This unit introduces learners to several ways that maps can be used to demonstrate connections between various kinds of information in a complex novel, Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. By practicing the methods described in this unit, students will develop skills that will allow them to envision text elements in new ways and chart their own comprehension. Once they have completed these activities, students will be able to apply their textual “cartography” skills to other texts that they encounter later on.

This unit introduces the topic of economics and economic inequality to 8th grade students through the use of nonfiction texts, podcasts, and films, and also asks students to examine, interpret and evaluate data independently, thus acquiring one of the most important skills for critical literacy in the 21st century. The recent young adult book, Economic Inequality: The American Dream Under Siege, by Coral Celeste Frazer is the central text for this curriculum unit and each student will have a copy of the text to read in class. Students study about the American Dream, and economic mobility as well as how these factors have changed over the past 50 years in the United States. Most importantly, students discover exactly what economic inequality consists of, how it impacts our lives, and what can be done about it. In addition to reading text there are classroom debates and the interpretation of political cartoons. As a culminating project, each student chooses a proposed solution to economic inequality for his or her own topic for an argumentative essay. It is hoped that in addition to teaching valuable skills and content that the unit provides a more educated citizenship for the future of our society.

Not everyone can be great, but greatness can come from anywhere.

It's a wonderful sentiment, but becoming less and less true. We know the rich get richer and poor poorer, or at least perceive it through media, as well as in a middle class with a lot of internet access but not a lot of direction upward. In this unit we will try and prove that greatness can still come from anywhere. Where does inequality come from? What should we focus on most in order to right the ship in our lifetimes, so that our children benefit? It is important for young people to understand income inequality as a discipline, as a subject to study, as important and relevant to and in their math and English and Social Studies classes. Citing work from prominent economists like Anthony Atkinson and Raj Chetty, this unit simultaneously provides a foundational study of income inequality while arguing for increased equality of outcome for American students through their college graduation.

Designed for a large urban high school’s upperclassmen in a Journalism class, the unit’s central thematic focus is the causes and effects of economic inequality on the middle class. In this country, we believe that everyone has a chance for prosperity, or at least a comforting sense of security: being able to pay our bills, send our children to college, succeed if we try hard enough, being able to afford health care. Taken together, we call this being middle class. Put another way, we call this The American Dream. Some of us aspire to great wealth, a mansion in the Hamptons. For the vast majority of Americans, making it is a simpler aspiration: doing better than our parents, living longer than our parents, being more educated than our parents. My topic is “The Shrinking Middle Class?” Within this topic are various subtopics/questions: 1) What is an accurate definition of “Middle Class?” (Is it defined by an income range or by a state of mind?) 2) What are the effects of periodic economic downturns on ordinary Americans? (confidence, conformity, fear of failure, mental health), 3) What effects do increases in the minimum wage have on the middle class? (decreased poverty, overall confidence in the future, the effect on the overall economy?) My own students are urban and many do not consider themselves, and are not, among the middle class. The topic should resonate.

This unit aims to provide a framework for introducing economic theory as an instructional strategy supporting ELA comprehension skills. Titled The Economics of Inequality, the unit will examine the arguments germane to the study of economic inequity gleaned from the seminar titled An Introduction to Income Inequality in America: Economics, History, and Law for the 2018 Yale Teachers Institute. Enduring unit goals intend to build student capacity to become literacy-based economists by examining the relational patterns between economic inequality and mobility while reinforcing reading comprehension and writing skills through novel analysis. This approach is unique because currently there is no formalized alignment between English Language Arts standards, Standards in Economics, and economic education. As teachers explore this unit, it is hoped that strategies, especially those that support critical and extended thinking, are used as a springboard for learning. This unit considers a cross-curricular approach as it was designed with the intent for teachers to spark more ideas on how they can enrich their own pedagogy and engage in lesson development using economic literary across other core subjects. It is also hoped that students’ enduring understandings are made through text-to-self connections by reflecting on how the economy affects their own lives.

This unit was developed for middle school students but may be adapted for elementary or high school students. The unit is focused on language arts, social emotional and behavioral standards. The activities and lessons included in this unit explore themes of identity. Using multicultural children’s literature, this unit will encourage participants to have honest and courageous conversations regarding race, culture, and socio economic identity. The activities in this unit have been created to boost a sense of belonging and acceptance by breaking down stereotypes in order to build a positive school community. The unit includes hands on activities and celebrates individual as well as group identities.

The time frame for this unit is nine weeks. Included in this unit are lesson plans and reading lists for teachers and students. Different hands-on activities are also recommended.

The purpose of this unit is to provide students with an understanding of the earth’s energy budget and how energy enters and leaves the earths’ atmosphere in a supportive environment to English language learners. My unit Energy and Earth’s Climate for English Language Learners will focus on the science around how energy affects earth’s climate.

