Our 11th grade American Studies course is now called, "American Studies with APLAC." In the coming year, all our 11th grade students will get exposure to the skills of an APLAC course while in their 11th grade Humanities class. At the end of the year, students will have the opportunity to sit the APLAC exam if that's appropriate for them. That's a pretty exciting development.
What's really interesting to me about this shift is the opportunities it affords the department to have conversations about the content and skills of all our courses. We adopted the APLAC skills model because we looked at the articulated skills and thought that those are skills we'd like all our students to have when they graduate from Culver. APLAC focuses on a number of different types of writing--students write analysis, argument, synthesis, and research essays as part of the course.
We have a Writing Program in the Humanities department at Culver. At its heart, it's a common assessment program--levels design writing assessments based on the skills and content of their courses, and those assessments are administered to all students in the course on the same day. The essays are coded, so student responses are anonymized, and then the essays are commonly scored by all teachers at the level using a shared rubric. Students get formative feedback on an interim version of the assessment. Then, they take a common assessment approximately two weeks later after a targeted teaching period. That common assessment is again commonly scored, and the score is converted to a summative grade. The Writing Program initially only highlighted students' synthesis writing. Part of the logic of that was the idea that synthesis writing requires that students pull together multiple sources to form an "argument"--something that seems to be at the heart of Humanities teaching. Over the last few years, however, the Writing Program has evolved so that levels are using the CA opportunity to have students do different kinds of writing.
As a department, we're at a spot where the work of the last few years on the Writing Program and the work of the last two years in the American Studies curriculum are about to converge. (And the work of the TRC--triennial review committee--is coming in hot here, too, but that's a whole other post.) Students in the 11th grade Humanities classes in the coming year will be formally working on four different kinds of writing--analysis, synthesis, argument, and research. And the 9th and 10th grades have maintained their focus on synthesis writing through their Writing Programs. Individual teachers can (and should) choose to do other kinds of writing with their classes, though.
Given the fact that the EOC assessments for the juniors will be to demonstrate proficiency in those four types of writing, the question in front of us shouldn’t be if we are going to formally introduce analysis and argument and research to students earlier in the 9-11 Humanities curriculum, but really when. If we are going to work towards stronger vertical alignment in the curriculum (per the TRC), we can’t fill in the writing targets column for freshmen and sophomores as “synthesis” writing and then “rhetorical analysis, argument, synthesis, and research” writing for the juniors.
As the 10th grade curriculum team leader, I concern myself quite a bit with where students are coming from (9th grade EOC targets) and how we can position our students best for success at the next level (11th grade start-of-course targets) through our instruction. So while I'm not responsible for the crafting of the departmental curriculum as a whole, I also can't think of the 10th grade curriculum in isolation. So today's wrestling topic is to advocate for some work I believe the 10th grade students and teachers need to do in order to prepare our kids for the 11th grade experience. We have some work to do to define that writing from a leadership team perspective, and then I have some work to do to figure out how to facilitate conversations about this kind of writing with the other teachers at my level. Interesting work in front of us, but definitely wrestling.
As a department, we're at a spot where the work of the last few years on the Writing Program and the work of the last two years in the American Studies curriculum are about to converge. (And the work of the TRC--triennial review committee--is coming in hot here, too, but that's a whole other post.) Students in the 11th grade Humanities classes in the coming year will be formally working on four different kinds of writing--analysis, synthesis, argument, and research. And the 9th and 10th grades have maintained their focus on synthesis writing through their Writing Programs. Individual teachers can (and should) choose to do other kinds of writing with their classes, though.
Given the fact that the EOC assessments for the juniors will be to demonstrate proficiency in those four types of writing, the question in front of us shouldn’t be if we are going to formally introduce analysis and argument and research to students earlier in the 9-11 Humanities curriculum, but really when. If we are going to work towards stronger vertical alignment in the curriculum (per the TRC), we can’t fill in the writing targets column for freshmen and sophomores as “synthesis” writing and then “rhetorical analysis, argument, synthesis, and research” writing for the juniors.
As the 10th grade curriculum team leader, I concern myself quite a bit with where students are coming from (9th grade EOC targets) and how we can position our students best for success at the next level (11th grade start-of-course targets) through our instruction. So while I'm not responsible for the crafting of the departmental curriculum as a whole, I also can't think of the 10th grade curriculum in isolation. So today's wrestling topic is to advocate for some work I believe the 10th grade students and teachers need to do in order to prepare our kids for the 11th grade experience. We have some work to do to define that writing from a leadership team perspective, and then I have some work to do to figure out how to facilitate conversations about this kind of writing with the other teachers at my level. Interesting work in front of us, but definitely wrestling.
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