The 12th grade learning experience consists of 7 mostly month-long units aligned to the Common Core State Standards, with available course material for teachers and students easily accessible online. Over the course of the year there is a steady progression in text complexity levels, sophistication of writing tasks, speaking and listening activities, and increased opportunities for independent and collaborative work. Rubrics and student models accompany many writing assignments.Throughout the 12th grade year, in addition to the Common Read texts that the whole class reads together, students each select an Independent Reading book and engage with peers in group Book Talks. Language study is embedded in every 12th grade unit as students use annotation to closely review aspects of each text. Teacher resources provide additional materials to support each unit.

In this lesson, students will study some grammatical principles about how Swift crafted “A Modest Proposal.”

The laws that govern and the social norms that regulate society are not always fair, legal, moral, or ethical. What is a person to do about all this injustice? What are the hazards of righting injustices or changing social norms? And what are the dangers of doing nothing?

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Students read and annotate Antigone, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and Pygmalion.
Students write a literary analysis showing the effect of social class or the law on a character’s life.

GUIDING QUESTIONS

These questions are a guide to stimulate thinking, discussion, and writing on the themes and ideas in the unit. For complete and thoughtful answers and for meaningful discussions, students must use evidence based on careful reading of the texts.

How do social class and legal institutions shape literary characters’ lives (and presumably our lives)?
How does social class affect a person in dealing with the law (protect a person, hurt a person)?
How is social class determined in America and in other places in the world?

BENCHMARK ASSESSMENT: Cold Read

During this unit, on a day of your choosing, we recommend you administer a Cold Read to assess students’ reading comprehension. For this assessment, students read a text they have never seen before and then respond to multiple-choice and constructed-response questions. The assessment is not included in this course materials.

In this lesson, students learn about civil disobedience—about people purposefully disobeying a law that they feel to be unjust. They’ll read from two examples that address the issue: Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

In this lesson, students will discuss in small groups whether Antigone, Thoreau, or Dr. King was the most courageous in his or her stand of civil disobedience. Then they will write a short argument about it.

Typically for when students have just finished a unit on the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, this activity twists the traditional autobiographical six-word memoir to other people's biographies. You will ask your students to create six-word memoirs for the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment. If people like Voltaire, Newton and Diderot only had six words, how would they describe their accomplishments? In other words, summarize the life of a philosophe.”for more info:http://www.edutopia.org/blog/clarity-brevity-6-word-memoirs-jonathan-olsen

A lesson about how entrepreneurs identify sources for new business ideas, recognize different business opportunities and identify their own personal goals for starting a business.

In this task students prove that linear functions grow by equal differences over equal intervals, and that exponential functions grow by equal factors over equal intervals.

Open access has been identified as a way to support diversity, equity and inclusion in new publishing models, compared to inequities in traditional publishing models.Despite the open movement being decades old, there is still a gap in research on Black, Indigenous, and faculty of color (BIPOC) in the context of open access. Understanding the motivations for and barriers against Open Access (OA) publishing (and the relationships between them) among BIPOC faculty helps LIS practitioners and Open advocates design incentives to increase participation and decrease lack of knowledge and stigma around OA.

In 2020, Camille Thomas served as co-PI on a research team that designed an original qualitative study (Perceptions of Open Access Publishing among Black, Indigenous, and people of color Faculty, forthcoming College & Research Libraries) that uncovers ways in which pre-tenure and tenured BIPOC perceive attitudes towards the legitimacy of open access publishing, especially as it relates to their own tenure and promotion processes. This study illuminates how their perceptions motivate or diminish their own interest in and adoption of open access as well as their level of advocacy for open access in their field, campus, and department, et al.

To foster practical application of outreach needs based on responses from the study, this resource includes:
- Readings
- Discussion questions
- Sample Scenarios, Events and Initiatives
- Assignments

Assignments were specifically created for developing strategic initiatives and outreach to support marginalized scholars. While these materials do not seek to solve systemic issues in academic research, they will encourage building equitable open infrastructure and an inclusive culture when discussing open access at institutions. This resource provides hands-on assignments to integrate inclusive practices in outreach and technical work. It will prepare students for practical experience with open advocacy and encourage deliberate outreach planning, execution and assessment as scholarly communication continues to evolve.

Learning Objectives
To understand diverse needs of researchers and scholars based on their positionality and intersectionality (student, post-doc, research topics, discipline and departmental culture, identities)
To identify when encouraging open may harm researchers or communities
To develop messaging that highlights social justice through open access’ benefits of transparency, access and non-traditional formats
To develop strategic initiatives that address the unique needs of an institution and its surrounding community
To develop advocacy, leadership and management skills by planning, executing and assessing strategic initiatives

This Softchalk lesson is in connection with the text Touch the Top of the World by Erik Weihenmayer.

This lesson is designed to have students understand different ethical philosophies and how they connect to Ethics and ethical dilemmas.

Students will use this website to learn more about the CRAAP Test and how to use it to evaluate websites.  Then, they will watch this video as a review.  Finally, they will complete an activity in which they find and evaluate two websites, one good and one bad.   

A SoftChalk lesson describing the major historical experiments for the development of the atomic model.

There are many different topics within exploration that students have some background information with.  Topics like the Atlantic Slave Trade and the Columbian Exchange are parts of history that students either have background knowledge on or they are easy for students to grasp.  However, there are other topics, like mercantilism and triangular trade, that students struggle with.  This lesson is designed to be done in an 80-minute period (or more), or over the course of two days.  It allows students some autonomy to work on their own, and to take the notes that they need, but also allows the teacher to lead a portion of the lesson and clarify any quesitons that might arise.

This lesson can be used to introduce students to the concept of different map projections that they might encounter throughout the year.  It helps them to understand that there are many different ways to view the world and that certain views give them different information.

This lesson is designed for elementary teachers &/or elementary teacher candidates to explore elementary math standards, especially focusing on the shifts in math (focus, coherence, & rigor).

This simulation allows you to use a slider to see how positive and negative integers add on a number line.

Students create movements to represent long and short rhythmic patterns and compose patterns using non-traditional notation.

Students will explore the concepts of place value using their bodies as tools. They will time themselves performing various kinesthetic tasks like jumping jacks and sit ups and use the numbers that they record from these activities in their exploration. Working in groups, they will practice adding and subtracting and comparing numbers. They will also come up with creative ways to represent numbers using the properties of operation and the rules of place value.