standards- english-language arts

Every student in the Secondary Block should become familiar with the Language Arts standards as they guide our awareness of the important role secondary teachers play in the development of literacy skills. In this course you will be expected to develop increased levels of performance in finding your own professional voice both in writing and oral presentations, your careful listening ear, your ability to observe beyond the obvious, an increased ability to make meaning from reading from multiple texts, and your ability to discern meaning from visual representations.

Writing

Today's teachers are building on 20 years of experience with teaching writing as a process. Before the "process writing" movement began in the late 1970s, many teachers simply assigned writing topics, then corrected and graded students' papers--which were typically first drafts. In process approaches to writing, by contrast, teachers help students do what adept writers do: brainstorm ideas, organize their thoughts, write a first draft, solicit feedback, revise their work several times, then edit and proofread the final product. (Despite these stages, the writing process is recursive rather than linear, experts emphasize).

Students lack a repertoire of writing skills. Most students do not know how to write a thesis statement or marshal supporting
evidence. Nor do students know how to generate ideas, write a good "lead," or organize their writing to emphasize important points. To learn skills such as these, students must revise their writing based on feedback. Teachers must have a wide range of
writing/organizing strategies to equip students with different learning styles with appropriate, workable repertoires.

Literature

The philosophy about teaching literature that has recently swept the fill-in theory, if not yet in classroom practice--is known as
"reader response" theory. At this stage, reader response theory has influenced higher education more than K-12. Basically this
theory differs most radically from previous theories about teaching literature in the degree of emphasis placed on the reader's
response to and interpretation of the text. In this theoretical approach, the text's meaning is considered to reside in the "transaction" between the reader and the text, not in the text alone.

This is a departure from the old school of literary criticism, wherein all meaning was presumed to reside in the text, and the teacher's role was to lead students to predetermined conclusions. This often led to a "guessing game," with students trying to figure out what the teacher wanted them to discover in the work at hand. When approaching a text, teachers under the traditional model usually started with theme, plot, character and symbols, downplaying what the reader felt about the selection.

In practice, reader response theory considers very carefully how students respond intellectually and emotionally to the text. By
validating students' responses, teachers can spark a lively discussion from which a careful literary analysis will flow. Class
discussions play a key role in trying to elicit student response--and in trying to help them better understand the literature and their reaction to it.

Examine the Standards

National Standards as reported by McREL: This is an attempt to synthesize all of the professional organizations, state agencies and national organizations who have proposed standards in content areas for all the nation's children, with benchmarks at early and upper elementary grades and the middle and high school levels. You will need to select "Browse Standards" and then your content areas.

Michigan Department of Education: Select your content area from the list on the middle, right side of page of the front page, under K-12 Curriculum. The English-Language Arts page will include a good deal of information about the Language Arts in Michigan. Look for the link to the Michigan Curriculum Framework, and for English Language Arts. It is a long document, so don't get impatient with its loading.