I will copy the directions in this box but i will also attach a few files with the directions, rubric, and papers to cite. If you have any questions please contact me ASAP. This is a final paper for the course on differentiated literary instruction for secondary education social studies/history.
The link to the school’s website you are applying to is https://www.the-linc.org/
Situational Context and Your Role
As part of your search for a teaching position in your field , you are applying to The Linc, a new public high school scheduled to open this Fall. Situated in the Kensington area, it is a “comprehensive” high school, serving students both in the surrounding community and across the city. It emphasizes diversity of just the kinds that we have examined in our course. Students are selected entirely by lottery; there are no minimum requirements for applicants to be accepted. It also emphasizes high academic standards. Curriculum, to be developed by school faculty, will be project-oriented (i.e. using real, or simulated, performance tasks for evaluation) and inquiry-driven, even including student voice and choice in the kinds of inquiry they will do.
Of course, students and teachers in the school will still be subject to Pennsylvania Core Standards and Assessments as a major component of the success of their model. Therefore, the school is especially interested in applicants who can bring expertise to bear on this issue:
How, and to what extent, can we address the learning needs of a diverse student body—similar to that which we have constructed in our case study class—so that all students can develop deep understandings of complex concepts and issues in your field—in an era of high-stakes testing?
Product and Goal
You will submit a 6-8 pg report that places the Back-to-Front planning framework in the context of those principles of differentiation and literacy instruction that our course has emphasized. Your goal is to persuade your audience(s) that these instructional principles can make the back-to-front curriculum framework even more effective in addressing the needs of all students so that they develop deep content understandings.
As evidence of your expertise, appendices at the end of the report will contain the unit plan overview that you have constructed (including, the authentic performance task written to students) and the four reports.
In the body of the report you will explain how an emphasis on literacy and differentiation as we have learned about them through reading and discussion can address the question raised in the final, underlined, sentence of the previous section in these directions.
To reach that goal, your report needs to include the following:
Section I
? A brief explanation (1-1.5 pp.) of the major principles driving each of the three frameworks we have learned—back-to-front planning, differentiation, and literacy instruction and an overview of how they work together. This section thus functions as an introduction to Section II:
Section II
? Extended explanations of how the combination of literacy and differentiation strategies in the documents included in the appendices can generate students’ engagement, support learning of complex disciplinary concepts, and improve student achievement, both by the end of the unit and also on state mandated high stakes tests.
o Using the three underlined concepts above as the terms organizing this section, be sure to include the following for each of the three:
? A strong rationale for the value of this principle as expressed in our readings. The rationale should employ the language of the important concepts we have studied, explain how those concepts function in planning instructional activities, and identify the sources responsible for these concepts appropriately. You may, and should, quote, but do so judiciously. Use summary and paraphrase to integrate the readings authoritatively into your presentation. Include a list of sources immediately following this part of your report, before the appendices;
? Evidence, from your appendices, that document how your unit activities implement the principle effectively;
? Responses to concerns, misunderstandings, or objections that you anticipate your audience(s) might have to these approaches.
Audience(s)
The readers of your proposal are the school’s principal and curriculum development specialist from your field; selected teachers, also from your field; and selected parents and their students. These individuals and groups have diverse, though overlapping, concerns.
? Principal. The diverse reading levels of our case-study class parallel the differences across the school. If this school is to continue to maintain AYP, curricula must simultaneously develop students’ ability to read and write more complex texts, yet provide students whose skills are considerably below the levels needed to do that work with alternative ways so as to develop a “deep understanding” of course content. The school’s administration understands back-to-front curriculum planning very well, but wants to know clearly how these approaches to literacy and meeting student learning needs will work within that curriculum framework.
? The school teachers and curriculum specialist. Obviously, these people are enthusiastic about the school’s approach to curriculum and to students, or they wouldn’t have applied. The curriculum specialist, because she is more knowledgeable, is more understanding of your approach. The other teachers are interested, but know less. They are concerned that this emphasis on literacy and differentiation may dilute high standards. They are somewhat suspicious of “new” approaches, having heard overblown claims many times in their careers.
? Parents and students. The parents are concerned that the curriculum attend to “real content”—the knowledge and skills traditionally the focus of schooling. Student representatives are concerned that the unit is “relevant”—that it include the interests and experience of the diverse students that comprise the student body.
