A Vision for the BHS English Department

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Big Picture

• Every member of our department shares a common vision of what it is we want our students to be able to do as thinkers, communicators, writers, readers, and researchers. 

Our students as Thinkers

• During the class time and in completing homework / projects, our students’ critical thinking increases in complexity from grades 9 – 12 and regularly reaches the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.

      Level    (1) – Remember – (rote recall)

      Level    (2) – Understand – (make sense of material)

      Level    (3) – Apply – (use learned material in a new situation)

      Level    (4) – Analyze – (break material into parts)

      Level    (5) – Evaluate – (judge the value of material based on specific criteria)

      Level    (6) – Create – (put parts together to form something new to the learner)

• Our students regularly demonstrate metacognitive skills; they are comfortable and skilled at suspending judgment and evaluating their own thought processes.

• Our students consistently demonstrate an ability to critically analyze, reflect, and synthesize, and evaluate.

Our students as Readers

• Read this link.  Our students can do what it is listed under (1A, 1B, 1C, 2A, 2B)

http://www.isbe.state.il.us/ils/ela/stage_I/descriptor.htm

http://www.isbe.state.il.us/ils/ela/stage_J/descriptor.htm

From Mosaic of Thought by Keen and Zimmerman

• Our students can monitor their comprehension during reading process by pausing, reflecting, skipping past difficult parts to see the big picture / overall meaning.
• Our students can assimilate information from a text into their own understandings, personal experience, view of the world, etc.  (In one sense, we – as instructors – acknowledge the reality of the transactional theory of reading in the way we allow students to respond to texts.)
• Our students generate questions before, during, and after reading, and they can use these questions to focus their attention on the text.
• Our students can make predictions about a text, confirm these predictions, and test their development of meaning as they read through a text.
• Our students can identify key ideas and themes as they read, and they can express these key ideas in the form of paraphrases and summaries.
• Our students can monitor the overall meaning, important concepts and themes in a text and their awareness of the ways the elements fit together to create the overarching ideas of a text.
• Our students gain an appreciation for literature, and find joy in the act of reading.
• Our students can infer meaning from a text.

 Our students as communicators / writers:

Read the same link as before – but focus on 3A, 3B, 3C, 4A, and 4B for a description of what our students should be able to do as writers:

http://www.isbe.state.il.us/ils/ela/stage_I/descriptor.htm

http://www.isbe.state.il.us/ils/ela/stage_J/descriptor.htm

• Our students are comfortable with the conventions and expectations of edited American English.  In other words, they are able to code switch between informal discourses and a voice / style which is academic / formal.
• Our students can consistently write sentences which are clear and sophisticated.
• Our students actively develop a writing style which “capitalizes on their own voice” (Keene and Zimmerman).
• Our students are aware of a wide range of choices as related to word choice, sentence structure, punctuation as ways to improve the sophistication and clarity of their style.
• Our students understand the basic structure of an academic essay / argument.
• Our students are able to maintain a clear focus and deliberately follow a pre-determined organizational structure throughout the length of an essay.
• Our students gain an awareness of their rhetorical and stylistic weaknesses / shortcomings / bad habits.
• Our students make decisions about content (structure and style) based on their own rhetorical purposes and sense of audience.
• Our students use listening techniques which keep them actively engaged and critically aware.
• Our students can effectively use and analyze various verbal and non-verbal strategies to maximize their formal and informal communication.
• Our students can design and deliver oral presentations where the audience is impressed with the speaker’s intelligence, clarity, and commitment.
• Our students can design oral presentations for a wide range of purposes and occasions utilizing a wide-range of delivery formats.

 Our students as researchers: 

• Our students can utilize a specific process and structure for effectively completing a researched argument.
• Our students can effectively and accurately paraphrase source material into their own words and writing style.
• Our students can apply the conventions and rules of MLA documentation style.

• Our students can effectively ask questions to narrow a search and find a topic.

• Our students gather, read, and organize sufficient amounts of scholarly articles as they construct their argument / paper.
• Our students can effectively evaluate the reliability, value, quality, and usefulness of the sources and information they read / view.

• Our students, as they research, pause and evaluate the value of the information in relationship to their thesis, purpose, and structural framework.
• Our students are willing to validate the information they find and check for accuracy.
• Our students know how to determine, find, and use the most effective resources for information.
• Our students can synthesize a wide variety of information from multiple sources to support and develop a single supporting point.
• Our students are comfortable considering and addressing multiple viewpoints and perspectives in a research paper.