Lesson Plan TemplateEDIS 5400: English Education

Context: Course name: AP English 12Grade level: 12 Length of lesson: 60 minutes Description of setting, students, and curriculum and any other important contextual characteristics:The lesson takes place in an AP English 12 classroom. They have had multiple opportunities to practice analytical writing and reading. They have focused on canonical classics and higher level academic texts.  The students have just completed writing a five page literary analysis paper. They are beginning a unit where they will read The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. The text is more convoluted than many texts and requires a greater amount of inferencing, specifically surrounding Jake’s “loss” from the war. With this in mind, it’s important to make the inferencing process more explicit for students prior to reading the text. The students just finished writing a literary analysis.

Virginia SOL(s):[Borrowed] SOL 11.5 The student will read and analyze a variety of nonfiction texts.  

d) Draw conclusions and make inferences on explicit and implied information using textual support.

Common Core State Standard(s):CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.1. Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.

Objectives (KUD format): U1: Students will understand that a text has many interpretations that are dependent on the experiences and background knowledge of the reader.K1: Students will know inferences about a text are drawn based on evidence within the text.K2: Students will know prior knowledge can be used to aid in making inferences about the text.D1: Students will be able to use inferences to construct the meaning of a text.D2: Students will be able to use inferences to identify key aspects of the text such as plot, characters, location, and time period.

Assessments: Methods for evaluating each of the specific objectives listed above.Diagnostic: Students will demonstrate what they already know by…Students will demonstrate their inferential abilities during the Hook when we have them work briefly in groups to make assumptions about the riddle on slide 1 of the PowerPoint (Appendix A). This will be an informal formative assessment in which we listen to the discussions the groups have to assess if they are using inferences based on the information provided and the prior knowledge they possess.

Formative: Students will show their progress toward today's objectives by…

The students will answer the questions from Slide 8 of the PowerPoint (Appendix A) after reading Hills like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway (Appendix B). During this activity, the instructors will circulate and conference with each group, asking them how they are drawing conclusions from the text (with specific reference to parts of the text) and what aspects of inferencing with the text they are struggling with (with specific reference to parts of the text that are vague or lack detail). We will emphasize the importance of students producing their own thoughts about the text with explicit reference to excerpts from the text and the rationale they drew. We will collect data from the conferences by taking notes on student response during the conferences. We will also discuss the discussion process and answers at the end of class as a whole class. This will be a larger indicator on how students are internalizing the process of inferencing as they provide answers about the text with details about how they came to their conclusions.

Summative: Students will ultimately be assessed (today or in a future lesson) on these standards by...The students will be reading The Sun Also Rises by Earnest Hemingway. Similar to Appendix B, the text is notoriously “lean” in nature and requires inferencing from the reader. Students will apply their inferencing skills to creating meaning within the text. They will be assessed when they write future papers about the text at the end of the unit, and even later in the semester as they read other texts and develop arguments around them.

Materials Needed:

Appendix A: Inferences PowerPointAppendix B: Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway with title removedInstructional Steps (Procedures): Detail student and teacher behavior.  

Beginning Room Arrangement:[Changes in this arrangement that become necessary later will be noted in the plan]The room is in pods of about five desks per pod. The students will stay in these seats for the entirety of the class period. The teachers will be at the front of the room with the projector at the beginning of the period. After the mini-lesson, both teachers will circulate throughout the pods and conference and collect data on the group discussions.

I. Welcome/greeting/announcements“Hello everyone! Happy Monday and Happy Halloween! Did you all have a nice weekend? Anyone doing anything fun tonight? Awesome! Let’s kick off our lesson!” Slide 1 (Appendix A)

II. Hook/ bridge/ opening to lesson“Go ahead and take a few minutes with your group to figure out this riddle. (No more than 1.5 minutes for them to chat. Instructor stays close to the front of the room while they do this). “ Okay guys any thought on the answer? (We will call on student with hand raised. If they are incorrect, we will ask them to explain their rationale.). Great! That is the answer...you are probably wondering why we looked at a silly riddle to start out the lesson well….III. Instructional steps

Mini-Lesson: “Today we will be talking about how we apply inferential thinking, just like the kind of thinking you used to figure out the riddle. There are two parts to making an inference. The first is the information you find within the text. Sometimes, the text may provide all of the information that you need to form conclusions. What types of writing do you think might be written in this explicit style? (wait for some student response or cold-call). Yeah, great. So largely informational texts are written explicitly and provide tons of detail. However, when texts are not informational, a text may provide you with only a skeleton of meaning. It may be missing tons of detail and information, forcing you to make your own conclusions and assumptions. We fill in these blanks with the second part of inferencing: our own prior knowledge. By doing this, we create our own meaning of the text. (Read Bomer quote off PowerPoint). The best part about inferencing is that it is something you already do and have done while reading. Think about all of the times you connected a pronoun like “she” or “he” to the name of a character. You used the word on the page as well as your own understanding of how pronouns work to make sense and meaning of the text. Similarly, you do this when you take complicated passages and create meaning for them. So we are going to go ahead and practice some inferencing together!