It is important for students to learn about climate change not just because it is in the curriculum but because it will greatly affect their generation and the generations of students to come. All students including the ELLs should have the opportunity to learn about relevant environmental issues of their time in a way that they can understand.

My first experience teaching climate change came after a unit covering the mechanisms and impacts of climate change. After this unit, I realized students may have a pessimistic outlook on the future. However, in the past humans have successfully reversed some major environmental problems. One example is banning the use of DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) as an insecticide which caused birds egg shells to be too thin. Another example is a global agreement to stop the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) which caused a hole in the ozone layer. Also the banning of lead in gasoline was another environmental success. The unit presented here is a engineering solutions oriented unit focused on climate mitigation. The mitigation strategies considered are carbon sequestration and alternative energies. This unit will cover the engineering design process with activities to practice this process while learning about carbon sequestration or wind energy. Information provided here includes background on climate change, information on the engineering design process, and different alternative energies or carbon sequestration.

This four week curriculum is for elementary learners to explore environmental engineering in urban environments. The unit starts with a broad question of “how can we make our community more sustainable?”, the unit will cover what the field of environmental engineering is, what predictability, mitigation and sustainability are, and how they relate to each other. These principles will be taught as vocabulary and will be supported with the use of anchor charts; students will be expected to use them during discussions. The unit will teach about urban infrastructure and the phenomenon of the Urban Heat Island effect. Students will then learn about and explore the possibilities of alternative energy sources and cities that already implementing green engineering. Students will explore how they can answer the question that was presented to them at the beginning of the unit. Following the engineering design process students will plan changes that they would make to their own city (in our case New Haven, Connecticut). Students will act as environmental engineers to come up with potential solutions to answer the broad question posed at the beginning of the unit.

The course is structured in theme-based quarters; each quarter targets a mode of writing (argumentative, persuasive, analytical) paired with a thematic unit of study. No texts are mandated, but texts are suggested to align with each theme. Though teachers have the flexibility to teach texts that they believe will best engage and push their students to a deeper understanding of the targeted standards, I became more and more aware of a lack of depth to the curriculum’s nature writing unit.

The district-endorsed unit, titled “Self and Nature: Exploring Human Relationships with Nature” recommends texts that are familiar to many English teachers as the canon of American transcendentalism, the 19th-century literary and philosophical movement advocating for the unity of nature, the divine, and humanity. Some suggestions outside of that realm are recommended (Rachel Carson, Jack London, Jon Krakauer), but even these more modern suggestions do very little to tell a more accurate and complete story of human’s place in the environment.

This unit focuses on the movement of water through a plant and how it is driven by transpiration at the leaf. The unit is applicable to both a physical science classroom as it focuses on the properties of water as well as other physical science topics such as pressure, fluid flow, and surface area to volume relationships. The unit is also applicable to a biology curriculum as it covers the phenomenon of water movement through a plant. Many structures and adaptations are discussed that allow plants to achieve this process. The unit dives deep into the properties of water and how unique plant structures take advantage of said properties to move water from the ground to heights over 300 feet. There are classroom activities included as well as demonstrations mentioned throughout the text.

The phenomenon, or hook, for this unit is the movement of water against the pull of gravity, in particular to the top of our giant trees such as the Sequioa semperivens (giant redwood) which reach heights of over 300 feet. Teaching around a phenomenon is the current trend with the States adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The use of water transport in plants is an effective phenomenon because not only is easy for students to grasp the oddity of water moving against gravity but also because the understanding of this action requires students to grasp scientific concepts from multiple disciplines.

A person’s starting line for success is due to a series of circumstances that are outside their control. This unit focuses on economic status as a factor of birth that can determine the opportunities that one can access. My students will unpack their economic identity to (1) examine how their economic status affects access to opportunities and (2) determine the choices they have control over that could increase future financial success. Through a careful examination of this facet of their identity, my goal is for students to identify the limitations that are correlated to their economic status and the choices that they can make to level the playing field between themselves and their wealthier counterparts.

Some of your students seem to have superglued their hands to their cell phones; for others, it is their eyes that have been permanently affixed. Why do so many students find their personal technology more appealing than the real humans on around them . . . and what might be the long-term consequences of this? These are the questions this unit will address – first, through the rhetorical analysis of various articles on the effects of cell phones and social media, and then, through a careful study of dystopian fiction. Ultimately, students will draw their own conclusions and share their learning through letters to middle school students and a creative writing piece that suggests what will happen next.

A few of your students may whine about the work you are giving them. They may rage, rage against the dying of the light emanating from their cell phones. They may claim that teachers and parents just don’t understand. But ultimately they will be better educated, more prescient, less addicted, more creative, and of better use to their communities. I think it is worth the fight.

