Background
This pre-assessment and subsequent lessons would be for a 7th grade IB language and literature class taught to a diverse group of students. Most of the students are boarding students or third-culture kids. They have been studying English with me as their teacher for one semester and we have examined literary devices rather extensively in that time period; however, there was little prior knowledge before the start of our classes together.
Unit 4
At this point, they have learned to identify literary devices and to analyze their use as our first semester was focused on analysis (Criteria A). However, in this unit students will shift roles and will now take the role of creator (Criteria C). As such the goal of these first few lessons is to cement the terminology and how it is used, so that students can make more thoughtful decisions as authors. The summative assignment will be for students to write a new final chapter to the book to explain what happens to the protagonist after the ambiguous finish of the actual novella. In order to do this students will need to have a firm grasp on the terminology of the elements that they will be expected to include in their creative piece.
The pre-assessment
Students will begin the unit by taking a quick quiz using the program quizlet.
The quiz contains eight literary terms and their definitions. Questions can be matching, multiple choice, or fill in the blank. I expect that a couple of the terms will be new to all of the students. Thus, it is assumed that the high performers will probably not have perfect scores. However, I cannot be sure that they do not already know them that is the whole point of the pre-assessment. For the two terms that I expect students will not know, any student that has prior knowledge will help coach others later on in the unit.
Using the pre-assessment to differentiate
After students complete the pre-assessment, I will show them a youtube video about how to incorporate quotes into an essay (to supplement our previous unit), while I review their scores and divide the students into groups. The students will be mixed into three groups: the top performers, those in the expected middle, and those who are struggling with the terminology, even that which we have learned previously.
Group 1: The top performers
This group is expected to be small and they will be given a collaborative project to create a storyboard that incorporates all of the literary devices we covered in the quiz. The goal for this group is to shift their understanding of the concepts from one of purely understanding in reading or analysis to that of understanding their purpose as a creator.
Group 2: The middle masses
This group is expected to be the largest. These students have a strong understanding of the terms we have already studied in class, but have gaps or little knowledge outside of those few terms. These students will be separated into smaller groups and given a competitive exercise to identify examples of the use of the literary devices from the quiz in our previous readings. The teams will be awarded points in our classroom behavior game for accurate examples of the literary devices in the books from 1st semester. The goal for this group of students is to solidify their understanding of the core literary devices and to get them to expand and explore the newer terms.
Group 3: Limited prior knowledge
This group, like the top performers is expected to be small. They will play a matching game connecting the terms to definitions and examples to start. This will be followed by an in depth group discussion with me about the use of a framing technique. The framing technique is the following lesson and the goal is to get these students to be experts about the upcoming topic so they can help lead the discussion on the following day. Framing techniques in literature is one of the new literary devices for the students.
The following lesson
The following lesson will be a series of presentations. We will start with the middle group, who will expand on the works we have already studied and bring in examples of how these literary devices have been used in works that we have already studied. Then the top performers will demonstrate how the devices could be used to create a story. They will present the outline of the story they made and how they incorporated the elements being discussed. Following this group, I will introduce the topic of the day as an examination of the use of the framing technique and ask the third group to introduce the topic to the class.
