Long-Term Planning

My long-term planning takes the form of a scope and sequence, which is created during the summer and finalized during our staff in-service professional development in July. While I am wholly responsible for creating the scope and sequence each year, my planning is guided by the Tennessee Academic Standards that I am assigned by my literacy coach. In an educational world that has become so driven by standardized test scores, I have the freedom to plan my curriculum without any tests in mind. While we do aim to be standard- and objective-aligned, I am not required by my school to teach for any test, despite the fact that we take the TCAP at the end of each year. I design my curriculum by drawing upon the knowledge of my content, pulling from my experience as an English teacher and a journalist; by incorporating cross-disciplinary skills, specifically connecting to the writing and Social Studies classes; and by choosing texts that have the potential to connect students to their communities. I focus on teaching students to be “careful, curious, and open-minded readers,” who have the ability to analyze and evaluate beyond an A, B, C, or D answer choice. One of the most important aspects of crafting my scope and sequence is text selection, wherein I aim to choose texts set in various parts of the world and featuring diverse characters my students can relate to, as well as themes that align to issues that are important to my students.

 
 
 

Scope & Sequence

In addition to planning the units for the year, the scope and sequence, to the left, outlines the following information:

  • Course summary and goals (page 1) – This section outlines what we will be focusing on in 7th grade reading, specifically through content and classroom culture. When writing this section, I aim to reflect the skills I want my students to leave my classroom with as citizens of the world, not test-takers.

  • Course skill and content priorities (page 1) – Based on the standards I am assigned by my literacy coach, I outline the skills I want my students to have mastered by the end of the course. This is written in collaboration with the 6th and 8th grade reading teachers, as we aim to align our skill priorities vertically to ensure students are set up for success as they move through our school. I also work closely with the 7th grade writing and Social Studies teachers to ensure our students are getting a well-rounded education, as well as to identify where we can implement cross-disciplinary skills.

  • Year-long course overview pacing calendar (page 2) – This is a simple calendar that shows the order of the units and their anticipated calendar dates throughout the academic year. This overview helps inform my quarterly pacing calendars.

 
 

The unit plans, found on pages 3-27 above, are the heart and soul of my scope and sequence. Each unit plan includes the projected number of instructional days, focus standards and skills covered, essential questions, a culminating writing task, key vocabulary words, and a breakdown of objectives and aligned formative assessment questions. The unit plans dictate the quarterly pacing calendars and ensure that I cover the required skills and objectives, while also allowing me to create a well-rounded curriculum. Putting these unit plans together during the summer prior to instruction also allows me to ensure that I am choosing texts and planning units that align to my overall course goal. The texts ensure that my students will be challenged to meet rigorous learning goals, and together, the units will provide opportunities for my students to draw upon their knowledge of the content, cross-disciplinary skills, and real-world experiences. Several of the texts are historical fiction, such as My Antonia and Number the Stars. Other texts lend themselves well to providing my middle school students with opportunities to contribute to their community and the world around them, such as A Long Walk To Water, wherein students will raise money for a clean water fund, and Island of the Blue Dolphins, which includes a project about marine life conservation. And a few of the texts were chosen specifically because they are culturally relevant to my students: Color of My Words appeals to my Hispanic and Latinx students, who get very excited when they are reading dialogue written in Spanish, and Brown Girl Dreaming gives my African American students a historical voice they can relate to.

To dig a little deeper, in our second unit, students will read the archaic text My Antonia by Willa Cather. This historical fiction text is based in the Nebraska prairie in the 1880s and focuses on themes including the immigrant experience and gender stereotypes. I chose this text because the language and vocabulary will push my students to meet rigorous learning goals, while also allowing them to draw upon their personal experiences and knowledge as immigrants, or children of immigrants, and as young humans living in a world full of gender norms and the challenges that come along with those. I have seen my students tackle this book, struggle with the vocabulary, but also connect deeply to the characters because they can relate to their experiences — even in 1800s. This text also requires me to have a strong knowledge of my content and pedagogy, as it is a heavy teacher-lift to ensure the students are prepared to read and comprehend the language of an archaic text in 7th grade. Additionally, I must rely on their cross-disciplinary skills when identifying historical context and socio-economic conditions.

 
 

Tennessee academic standards

While my school does not receive state or district resources, we do teach the Tennessee Academic Standards, provided to the right, which are very similar to the Common Core standards. These standards, according to the Tennessee Department of Education’s website, “provide a common set of expectations for what students will know and be able to do at the end of a grade for each subject area. Our state’s standards are rooted in the knowledge and skills students need to succeed in their postsecondary studies and/or careers.”

