11th Grade - Gateway 3

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 11 meet the criteria that materials are well-designed and take into account effective lesson structure and pacing.

The instructional materials, which are based on Understanding by Design, include four units of study, a Language Workshop, a Close Reading Workshop, and a Writing Workshop. Each unit is organized around a collection of texts or tasks based on theme. The four units are The American Dream, The Power of Persuasion, American Forums: The Marketplace of Ideas, and An American Journey. Teachers access the unit materials on the Digital Bookshelf. The introductory materials include a Planning the Unit section at the beginning of each unit which suggests possible instructional sequences. Next, the Instructional Pathways section offers a pacing guide for the activities and workshops, based on a 50-minute class period.

The teacher materials include a digital Teacher Wrap bar to the left of the page that can be accessed at any time and provides a range of additional information, such as step-by-step guidance for each activity including standards citations, vocabulary support, pacing recommendations, independent reading suggestions, and a possible instructional pathway. Each unit includes two embedded assessments that are directly aligned to the content students experience throughout the activities within the lesson. Information about the assessments are accessed through the table of contents tab and the unit overview.

In Planning the Unit, there is an Activities at a Glance and a Resources at a Glance section. The Activities at a Glance provides a clear overview of what is included in the unit activities. Activities begin with learning targets, a preview, key vocabulary, and learning strategies that are covered during the lesson. Additionally, some activities include recommendations for leveled differentiated instruction to support the implementation of a specific section of a given lesson. The Unit Resources at a Glance section provides an overview of the various supplemental resources for the unit. The Teacher Edition also includes a pacing guide that provides several instructional pathway options including where to incorporate additional resources.

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 11 meet the criteria that the student resources include ample review and practice resources, clear directions, and explanation, and correct labeling of reference aids (e.g., visuals, maps, etc.)

The student materials include ample supplementary materials that serve as additional practice resources. Throughout each lesson, students engage with reading selections in a variety of ways, enabling them to practice necessary skills. They are provided multiple opportunities to interact with the text through digital tools such as highlighting, underlining, and circling. Teachers have the option to select from quick multiple-choice assessments found on SpringBoard digital which assess students’ knowledge and skills of activities within the curriculum. Teachers can also select which quizzes to assign over the span of a unit based on student needs.

Each unit follows the same format including icons, symbols, and activity titles/categories. The four units begin with explicit goals, learning targets, and a preview of the activity. Each activity also concludes with a check for understanding to assess students’ understanding of the activity. As the activity progresses, directions and tasks are labeled and tasks for student engagement with content are clearly indicated. Visuals are accompanied by captions and/or are related to the content of the readings. Reoccuring strategies and activities are assigned specific symbols. For example, an enlarged V is provided for vocabulary which appears each time students are given new vocabulary or engaging in vocabulary-related tasks. Additional reference aids include consistent use of visual prompts to analyze topics/themes, highlighted vocabulary, numbered paragraphs, enlarged titles of text and relevant subtitles.

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 11 meet the criteria that materials include publisher-produced alignment documentation of the standards addressed by specific questions, tasks, and assessment items.

In the Teacher Resources section of the Digital Dashboard, the materials provide information about standards alignment for each activity across all four units. This document details the activity number, title, focus standards, and additional standards. Information on standard alignment can also be found in the Assessments section of the Dashboard; the standards are aligned to the overall assessment but not individual questions on the assessments. Teachers generate standards-based progress reports for their students through the Progress Reports section of the Dashboard. Additionally, the Teacher Wrap in the eBook provides linked standards for each activity, and the Correlations Viewer in the eBook shows page numbers for aligned content for each standard.

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 11 meet the criteria that materials contain a teacher's edition with ample and useful annotations and suggestions on presenting the content in the student edition and in the ancillary materials. Where applicable, materials include teacher guidance for the use of embedded technology to support and enhance student learning.

The materials for each grade level provide an ELA Standards Correlation document and incorporate introductory content, including a Table of Contents and an introduction to the scope of the materials. The introduction explains the materials’ design, approach, and vision. Also included is a breakdown of the available components of the Teacher Edition: Planning the Unit, Instructional Guidance, Differentiation, Integrated Assessments, and Workshops (Language, Close Reading, and Writing). The introduction also explains the additional tools—SpringBoard Digital, Zinc Reading Labs, and Turnitin Revision Assistant—for users who have digital access.

Instructional materials include systematic annotations and suggestions on presentation of the content starting in the opening pages and continuing through the ancillary materials. The start of each unit includes “Planning the Unit” to give teachers an overview and point out areas where teachers may want to use ancillary materials to enrich or scaffold the unit. This section includes: context, suggested materials, instructional sequence, connections to Advanced Placement (AP)/Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), Unpack Embedded Instructions, Cognate Directory for ELL students whose original language is Spanish, Activities at a Glance chart, Unit Resources, Independent Reading suggestions, Instructional Pathways for embedding ancillary materials in language and foundational skills, and Flexible Pathways for adding writing and close reading units within the unit.

In each activity, the Teacher Wrap sidebar provides the addressed standards, pacing recommendations, step by step teaching guidance, scaffolding for text-based questions, suggestions for leveled differentiated instruction, assessment guidance and ways to adapt the assessment. Additional call-out boxes provide “teacher to teacher” advice for some activities, text complexity information, and additional writing and language standards being taught in the unit. Additionally, teacher materials include a resources section at the back of each grade level, including documents for organizing independent reading, a breakdown of learning strategies, a variety of graphic organizers, an English-Spanish glossary, an index of skills, and an index of authors and titles.

