Bringing Calkins and Science To Unite in Curricular Glory: The Vision

By Chloe Kannan

We love teaching Middle School reading and writing. We, like many other devoted and passionate Language Arts teachers, are obsessed and dedicated followers of the Calkins Readers’ Writers’ Workshop model.

Being workshop devotees, we constantly want our students engaged in the art and process of reading and writing. This work needs to be meaningful, authentic, relevant, and personal. We want them to cultivate a true passion for this work and we hope that our students will begin to understand how the world of reading and writing can shape their lives in a whole new way.

During my first year at the American School of Bombay, I had the opportunity to witness kids falling in love with the killer openings of personal narratives, engaging in spoken-word, and finally feeling comfortable to unveil their deepest hopes. I saw kids who hated reading with fiery passion become life-long readers. I watched kids who read 3 books the year before read 22. It was beautiful and our curriculum was great (thanks to my colleague Carol who has been doing workshop lessons since the early 90’s. True Dumbledore.). Look at how much we accomplished in an 80-minute period every other day.

On the other hand, I did not feel like we were laying the ground-work for critical thinking in writing that they would need in our future world. We weren’t getting kids to reconcile opposing view-points, they weren’t addressing counter-claims, they were still committed to the five-paragraph essay, and they couldn’t understand why nuance mattered so much in their writing.

As a result, we found that kids were going into 9^th grade and IB with real struggle. Sure, they loved to read and they could write flowery pieces with passion- all great things, but they didn’t have the critical thinking, argument, and analysis practice to bring everything they knew full-circle. They rambled and wrote in circles. My kids were passionate, but we needed kids to have the critical thinking tools to defend themselves. We needed to raise the bar in writing. We needed the power of something relevant, and something where writing would be the medium in which to argue really difficult issues.

So this year, my new colleague, Velicia Pernell, and I were committed to do argument. And we were going to give it everything we had.

Last summer, I went to Reading and Writing Project’s Summer Institute. And of course, during lunch, I went to the store hoping for another resource that could help sharpen our curriculum. I knew I wanted less narrative and more argument and analysis. And then, Christmas came.

The brand new writing units were sitting on the table. Santa had come. How was I supposed to know these would be there? I would have begged my principal to let us have the whole department purchase it. Alas, I could only afford one out of my pocket. I decided to buy the 8^th grade one to start with. In my mind, we could try one to two new units, see how they went, and then decide if we wanted to buy more the following year.

It was my second year and we didn’t have a 7^th grade argument unit on the books. I read through the 8^th grade position papers unit written by Cornelius Minor, Julie Shepherd, and Mary Ehrenworth and I was just overwhelmed with joy. And once I met Velicia, the argument curriculum queen, I knew we were going to eventually run with this. I just didn’t know how. We have a lot of initiatives at our school, and we just wouldn’t be able to fit in the research component. And we knew we wanted to do this right. If we were going to do it, we weren’t going to half-ass it.

We did know that we could do it after our famed book club unit where our kids discussed and argued over texts. That would at least give them some practice in doing argument work before-hand. We also had kids do responses to reading in the fall. Again, not a formal unit, but kids at least knew “claim” and “evidence.” Analysis was lacking and the kids struggled during those months to master it.

We really didn’t want to do a position paper on yes or no to “school uniforms.” Ugh. We needed this to be relevant. “CURRICULUM GODS, GIVE US AN ANSWER. WE WANT OUR KIDS PREPARED FOR THE 21^ST CENTURY, BUT WE WANT THIS TO BE THE GREATEST UNIT EVER. PLEASE.”

And then, Santa came again with the greatest gift we could have asked for in late autumn. The 7^th Grade science department came to us at a faculty meeting and begged for a cross-curricular PBL unit. Bingo. We had won the lottery.

So, I know what you might be thinking. Teaching an 8^th grade unit to 7^th graders with no foundation in argument and also having science content on top of it. Are you guys out of your mind?

Well, why not? We want the content relevant, we want connections across classes, and we want kids actually prepared for the 21^st century. And we were willing to do whatever it took for the kids to have this opportunity.

Science was doing a unit on disease. In the fall, the kids play a zombie-unit video game that the science team designed where kids are learning about the content, the real-world issues of disease, and they have different challenges where they have to use that knowledge in various contexts. It was relevant and they wanted to do a deep-dive of the diseases in more depth starting in January.  We had to unite.

The Unit Design:

Now, what exactly were kids going to argue that was relevant to today? It took some time to develop an essential question that worked but, here we go:

Which disease should the international community focus the most effort on stopping through vaccination?  You are asked to write to a coalition of doctors and produce a science-based research paper that supports your position. You must acknowledge why this disease should be the priority over the others up for consideration.

The following diseases science selected were based on which diseases were resurfacing throughout the world and have been all over the news lately. Talk about relevant:

• Mumps
• Measles
• Rubella
• Diphtheria
• Tetanus
• Pertussis

Science provided us with the content they wanted to see kids use in order to justify their positions. This would be the criteria (not listed here) that kids must include in their paper.   In turn, we gave science the learning outcomes we wanted to see throughout the unit and in the final paper:

Writers will rethink their positions as they research where they will be choosing, situating, and explaining evidence. They are going to learn to work with counter-argument in order to be principled and fair to multiple points of view. They will contextualize the issue and highlight its complexity, develop its history, and define the scope of their particular argument in their papers and final presentations.

Similar to the TCRWP’s unit, we divided this into two bends for both science and Language Arts:

In Language Arts, we are building their argument skills in the first bend using the lessons and texts from the unit. In Science, they are teaching them source evaluation and research. In the second bend, Language Arts will attack the paper using the skills they learned in Bend 1, and Science will do shorter mini-lessons based on the content that is missing or where kids need help.

I know what you are thinking now…This isn’t a PBL unit. What are kids going to actually be doing at the end to bring this argument paper to life?

At the end of the unit, students will find partners in their class who also wrote their position paper on disease. They will be responsible for using their final research papers, and reconciling viewpoints in order to create a visual or short presentation detailing their findings. Students groups will also create short pitches where they must convince stakeholders to prioritize their disease for the international health organization. Our kids are being asked to put all their argument skills to the test orally, visually, and using a research paper to ground it. The school will then vote on what they think. As kids present their findings in the cafeteria at small tables, stakeholders will look at their options in order to make the best decision. They will fill out a ballot on the way where they will mark their vote and write one reason to justify their decision.

At our last logistics meeting, the four of us were officially super stoked about the vision for this project. It was a curricular unit dream: rigorous, engaging, relevant with three of the greatest teachers working by my side. It would be SO awesome, SO AMAZING, and SO EPIC.

We kicked off the unit the first day back from winter break.

We taught the first lesson and…

MORE TO COME FROM VELICIA PERNELL.