Students at my school receive literacy instruction three times a day: reading, writing, and social studies. Because we have a separate reading and writing class, as well as a social studies curriculum aligned to English Language Arts standards, our literacy coach divides the ELA standards three ways. I am responsible for covering all Reading Literature standards, with spiraled Reading Informational, Writing, and Language standards throughout each unit:

  • 7.L.VAU.4 (p. 4) – Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases based on 7th grade-level text by choosing flexibly from a range of strategies.

  • 7.RL.KID.1 (p. 9) – Analyze what a text says explicitly and draw logical inferences; cite several pieces of textual evidence to support conclusions.

  • 7.RL.KID.2 (p. 10) – Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text; provide an objective summary.

  • 7.RL.KID.3 (p. 11) – Analyze how specific elements of a story or drama interact with and affect each other.

  • 7.RL.CS.4 (p. 12) – Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including allusions to other texts and repetition of words and phrases.

  • 7.RL.CS.5 (p. 13) – Analyze the form or structure of a story, poem, or drama, considering how text form or structure contributes to its theme and meaning.

  • 7.RL.CS.6 (p. 14) – Analyze how an author establishes, conveys, and contrasts the points of view of different characters or narrators in a text

  • 7.RL.IKI.9 (p. 16) – Compare and contrast an historical account with a fictional portrayal of the same time, place, or character.

 
 
 
 

Coaching & Revision

Once I completed my scope and sequence, I submitted it for review to my literacy coach. The first page to the left shows a snapshot of her notes for revision, which I used to adjust and edit my plan prior to beginning the year. I was proud that my coach supported my units and felt that the design of the curriculum and text selection aligned well to meeting rigorous standards, as well as my course goals. Many of her notes focused on writing higher Bloom’s Taxonomy aligned objectives that were reflective of each part of a standard — a skill that I struggle with and was grateful to have her support on. With these initial notes, I focused on writing rigorous objectives in each of my planning documents, including my quarterly pacing calendar and daily lesson plans.

The second page includes notes taken in our first meeting, wherein we discussed my scope and sequence and set goals that I have for myself and for my students for the year. My goals for the year included:

  • Working on questioning

  • Data analysis and implementation

  • Joyful approach to content

  • Better turnaround on grading and responding to data

 
 

In the final two pages above, you can see the work we did together in drafting my classroom vision, which is reflected in the course summary and ambitious goals on the first page of my scope and sequence. I first identified the skills I want my students to have mastered by the time they leave my classroom in June, and then we worked together to find the commonalities between, ending with three, all-encompassing objectives: Students will be able to (1) engage in inquiry and discussion, (2) use rigorous vocabulary, and (3) express complex ideas through writing. With these skills in mind while I design each lesson, I have the confidence that my students are working each day to meet the goals we have set out for them over the course of the academic year.

I have learned over the years that the phrase “it takes a village” does not simply apply to our students, but to teachers as well. I appreciate the reflective approach I am empowered to take by my coach and her responsiveness to those needs.

 
 
 
 

Vertical Team Planning

The vertical team at my school includes the literacy teachers in the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. Sometimes we meet in grade-level teams, sometimes we meet as a whole group, but most often we meet in content teams — which means I work together with the 6th and 8th grade reading teachers to make sure that what we are teaching builds off the grade prior and ensures the students have the skills necessary to be successful in the next grade. As the 7th grade teacher, I get to sit in the middle and work to serve as the bridge in the middle school.

Within our vertical teams, we work to ensure that what we are teaching students is consistent across and within grade levels. For example, we met at the beginning of the year to determine how we would teach students to write a body paragraph and when each grade level would scaffold out of it. The 6th grade literacy team teaches students to write in A-C-E format (Answer-Cite-Explain), with the goal to be able to write a 3-paragraph essay; the 7th grade literacy teachers then build on this with A-C-E-C-E body paragraph formats, with the goal to be able to write a 5-paragraph essay; and then the 8th grade teachers focus more in on high school and college-level reference formats, including APA and MLA.

We also collaborate on the resources given to our students, most commonly in the writing and annotation toolkits used in each grade level and content. To the right is the collaboration between the reading and writing teachers on finalizing our Fictional Text Annotation Toolkit. You can see in this document the notes that informed our decision-making on pages 1-2, an annotated copy of the old toolkit on pages 3-4, and a new copy of the toolkit we are using this year on page 5. This ensures that our students have consistent expectations across grades and contents, and it also has helped us focus on how to teach meaningful annotations. This has helped our students to better identify textual evidence in both reading and writing.