The goal of this five-day exemplar is to explicitly model the process of searching for and interpreting intra-textual connections. In this lesson sequence, the teacher poses an analytic focusing question and then guides students in gathering and interpreting evidence from the text in order to come to a deeper understanding of the story. Simple word play and art activities give students practice in closely attending to language and word choice, and in visualizing and recording their interpretations. Discussion and a short writing exercise help students to synthesize what they have learned.

In their WISELearn grant application, Bonduel School District wrote, “The teachers at Bonduel Middle/High School will create units to address our deficits in our curriculum and increase student learning for college and career readiness, including creating a new junior level English class. Our first step will be to look at our current curriculum and decide where we have gaps. Although we have worked to align our curriculum to the Common Core standards, we believe there are gaps which have led to lower test scores. We also would like to better align our curriculum in grades 7-12.” In order to meet their grant goals, teachers will be trained in the EQuIP rubric to assess the level of alignment and rigor in existing units. Then teachers will use the rubric to review and revise current units for English 9 and 10, embedding Open Educational Resources which were determined to be high quality instructional materials by EdReports to fill in gaps in the curriculum. In addition, teachers will be reviewing published high quality instructional materials from EdReports as they undergo materials adoption for grades 7, 8 and 11.