Modeling:Slide 5 of the PowerPoint (Appendix A) should be up at this point. “So here we have a super short phrase “Painfully, he turned “is” to “was”.” The fact that there is not much there is what makes this a great inferencing piece! We can use what we do know from this text as well as our own prior knowledge to create meaning from this short, short story. So we do know that the character is a he. There was some big change in his life, something got moved from the present to the past with the “is” to the “was.” I am going to guess that since he is actively changing the text of something, he is editing something that is written down. So from my knowledge of things that you have written down as an adult that can be passing, I bet he is editing his resume. Maybe he got fired from his job. (Change to the next slide, Slide 6, of the PowerPoint). “Let’s do one together to get some practice. Here we have another short writing, “Born a twin; Graduated an only child.” Okay, so what do we know about this piece from within the text?” Instructors will call on multiple students for some answers. “Great, what prior knowledge can we apply to this?” Instructors will call on multiple students for answers. “That was awesome guys. Good job making some sense out of these short texts. So now we are going to move onto a longer text.

Activity:Slide 8 of the PowerPoint (Appendix A) should be up at this point. Hand out copies of Appendix B. “Okay, so you are going to work in groups (or independently if you prefer) to answer the questions on the board regarding this text. For each one, try to write down what you know with citations from the text and then any prior knowledge you are applying that helps bring you to your conclusion. It is totally okay if you do not get to every single question, we really want you to engage with the text! We will be coming around during this activity to see how it is going and to hear about the strategies you are using to come to your conclusions. Biggest thing for this: No computers or cell phones, please! You are supposed to be using only the actual text and what you already know to do this. It wouldn’t be inferring if you just googled the spark notes to the story haha. Alrighty, go ahead and get started!”

While the students are working on this, starting at about 10 minutes into the activity, the instructors will go to each group and ask about how they are coming up with their answers and how they are applying inferencing to the text.

IV. ClosingAlright let’s come back together. We’ve heard some great interpretations and inferences from you guys. Remember, this activity wasn’t meant for you guys to hunt for the right answers, but to practice and explicitly think about your inferencing skills. That being said we are interested in hearing what answers you all came up with and why. (Cold call on students from one or two groups for each one). Great. It is awesome to hear when we are/aren’t in consensus see the influence prior knowledge has on making meaning of the text. Each of you will bring your own background knowledge and experiences to the table when you read a new text. So, each of you will also come up with different conclusions and opinions about what you’ve read and processed. This is something you probably noticed when you were writing your literary analyses. You all read some of the same texts, but probably none of you wrote the same paper arguing the same thing about the same texts with the same quotes and explanations. Have a great rest of the week, thank you for being a great class today!

Attention to Individual Student Needs: Detail specific actions/materials you will use to differentiate your instruction to meet various individual’s learning needs in this lesson.We are working with a relatively homogenous class of 12th grade AP students. We do not feel as if major differentiation needs to occur. However, we may find throughout the course of the lesson we need to change our instruction in order to better meet the needs of individual students.

Technology Use: Detail specific technology being used in the lesson with explanation for why it is being used.The instructor will use a PowerPoint presentation in order to provide the hook, notes outline, and the questions for the activity. No other technology will be used during class.

How this lesson incorporates specific insights from course readings and/or class discussion:

This lesson focuses largely on Chapter 6 of Randy Bomer’s Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classroom, “Teaching Toward Interpretive Reading.”  In this chapter, Bomer focuses on the idea that meaning about a text lies within the mind of the reader and hinges on their “memory, perception, expectation, feeling” and “attribution” (Bomer 115). Our mini-lesson follows the idea that inferencing should be explicitly taught, teaching students to actively think about what is lacking (Bomer 109). We also include the Bomer-influenced instructional strategy of mini-lessons. Our mini-lesson occurs at the beginning of the class period and includes modeling, guided practice, and independent/group practice. These steps give students support while building on explicit inferencing knowledge and skills.

Materials Appendix:

Appendix A: Inference PowerPoint

Appendix B: “Hills Like White Elephants”Remove the title and author before providing for students.

Works Cited

Bomer, R. (2011). Building adolescent literacy in today’s English classrooms.Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann

Berg, Pete. Six Word Stories, http://www.sixwordstories.net/. Accessed 27 October, 2016.

Charters, Ann, Ed. “Hills Like White Elephants by Earnest Hemingway.” The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. 6th Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.