Standard-Based Global Education Updates
In globalizing instructional standards, I focused on the following: How could I modify this standard to help my students investigate the world, recognize perspectives, communicate ideas, and/or take action.
ELA.6.14A calls for my students to “Plan a first draft by selecting a genre appropriate for conveying the intended meaning to an audience, determining appropriate topics through a range of strategies (e.g., discussion, background reading, personal interests, interviews), and developing a thesis or controlling idea.”
In teaching my students to recognize perspectives through this standard, I could use RAFT to help them understand how a text would change if the role, audience, format, or topic changed. I can use this same format to help my students choose topics and formats for each genre we study. Their assessment will be based on the appropriateness of audience role and topic to the format.
ELA.6.15A calls for my students to write imaginative stories with a clear focus, plot and point of view, to use sensory imagery to create a specific and believable setting and to develop interesting characters that use believable dialogue which carries the plot forward.
In teaching my students to communicate ideas and recognize perspectives, I could have them read folktales from a variety of cultures, then talk about the lesson behind each folktale and why that lesson was probably important to that culture. Then my students would come up with a lesson that perhaps we need to teach to students today, and write a folktale to teach that lesson to a younger audience. Their assessment will focus on how they depict culture.
ELA.6.16A calls for my students to write a personal narrative that has a clearly defined focus and communicates the importance of or reasons for actions and/or consequences.
Like all writing objectives, I will use this to teach my students to recognize perspectives and communicate ideas. They will study other personal narratives, and then use their personal narratives to explore their thoughts on events which happened to them.
