This unit intends to introduce students to concepts that surround race and racism in the United States using To Kill a Mockingbird as the core text to explore these ideas. This unit will be taught over three weeks and focus heavily on students reading, listening, responding, and annotating texts that give alternative perspectives to the predominantly white voices heard throughout the story. This unit is intended to be the prelude to the reading of the novel. Much of the unit was developed using a mix of:

1. Beach et al.'s (2015) work with Identity Focused ELA teaching. 

2. Facing History and Ourselves'(2014) unit Teaching Mockingbird

3. Schoenbach et al.'s (2012) Reading for Understanding approach through the use of the Reading Apprenticeship Framework.

I hope that students will be able to reflect on their understandings of issues of race in the United States. I want students to tell us what they already know about some of the historical issues in TKAM such as The Great Depression, The Jim Crow era South, and the dangers that racism posed for the Black community. perhaps more important than their understandings is their ability to collaborate to co-construct some of the background knowledge needed to critically look at the novel. Much of the focus of these first few weeks of the novel will be to openly discuss criticisms with TKAM and to respond to those criticisms by supplementing students' knowledge with primary sourced/first-hand accounts of what it was like to live in the American South during Jim Crow Era. Additionally, we will use some current literature and poems that speak to the ways that America might begin to reflect on its past and move forward.

• We will start the unit with a Take a Stand activity that asks students to pick a side on six controversial statements to focus on race in the United States.
• We provide students with some important content-specific terms that will help them discuss and write during the unit. We then ask students to explore some other current terms that deal with race, anti-racism, and positionality.
• We ask students to read one current piece of literature and compare/contrast it to the themes from TKAM.
• We will ask students to read two primary source documents and ask them to write a claim-evidence-reasoning(CER) paragraph using specific evidence from the text.
• We will have students peer edit the CER paragraphs and reflect on their initial drafts before turning in their final product
• Finally, we ask students to explore some of the criticisms surrounding TKAM and decide whether they agree with those criticisms or not.

We will use Google Classroom as our primary Learning Management System as well as Jamboard, Nearpod, and Google Docs to help curate and capture some of the thinking of the entire class.

Students will need the following materials:

1. A computer with internet access
2. A digital copy of TKAM
3. Access to Google Classroom

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.5
Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach, focusing on addressing what is most significant for a specific purpose and audience. (Editing for conventions should demonstrate command of Language standards 1-3 up to and including grades 9-10 here.)

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.1
Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.2
Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.9
Analyze seminal U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (e.g., Washington's Farewell Address, the Gettysburg Address, Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech, King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail"), including how they address related themes and concepts.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.7
Analyze various accounts of a subject told in different mediums (e.g., a person's life story in both print and multimedia), determining which details are emphasized in each account.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.1
Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.1.B
Develop claim(s) and counterclaims fairly, supplying evidence for each while pointing out the strengths and limitations of both in a manner that anticipates the audience's knowledge level and concerns.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.1

Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 9-10 topics, texts, and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

For those teaching this activity, it is important to have an understanding of what the Reading Apprenticeship model refers (Schoenback et al., 2012) to as "Surfacing, Building, and Refining Schema" (pp. 239-242). With activities like the Jamboard vocabulary discovery and the Race: Take a Stand Nearpod, we are asking students to go through the inquiry process with the teacher very much involved in overseeing any misunderstandings or misconceptions that might "surface." Once those misconceptions have been explored and identitfied, we rebuild/revise schema and asks students to start the process of monitoring their conceptual shifts. 

However, any time you discuss issues of race with 9th grade students, it is important to cover some classroom rules and expectations when it comes to listening and responding to classmates that you don't agree with. We always use a "Parking Lot" style Google Question near the end of any class that focuses on a controversial topic so that students can privately share any feelings or questions.

For the written portion of the Take a Stand Activity, we always emphasize that we want students to show us two different phases of thinking: their intial stance and the stance they took once they saw their classmates responses. This approach stems from ***Hyland's (2012, from Identity Focused ELA)  assertion that "who we are, or rather who we present ourselves to be, is an outcome of how we routinely and repeatedly engage in interactions with others on an everday basis" (2012, pp.2-3). 

Below you will find links that will help illustrate:

1) How to use a Jamboard

 (Teacher's Tech, October 5th, 2020)

2. How to use a Nearpod to engage in class thinking

(New EdTech Classroom, 2020)

3. An example of a Take a Stand Activity during in-person learning

(EL Education, 2014)

4. Example Output Report for Nearpod Take a Stand

Student Responses

This next crucial step in the process of building understanding for a text as heavy as TKMB is to provide students with a common language to talk about issues of race. This is a vital step in looking critically at challenging texts. This idea comes from some of the approaches offered in the Reading Apprenticeship workshop as well as critical pedagogy studies by Aronowitz & Giroux (1991) that posited that "the construction of meaning, authority, and subjectivity, is governed by ideologies inscribed in language, which offer different possibilities for people to construct their relationships to themselves, others, and the larger reality" (pp.128-129, 133).

