10th Grade Power Standards

The Essentials – 10^th GRADE POWER STANDARDS

The 10 most “essential” skills and concepts for 10^th grade English

WRITING: Please see the “Adapted Rubric” distilled from the state’s 6-trait rubric for scoring UBSCT persuasive essays

1. Familiarity with the 6-traits of writing enables students to analyze their own and others’ writing for strengths and weaknesses in each trait area.
2. Students will compose a persuasive essay, among other writing modes, and will employ 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd person perspectives appropriately, depending upon the structure, audience, and purpose of the composition.
3. Students will understand and employ basic sentence components, boundaries, and punctuation in their writing.
1. Basic components: independent clause, dependent clause, and appositive, infinitive, prepositional, and participial phrases
2. Sentence boundaries: comma-splice, fragment, run-on

                           i.  Comma rules

1.       commas in a series

2.       states and dates

3.       comma w/ coordinating conjunction to join clauses

4.       quoted language

5.       introductory elements (e.g., words, dependent clauses, phrases)

6.       parenthetical elements (e.g., appositives, interjections, absolute phrases)

1. Students will understand the differences between and appropriately employ active and passive voice; they will focus on eliminating dependency on the basic “be” verbs (i.e., is, am, are, was, were, be, being, and been) to strengthen their writing and use passive voice with intention instead of as a default.
1. Some revisable passive constructions include…

i. missing agents (Mistakes were made)

ii.“by the agent” constructions (The essentials were determined by some teachers)

iii.      “be” verb + -ing (The teacher was talking.)

 READING: Please see “Critical vs. Casual Readers” (below)

1. Students will recognize text elements to aid their comprehension and analysis of both informational and literary texts.
1. Informational text elements include headings, subheadings, charts, and tables.
2. Literary text elements include symbolism, metaphors, and others as detailed in the core.
2. Students will recognize and understand the differences between critical and casual reading in order to develop critical reading and thinking skills.  They will employ critical reading skills to analyze and understand textual connections to politics, history, culture, and economics.
3. Students will recognize and utilize knowledge of Greek and Latin roots and vocabulary-in-context skills to aid their comprehension and composition of texts.

INQUIRY: Please see the “Elements of Understanding” below.

1. Students will employ the processes of inquiry to deepen their understanding of issues.
1. Processes include formulating questions, research, differentiating between and evaluating sources.
2. Students will synthesize their inquiry and compose an appropriate text (e.g., essay, report) explaining multiple facets of the issue and supporting their analysis with relevant concrete details (e.g., specifics, examples, quotations, paraphrase).
3. Students will synthesize their inquiry and prepare an oral presentation to communicate their findings and analysis; students should prepare to respond to audience questions; students may be required to us visual aids or technology during their presentations.

ELEMENTS OF UNDERSTANDING

“Knowledge” and “understanding” obviously have a close relationship, but knowing something and fully understanding it resembles the difference between an artist’s painting of people feasting at a glorious banquet and attending the banquet with friends and loved ones, hearing the people and the music, smelling and tasting the food, and helping with the clean-up afterward.

Although scholars, teachers and students have tried many ways to describe the disparity between knowledge and understanding with humanity’s amazing yet imprecise and slippery languages, it remains elusive; nevertheless, for our purposes, we will employ the following definitions for aspects, or elements, of understanding.

FACET 1 – EXPLANATION: To demonstrate understanding, one must explain not only facts, inferences, and connections, but also why and how those facts, inferences, and connections matter.  Educator John Dewey explained, to understand “is to see [something] in its relations to other things: to note how it operates or functions, what consequences follow from it, [and] what causes it.”  In other words, knowledge of context leads to deeper understanding.

FACET 2 – INTERPRETATION: To deepen understanding, one must have the ability to interpret events, emotional responses, facial expressions, art, architecture, symbols, language, and perhaps especially stories. “Stories help us make sense of our lives and the lives around us, whether in history, literature, or art.  The deepest most transcendent meanings are found, of course, in the stories, parables, and myths that anchor all religions. A story is not a diversion; the best stories make our lives more understandable and focused” (Wiggins and McTighe 89).  To display a valid interpretation of a “text,” one must move back and forth between the textual themes and personal experience, showing how they inform each other.  Good interpretations find common ground and resonate the universal themes between the “text,” the interpreter, and the reader of the interpretation.

FACET 3 – APPLICATION: To understand, one must apply her or his knowledge in new, unique, diverse situations.  Although the acts of interpreting and explaining provide people with opportunities to demonstrate some elements of understanding, true understanding involves applying acquired knowledge beyond the confines of a classroom or a particular learning activity.  Completing a project or lesson, working hard, following directions, and turning in a product represent only the first steps toward understanding.

FACET 4 – PERSPECTIVE: Recognizing that anyone’s particular point of view, including one’s own, represents only one of many plausible explanations demonstrates another facet of understanding.  People with perspective realize they do not ever possess the entire truth, but instead, they expose and explore previously unquestioned and unexamined ideas and assumptions.  Even deeper levels of understanding come from exploring the veracity of varied perspectives and learning how and why others cling to their views and beliefs.  To attain a greater perspective, critical thinkers must constantly ask to what extent information they encounter seeks to influence and bias them towards or against a particular view.

FACET 5 – EMPATHY: Whereas perspective may provide one element of understanding in the mind, an intellectual understanding, empathy creates an understanding of the heart, an emotional understanding.  Empathy enables one “to walk in another’s shoes, to escape one’s own responses and reactions so as to grasp another’s” (Wiggins and McTighe 98).  Perspective maintains a detached and critical distance in its attempt to understand objectively; it’s external.  Empathy seeks to get inside another’s heart and mind, and it often creates feelings of intense discomfort.  To cultivate empathy, one must escape her or his ethnocentric and egocentric views and attempt to understand how and why others behave and respond the way they do.

FACET 6 – SELF-KNOWLEDGE:  To understand, one must cultivate an awareness of the self.  A lack of self-knowledge does not merely show ignorance, but it also displays no effort to learn or reflect.  Self-knowledge starts with metacognition, asking oneself why we think and believe the things we do and how we process information in the darkness of our own limited subjectivity.  “Self-knowledge…demands that we self-consciously question our ways of seeing the world…” (Wiggins and McTighe 102).