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Middle SchoolMicroCourses Grades 6, 7 & 8MicroCourses are short, grade-specific courses that provide an alternative to the drudgery of textbooks and the excesses of “comprehensive programs.” MicroCourses are focused on critical aspects of the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and support students as they work to gain the knowledge and skills needed for success in high school and for college and career readiness. All MicroCourses feature complex texts and sequences of close reading, text-based writing, and collaborative discussion.

Multi-Unit MicroCoursesMulti-Unit MicroCourses are comprised of separate, but related, units that ask students to focus on sequences of work carefully designed to help them develop the ability to read, as well as write and talk about increasingly complex texts. MicroCourse units can be implemented back-to-back or spaced across a semester or a year. Research clearly supports the idea that students need multiple opportunities to learn and practice what they’re learning with different types of texts. MicroCourses provide students with exactly those opportunities.

CREATING A TEXT-BASED CULTURE

UNIT 1: Reading Life

Grade 6: Introduction to the Reading Life

These studies orient students to many of the habits of lifelong readers. Teachers work with students to establish and reinforce essential rituals, routines, tools, and practices around independent reading, shared reading, literacy notebooks, and text-based responses to reading. Each of these investigations concludes with a reflection project in which students generate clear goal statements regarding their independent reading progress across the year.

Grade 7: Reading as Problem Solving

Grade 8: Vantage Points

UNIT 2: Writing Life

Grade 6: Introduction to the Writing Life

These studies begin with the idea that if students are to become writers, they must live like writers. They must learn the ways writers think, write, and read, and they must employ the tools writers use to do their work. In these units, students learn how to set up and use a writer’s notebook as a place to think, to try new techniques, to reflect on one’s writing, and and as a resource for determining new projects and new directions. Writing Life units provide teachers with a structure for getting writer’s notebooks working in their classrooms and set in motion ways of working that can be developed and drawn on throughout the year.

Grade 7: Writers on Writing

Grade 8: Studying Craft

UNIT 3: Introduction to Interpretive Work

Grade 6: Introduction to Interpretive Work 6

These introductory studies are specifically designed to provide students with in-depth orientations to the development of text-based arguments about literature—a key element of the Common Core State Standards. Students engage in integrated cycles of reading, rereading, writing, and discussion that culminate in written arguments about important and engaging pieces of literature.

Grade 7: Introduction to Interpretive Work 7

Grade 8: Introduction to Interpretive Work 8

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CLOSE READING: INFORMATIONAL & LITERARY NONFICTION TEXTS

UNIT 1: Close Reading of Informational Texts

Grade 6: Story and The Brain These grade-specific, two-text units provide introductions to the close reading informational texts by scaffolding students through cycles of comprehension and analysis work marked by reading, writing, and collaborative discussion. Students learn to determine and analyze the development of central ideas and arguments in informational texts. Students learn to comprehend and analyze the content and to describe the language moves and methods writers employ to develop that content. Units culminate in performance tasks in which students compose analytic essays.

Grade 7: Texting and Language Change

Grade 8: Superstitions, Patterns & Control

UNIT 2: Dealing with Difficulty

Grade 6: Doyle & Dickinson These units offer students supported opportunities to work with complex literary nonfiction. Composed of two modules, each unit at each grade level provides a valuable excursion into difficulty that gives students practice with essential methods proficient readers use when working with complex texts. All units begin with a literary text that scaffolds or augments the work with the second text, a piece of complex literary nonfiction. As with Unit 1, students study the content of the texts and analyze how they are constructed. Students write explanatory essays and text-based arguments.

Grade 7: cummings & Dillard

Grade 8: Reed & Thomas

Middle SchoolGrades 6, 7 & 8 MicroCourses

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Middle SchoolMicroCourses Grades 6, 7 & 8

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One-Unit MicroCoursesOne-unit MicroCourses engage students in rigorous intertextual work that unfolds over the course of several weeks. These MicroCourses provide a single unit that features extended reading and writing projects that take students deeply into texts, tasks, and topics that are interesting and worthy of sustained attention.