Here we are not simply asking students to write down a definition for the purpose of rote memorization. We want them to explore what those terms mean historically, presently, and locally. In what ways do they see prejudice affecting their relationships? How do schools and their curriculums represent a certain ideology?

The final piece to this section is offering students to (limitedly) explore new terms that allow them to evolve in their understanding of race and anti-racism before exploring a novel that has some very outdated ideas about equity and prejudice. Providing students with tools like language and terminology allows them to "critically analyze issues and events raises [so] that they might call dominant interpretations (and teachings) into question" (Beane & Apple, pp. 14-19).

From a teaching perspective I found that the Racial Equity Tools Website really helped me develop a further understanding of the terminology surrounding race as see below.

Racial Equity Tools

(USDN, 2015)

One of the major ways that sudents are able to build a foundation of undestanding for what they read is to understant the context in which is was written. In this case, students watch a short video that gives them an overview of three major aspects of the setting of TKMB:

1. Jim Crow Era Segregation practices

2. The effects of the Great Depression

3. The roles of men and women in Southern culture

This video and question used for this reflection come from the Facing History and Ourselves unit "Teaching Mockingbird" (2014). The purpose of this section of the unit is to set the "Moral Universe" of Maycomb. What I like most about this video is that it expands students' knowledge beyond some of the more talked-about aspects of segregation in the South. In addition to mentioning separate seating on busses and in restaurant, this video illustrated the personal and professional divisions that existed during this era. For students to critically approach a text like TKMB, they need to understand that real people lived these events every day. Teachers interested in exploring more about from the Facing History Series should consult the link below.

Setting the Setting of Maycomb, AL.

Often, when we approach a text like TKMB there is a tendency to only focus on the ways that race affects characters in the book. What is often overlooked in this critical approach is the intersectionality of gender and race. When characters in the story are reacting to situations it's because of several competing notions that deal with race, gender, socio-economic status, or family background.

Using a critical approach, I hope to show students the complexity of the characters in the story and how they represent the conflicts that real people experience. We always try to start our units throughout the year with at least one essential question that asks students to think about how learning about characters in conflicts with things like race or gender helps us to better understand ourselves.

For more information and guidance regarding teaching to intersectionlity, please check out the website below. This is a great resource for helping students unpack this.

Teaching to intersectionality

(Learning for Justice, 2016)

A major point of emphasis for any ELA unit that uses a critical approach to pedagogy is to allow students to explore modern applications of conflicts they see in the stories they read. TKMB's setting and themes are very dated by today's standards, but when teachers use videos like Adichie's (2009) "The Danger of a Single Story," they allow students to apply how the racism in a novel set in the 1930's still exists in modern forms with things like stereotyping and prejudice. 

Another important aspect of this assignment is the use of evidence to support claims that students make about the TED Talk. Here, we've given students a number of curated critical thinking questions to pick from. For this first round of formal writing, we wanted to give as much guidance as possible so students didn't struggle. Rather than making their own questions and claims up on their own, we narrowed down from a larger list created by students before we watched the video using some question stems that made use of Bloom's Taxonomy. This was so that we can ensure that students were asking the right type of questions so that they could make formal claims.

Please see the article below on using TED Talks in classroom writing as well as our list of questions stems that use Blooms.

Article on TEd Talks:

https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/using-ted-talks-in-the-classroom-8de97079c398

Bloom's Taxonomy Stems:

Attachment 1. Bloom's Questions Stems to Support Claim Based Writing. (Tophat, n.d.)

The final piece of our building background asks students to apply some of the knowledge they have built so far using our frontloading activities to create a formal CER paragraph that focuses on a modern TED Talk. The critical pieces to this assignment are the process approach we take to writing and the peer review element that allows students an opportunity to get initial feedback on their writing. For this lesson, I borrowed frequently from NCTE's guidelines for quality peer review in high school ELA classrooms. Both of the attachments below give some framework for the methods I used with my class during this writing activity. Please also find below a snapshot of the embedded rubric we use for our CER writing assignment.

Attachment 1. Peer Review Process Overview A (Gere et al., 2010).

Attachment 2. Peer Review Process Overview B (Gere et al., 2010).

Attachment 3. CER writing rubric.

I like implementing this approach because it widens the audience that our students our writing to. In the case of this peer review writing activity, students are creating paragraphs not just for me as the teacher, but also for their classroom peers. This adds an extra step between the creation of writing and when that final product get to me.