Community Profile

Characterize its people in terms of their careers, values, aspirations, and views of schooling:
The parents of the students at my school are middle class working families with a few lower class families struggling to make ends meet. These people will understand the importance of hard work and will put more value on making money and surviving than on education and continuing onto higher education. Many of the people in the community value hard work, honesty, dependability, and providing the best for their children. Many parents want their children to do well in school, even though they aren’t always around to help their children when help is needed.

Describe the school, including its size, its curriculum [choose a grade—units in that grade], its English department, its approach to grouping (i.e., if and how it tracks students), and its overall mission:
The school I would be working in would be in a larger community and have a rather large, diverse population. The average graduating class size to be roughly 800-1000 students. The diverse groups in my community would include: Latino, Caucasian, African American, American Indian, and east Asian students.

The curriculum for tenth-graders in my community would consist of: novels, plays, poetry, short stories, and non-fiction with a variety of projects and assignments to be completed, and continued development of writing and communication skills.

The English department is a mix of seasoned veterans and newer teachers resulting in a mix of pedagogy from very collaborative, to teacher led. Most of the teachers are willing to discuss methods and share insight, but there are a few who do not like to interact with the other teachers. Some of the newer teachers, in support of their collaborative efforts, have taken the time to work with other teachers in various subjects to plan previous learning exercises.

The classes are untracked and the students in each classroom vary in terms of ability. The overall mission of the school is to provide students with learning opportunities to help each of them attain the greatest level of confidence and ability in education.

Think of a particular grade level you would be teaching and describe the kinds of students you would have in your class. If the school is tracked, describe the track you would be teaching. If it is not, describe the range of students you would find in a typical class:
I would be teaching incoming Freshman. These students would still be rapidly changing in all levels of development (physical, emotional, social, and intellectual). Most of these students will be more focused on finding a place in their new environment than on their studies and will be going through many social, emotional, and physical changes that will cause fluctuations in their moods and behaviors. Also, these students will be intellectually maturing, but will lack some of the critical thinking and problem solving skills of their older schoolmates.

Some students will aspire to high levels of education while others will be focused on simply making it through life. Many of these students will not have supportive backgrounds or a lack of constant adults in their life outside the school walls and, due to this, will need extra guidance in the classroom.

Student ability will vary greatly over a range of high achievers to lower achievers and everything in between. To help accommodate the very diverse population of learners in my classroom, I plan to create activities that have a good deal of scaffolding but that will also prove challenging enough for each the high achievers in class. I also plan to create groups in which my students will work together and learn from one another. These groups will hopefully have students with a range of skill levels and will help lower achievers to do better in class, while providing higher achievers with an opportunity to peer tutor their group-mates.

Think of an overarching concept that would guide the curriculum as a whole for the grade level or course you are envisioning. [reread 46-53 about overarching concepts]:
I am currently having a difficult time deciding on a concept for my project. However, if I had to pick one right now, I would go with a strategy. As I was looking through the chapter in TED, I realized that this type of unit seemed to be the most beneficial to a greater variety of student learners. The strategy that I would probably focus my unit around would be understanding perspective in writing.

Within this overarching concept, identify a set of topics that could serve as the basis for instructional units:
Some of the topics I would focus my unit around would be: tone, mood, point of view, voice, audience, and bias.