CLOSE READING NONFICTION LIKE A DETECTIVE

These grade-level units invite students to construct a theory of “reading like a detective” that they test and refine through a set of experiments in reading nonfiction.

Grade 6: Close Reading Nonfiction Like a DetectiveIn this MicroCourse, students use the “detective” metaphor to guide them through a set of experiments in reading nonfiction. The metaphor, as it is used in the unit, suggests that the habits and behaviors a detective employs to solve a crime—for example, asking questions, building (and re-building) theories based on evidence, doubting, mistrusting appearances—can also be usefully employed by readers of texts to see “below the surface” meanings. Students read Carl Hiaasen’s novel Scat to notice what detectives do and, on the basis of their observations, to create theories about what it might mean to read like a detective. The remainder of the unit is dedicated to refining those theories as students test them while reading, writing, and talking about a set of nonfiction texts.

Grade 7: Investigative Report WritingIn Investigative Report Writing, students are once again charged with building, testing, and refining a model of what it means to “read like a detective,” but this time they use that model to tackle a large text-based project: a critical analysis of a popular advertising campaign. Grounded in close studies of texts by Roald Dahl and Michael Pollan, in the culminating project students conduct a close and critical reading of a popular advertising campaign as they consider “on the surface” and “below the surface” messages the ads contain. This project unfolds via a series of five sequenced sub-tasks or parts and culminates in a presentation in which students synthesize their “on the surface” and “below the surface” readings and reflect on the power and possibilities of reading these ubiquitous cultural artifacts “like detectives.”

Grade 8: Metaphorically SpeakingIn the eighth grade Close Reading Nonfiction Like a Detective MicroCourse, students explore the idea that much of the thinking and speaking we do every day is metaphorical in nature. Metaphors are all around us, not only in written and spoken language, but also in the visual images that we see. In this study, students will learn to read “like a detective” in a very specific way—as apprenticing cognitive linguists—as they work to understand that metaphor is not simply a way with words reserved for poets and novelists. Students will explore several common metaphors and practice identifying and analyzing metaphors in everyday written language. They will conduct a metaphor analysis of selected essays from the New York Times in an effort to understand what metaphors highlight and hide about the subjects people write and talk about.

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Middle SchoolGrades 6, 7 & 8 MicroCourses

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CLOSE READING: POETRY

Grade 6: How Poems Are BuiltIn this unit, students experience three cycles of interconnected work with poems by Ko Un, Rita Dove, and William Carlos Williams. The work with each of the poets is designed to ensure a close reading of the texts. The work begins with basic comprehension-level work and culminates with text-based interpretive tasks in which students participate in collaborative discussions and write text-based arguments. The unit concludes with a retrospective task in which students consider what they have learned about poems as things people make or build. This study features essential close reading work that is required by the Common Core Reading standards.

Grade 7: Creating Characters in PoetryThe work in this unit grows from the following ideas: 1) poems are things people make 2) people make poems to think about ideas and issues 3) poems themselves can be usefully understood as enactments of this thinking. In this unit, students will have an opportunity to work with sets of poems by Martín Espada and Luci Tapahonso. Comprehension work with each poet culminates in text-based interpretive tasks in which students participate in collaborative discussions, write text-based arguments, and write their own poems. As with the grade six units, this study features essential close reading work that is required by the Common Core Reading standards.

Grade 8: Poems as PuzzlesThe poems of Kay Ryan, the United States Poet Laureate from 2008–2010, have often been compared to the work of Emily Dickinson. In this unit, students explore clusters of poems by each poet through cycles of comprehension, interpretive, and “write like” work that are supplemented by investigations of the devices that mark Ryan and Dickinson’s poetry. In the culminating task, students consider Ryan’s and Dickinson’s poetry side-by-side as they work to explain similarities and differences in how each poet uses language to “think on the page” about the things that matter to them most. Like the other middle school poetry units, this study features essential close reading work that is required by the Common Core Reading standards.