Academic Moves for College and Career Readiness, Grades 6-12. Jim Burke

for key words and phrases; they then worked together on the last character and added to others as a group.

       Level Three (Strategic Thinking)

       Sample Task: Choose three ways in which the characters in the novel could be compared and contrasted and, for each, compose a question that could generate possible discussion or writing.

       What Peter’s Group Did: Realized that the most obvious comparison in this novel would be to compare males to females, but each member thought of other possible comparisons: characters who wind up happy to those who wind up unhappy, for instance, or characters who follow the rules and those who break the rules. In the end, the group wound up with several questions, including the one Peter answered.

       Level Four (Extended Thinking)

       Sample Task: Imagine that your group has been asked to write the preface to a new edition of your group novel, including an assessment of the work’s historical importance, literary merits, and effects on other authors over time. As a group, investigate and present your plan for this preface with appropriate citations.

       What Peter’s Group Did: Peter’s group assigned each group member research tasks and then compiled the information and worked together to create an outline for the preface. After discovering that the novel had originally appeared only in magazines and was first published in book form in 1979, they decided in particular to research the genre of utopias and dystopias written by women in the 20th century and the effect Gilman had on those writers.

      Rubric for Comparison and Contrast

      Planning Page: Compare and Contrast

      Compare/Contrast: identify similarities or differences between two or more items in order to understand how they are alike, equal, or analogous to each other

      4 Describe report what one observes or does

       illustrate • report • represent

       The Main Idea

      Telling what we see and experience is a key piece of learning, so much so that students usually begin learning to write description at a fairly young age. Yet both narrative and informative writing require descriptive skills that must be honed and practiced. What’s more, the same tools of description apply whether a student is setting the scene for a story to take place, creating a piece of objective journalism, or describing a scientific event.

      Underlying Skills:

       Observe closely. Description relies on details. Noticing, documenting, and creatively relating those details are elements that can separate a prosaic description from a memorable one. Younger students will benefit from writing exercises that focus on all five senses.

       Research. Whether a student is describing a scene set in another country or interviewing a firsthand witness of an account, accurately relating the truth in a way that conveys a full picture can require painstaking background research.

       Write clearly and succinctly. While descriptive text can certainly be complex, it requires specificity and clarity to communicate atmosphere and mood (or, in history or scientific disciplines, to communicate exactly what occurred in a process, test, or event).

      Describe: report what one observes or does in order to capture and convey to others a process, impression, or a sequence of events in a narrative

       Core Connections

       Describe how a particular story’s or drama’s plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution (RL3)

       Describe how a text presents information (e.g., sequentially, comparatively, causally) (RH5.6–8)

       Use narrative techniques, such as dialogue, pacing, and description, to develop experiences, events, and/or characters (W3b.6–8)

       Construct an explanation that includes qualitative or quantitative relationships between variables that describe phenomena (NGSS, MS-LS4–4)