This month, we focus on the 4 C's: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. Today's entry comes from Christine Corrao, English teacher at Torrey Pines High School:21st-century skills: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking
I would love to share some of the ways that I help foster 21st Century literacy skills in my classroom. As an English teacher I am really thrilled about the inclusion of more non-fiction into the classroom with the move towards Common Core. I have always supplemented the teaching of novels by providing my students with articles that reflect the themes presented in our Core novels. Being able to supplement with short, relevant, and aligned text allows me to help students see our “classic” novels in a fresh or modern context. The STRUCTURE of my class period allows me to do this more easily- I don’t have to change how I teach in order to add in non-fiction I just need to arrange my class schedule to support the use of these texts.
The four main 21st Century literacy skills needed for all students (these can be used in any content area when tackling a reading selection) are:
- The ability to “activate” prior knowledge.
- Organize or make sense of new information.
- Comprehend the text.
- Summarize, so as to inform others about what you read/learned.
The best way to embed these skills and support them is by using the structure of the class to give the framework for inclusion. At Torrey Pines we teach in 2 hour block periods. I use this longer length of time to breakup my class period and roughly teach Fiction 50% of the time and Non-Fiction 50% of the time. Then within that 1 hour I allot for Non-fiction texts, I use specific reading strategies that support the four main skills I listed above. I search for a variety of articles/texts/video clips/music that make our novels interesting and relevant and roughly devote about 25 min of time to teaching those specific strategies. One example would be when I taught The Scarlet Letter this Fall and used both evidence from the text and support articles to envision the novel as a story about the effects of post-partum depression. We talked about the several times in the text when the characters referenced Elizabeth Proctor being “unwell” or “not wholly well” after the birth of her last child. I supplemented with a medical reference article on Post-partum depression along with a recent blog post by a women who struggled with depression after the birth of her child. Students were engaged and interested in a topic they did not seem to know much about- they now easily saw the connection to our Core text and were surprised they didn’t “see” it before the non-fiction supplements. Overall, it is just a simple adjustment to how I devote my class time that allows me to creatively and easily infuse non-fiction into my classroom.
