After studying utopian literature, students design their own utopian society, publishing the explanation of their ideal world on a blog. As they blog about their utopia, students establish the habits, practices, and organizing social structures that citizens will follow in their utopian societies. They begin by brainstorming ideas about what a perfect society would be like and then, in groups, begin to plan their project. Next, they become familiar with the blogging process, including legal guidelines and the specific site they will be using. Over several class sessions, students work on their blogs comparing their work to a rubric. Finally, after students visit one another's blogs and provide constructive and supportive feedback, they reflect on their own work. The lesson plan includes alternative handouts for classrooms where computer or blog access is limited. In this alternative, students complete the same basic activities, but publish their work using a Flip Book.

In this unit, high school juniors will research one career of their choice, based on analysis of results of their three assessments on Career Cruising (Career Matchmaker, Ability Profiler and Learning Styles Inventory). In this process, students will develop the skills necessary to writing a high-quality, well-founded research paper. Topics will include source integrity, works cited pages (both formatting and the creation of citations for works cited page), the correct format for various in-text citations, stages of research, development of graphic organizers, translation of graphic organizer in the creation of an outline, transferring outline topics to paragraphs, developing strong introductory and concluding paragraphs, creating effective transition sentences, formatting cover pages, editing, revising, peer editing and submission of final draft.

In this lesson, high school students look critically at the literary work "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe and its 1961 film interpretation. They use prediction strategies to form and refine their opinions about the story line progression in each work. They read the short story, screen the film, discuss reactions to both works, and plan and write a persuasive essay analyzing the validity of the film interpretation. This lesson is ideally suited for students who have experience with persuasive writing, and it can be adapted to work with any literature-film pairing.

What is scary, and why does it fascinate us? How do writers and storytellers scare us? This lesson plan invites students to answer these questions by exploring their own scary stories and scary short stories and books. The lesson culminates in a Fright Fair, where students share scary projects that they have created, including posters, multimedia projects, and creative writing.

The "This American Life" crew spends five months at Harper High School in Chicago, where 29 current and recent students were shot during 2012. The listener gets a sense of what it means to live in the midst of all this gun violence, how teens and adults navigate a world of funerals and Homecoming dances. This is a primary source with a lesson plan included in the narrative.

Using Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat, students learn a simplified method of analyzing a literary work through psychoanalytical criticism. Students identify plot and theme, and then identify characters from the story with their psychological personalities (Id, Ego, and Superego). Students then develop an argument supporting the character identification. Finally, using explicit textual evidence, students write an analytical essay supporting their position.

This resource will help you begin the process of understanding literary theory and schools of criticism and how they are used in the academy.

Using Beloved as a model of a work with multiple narrative perspectives, students use a visualizing activity and close reading to consider ways in which subjective values shape contradictory representations.

I include this assignment in my 11-12 Grade Native American Literature class. I usually introduce this unit after students have read the short story "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona," by Sherman Alexie (Form his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven). The story (along with pieces of his other short stories) was the inspiration for the 1998 film Smoke Signals, one of the first authentic films to examine the humor, pain, loss and struggle of reservation life.After reading the story and watching the film, students write about what makes the film authentic and how forgiveness plays into the ability to move on.We then watch the documentary film Reel Injun (2009), chronicling the evolution of Native American portrayals in film. Next, students have the opportunity to discuss the attributes of authentic Native American depictions in film and what aspects of Native culture they would like to see in film.Finally, we finish the unit by looking at the impact of stereotypes in film, especially children's films, and students watch the Disney film Pocahantas (2005) through the lens of a movie critic and write a movie review based on the film, focusing on the authenticity of racial and cultural portrayals.Video Lesson: The Evolution of Native American Representations in Film

This activity guides students through analyzing the social media postings of five businesses based on a theme of the student's choice. After making their observations of good and bad business practices, students will create their own posts with pictures. 

Great supplemental resource to support teaching caption writing for teachers of journalism or advisors of yearbooks.

This set of lessons extends over several days. Students work with a partner to read and annotate G.K. Chesterton's "The Fallacy of Success." Students take notes which summarize each section of the text. Students write an objective summary of the text, identifying two claims and determining how those claims are developed in the text.