In this unit, students will learn about multiple ecosystems and the human impact to these systems as they follow migratory fish through their life cycles. As students study migratory fish, they will learn about the ecosystems of the rivers, Long Island Sound estuary, and the Atlantic Ocean. In this way, students will develop an understanding of the complex interactions between these ecosystems as well as their interdependent relationships in our global water system enabling the survival of these world travelers. This engaging thematic curriculum unit is designed for students of 3rd through 6th grades to explore the more complex ecosystems of the Long Island Sound watershed. This unit builds upon a prior unit I wrote called, “Just Ask! Exploring Marine Life of Long Island Sound.” /curriculum/units/2013/4/13.04.02.x.html

Through this study, students will learn the fundamental principles and interactions between multiple ecosystems and the marine creatures that swim within them. As students develop an appreciation and deeper understanding of these marine creatures and each ecosystem, students will more fully understand the significance of the human impact of these systems and be inspired to invest in potential solutions. This problem based unit will build core knowledge of watershed science, our global water system, and the migratory fish that move through these marine environments as students ask questions, read, write and investigate these topics.

In this unit, students are asked to use the six hats analytical method to interact with both visual and written art. During the unit, students will be introduced to the six hats technique and apply the practice to art work from artist collective the Spiral Group as well as various versions of their core text. For our core text, my students will be reading Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun.” The text is important to our unit because Hansberry is an artist who is creating works reflective of the social movements of the period of time in. Many of these social movements still resonate today.

The focus of this curricular unit is twofold. The first is to consider the math classroom as a racialized space. In doing so, the unit will shed light on why math education is not race-neutral and will explain how color-blindness reinforces the oppression of students of color. The unit will examine how color-blindness within mathematics education ignores historical data and blames academic failure on students, their families, and their communities without recognizing the systemic biases that reproduce racial inequality through material stratification, deficiency framing, and reduced access to high quality instruction.

The second part of the unit will consider anti-racist teacher-centered instructional strategies that directly address inequality in math instruction. Among these strategies, the unit will consider teaching for understanding, group participation through complex instruction, culturally relevant pedagogy, and teaching mathematics for social justice. To achieve this, the unit will provide several examples of activities that approach mathematics instruction from a culturally relevant and critical lens. Then, the unit will examine a brief race-neutral Calculus lesson on integral approximation and will highlight components that reinforce systemic racism. Finally, the unit will then address what changes must be made within the sample lesson to better address issues pertaining to race in the math classroom.

This six-week curriculum unit is designed for students in the second grade as they follow a water molecule through a watershed. The unit begins with Follow the Water from Brook to Ocean , a picture book by Arthur Dorros that introduces to primary-level students how water moves and how it has shaped our earth over time. The young scientists will use their skills of inquiry to understand the structure of a watershed, investigate human impact, and participate in activities and experiments throughout. Students will use journals to document their learning as they build vocabulary, identify stream order, discover how materials dissolve or not in our waters, create an aquifer, and design a game that simulates the pollution entering our watershed.

Young students love to investigate, experiment and discover. This four-week unit gives second graders opportunities for all three as they learn about liquids, solids and gases through games and challenges with their classmates. They will participate in a Matter Scavenger Hunt, discover that solids remain solids even if they break apart, challenge teams in an Amazing Liquids Race, and investigate popping balloons.

As students join in the fun and games, they will develop critical thinking skills, learn to observe and take notes, document results, and make conclusions based on their findings. This unit is designed to make the current science curriculum more engaging and exciting for my primary-level students and encourage them to explore matter and the transformation of matter through experimentation and discovery.

Know thyself. These two, small words hold tremendous power. The path to understanding who we are and how we relate to others is long and ever changing. This unit has been designed for high school special education students enrolled in English I. The novel Flight by Sherman Alexie and other supplemental readings will be used to explore the development of self-identity and the importance of empathy. Through classroom support in the general education classroom and specialized instruction in the resource room, students will engage in learning experiences that explore how we as individuals define ourselves and relate to others who come from different backgrounds; it is through our differences that we can find common connections.

This unit revolves around the National Book Award winning memoir in verse, Brown Girl Dreaming1, by Jacqueline Woodson. Supplementary texts include fiction and nonfiction poetry, picture books and articles by and about Woodson and the topics alluded to in her memoir, including brief biographies of figures from the Civil Rights Movement such as Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin and artists that influenced her and that connect to the time period. The unit explores analysis of visual art pieces such as photographs from the era (1960s and 1970s) and works depicting black youth as well as the settings she writes about (Ohio; Greenville, South Carolina; and Brooklyn). Music that Jacqueline Woodson mentions in her memoir can be listened to and responded to. Artwork and music that reflect the black social movements of the period has been selected for students to view and react to. Students learn how to analyze visual art in a manner that is appropriate to middle school. In addition to responding to the various texts, students will have an opportunity to engage in creative writing. To engage in the theme of identity, students can write their own brief memoirs in verse, as well as creating works of art.