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 11 meet the criteria that materials contain a teacher's edition that contains full, adult-level explanations and examples of the more advanced literacy concepts so that teachers can improve their own knowledge of the subject, as necessary.

The Teacher Edition integrates directions, procedures and additional information designed to extend teacher knowledge of instructional content and pedagogy. The opening pages for each unit provide rationales for skills taught throughout units. The closing pages for each grade level provide the definition and purpose of the Learning Strategies used across the year. The Teacher Wrap sidebar, present throughout units and activities, provides professional support such as Teacher to Teacher recommendations and Leveled Differentiated Instruction that suggests implementation moves to adjust and extend lessons. The Teacher Wrap also provides explicit directions and explanations for implementing activities as well as recommended answers and additional explanations for literary concepts and tasks.

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 11 meet the criteria that materials contain a teacher’s edition that explains the role of the specific English Language Arts (ELA)/literacy standards in the context of the overall curriculum.

The materials are consistently aligned to the College and Career Readiness Standards along with Advanced Placement (AP) coursework. The materials are “Based on the Understanding by Design model” and teach “students the skills and knowledge that matter most to meet AP and college and career readiness standards.” The English Language Arts Pathway contains “student-centered activities that gradually develop the skills and knowledge needed for the Embedded Assessments and are aligned to grade-level standards.” Each Activity begins with standards-aligned learning targets and provides the lesson focus standards. Materials also include standards-aligned unit assessments for each half unit. Lessons occasionally make connections to social studies and and/or health education through the Gaining Perspectives sections. The Planning the Unit section at the beginning of each unit lists the AP and SAT connections that will be made in the upcoming unit. The materials also include an ELA Standards Correlation chart that outlines each standard addressed in the curriculum and where in the curriculum the standard is addressed. The digital version provides links to standards built into lessons and a standards correlation document that links standards to specific activities.

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 11 meet the criteria that materials contain explanations of the instructional approaches of the program and identification of the research based strategies.

The introductory pages for each grade level describe the instructional design of the materials and the authors’ approach to the different components of instruction. The materials are based on the Understanding by Design Model, a widely known approach to learning by Wiggins and McTighe that focuses on understanding the assessment at the end of instruction to see how the learning students need to be successful on the assessment should build. The program is also designed through a “Shared Instructional Vision” between SpringBoard and AP. This model emphasises close observation and analysis, higher-order questioning, evidence-based writing, and academic conversations. SpringBoard also aligned the materials with the knowledge and skills needed for the evidence-based reading and writing sections of the SAT assessments.

The materials are research-based, classroom tested, and created by classroom practitioners. The introductory pages includes the following statement: “SpringBoard’s lesson design also takes into account the work of the American Institutes for Research in its focus on students moving through multiple levels of cognitive engagement: progressing fluidly from comprehension and understanding, to analysis, and ultimately to synthesis and the creation of new content. Each lesson is designed to allow for the type of facilitation and flexibility referenced by Charlotte Danielson in her work on teacher instruction. We have also integrated the research of Marzano and Pickering by building students’ background knowledge in the area of academic vocabulary development. Finally, SpringBoard is directly informed by Robyn Jackson’s work on rigorous instruction. As Jackson suggests, our content requires students to be ‘active, not passive,’ and our units feature activities that stress ‘implicit meaning, ambiguity, layers, and complexity.’

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 11 meet the criteria that materials regularly and systematically offer assessment opportunities that genuinely measure student progress.

Assessment is a key part of the design of SpringBoard’s curriculum. The materials offer frequent opportunities for formative and summative measurements of student performance. Each unit includes two Embedded Assessments, which summatively measure students’ performance on key concepts. These assessments include scoring guides and student examples for teachers and students alike to use during the process. Each unit also includes many types of formative checkpoints that allow students to practice what they are learning, and for teachers to assess student progress. These tasks include Making Observations questions, Returning to the Text Questions, Check Your Understanding Tasks, Focus on the Sentence Tasks, Graphic Organizers, Writing Prompts, and Reflection Questions. The digital version of the materials also includes multiple-choice quizzes for each activity and unit assessments that are aligned to the standards in each half-unit.

The units are designed around the same format: plan, teach, assess, and adapt. Materials offer teacher guidance for assessment. In the Teacher Wrap, the Assess section explains the opportunities for assessment in the unit. Materials also provide the connection between the formative assessments and the two Embedded Assessments and the overview of the skills being assessed.

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 11 meet the criteria that assessments clearly denote which standards are being emphasized.

The materials include an ELA Standards Correlation document that lists individual standards and their corresponding tasks, questions, and assessments in the units. The document contains links to these specific locations in the online version of the materials. The digital materials contain icons with drop down boxes that indicate the standards for the activities. For the print materials, the Common Core College and Career Readiness Standards that correspond to the Embedded Assessments are listed at the bottom of the page for each assessment. The standards mentioned in Scaffolding the Text-Dependent Questions boxes are linked to formative assessments.

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 11 meet the criteria that materials should include routines and guidance that point out opportunities to monitor student progress.

The materials are organized into four units of study that are broken down into a systematic series of activities—lessons built around specific texts or tasks. Each activity follows a similar structure and routine including read the learning targets, follow the directions for annotations in the As You Read section, complete the first read, Make Observations about the text, Return to the Text to answer text-dependent questions, and Work from the Text by analyzing certain aspects of the text. Follow-up tasks also include Focusing on the Sentence, Language and Writer’s Craft, and/or a final Checking your Understanding. The Teacher Wrap directions follow a Plan, Teach, Assess, and Adapt format and provide teachers with suggestions for how to monitor student comprehension and progress toward the Embedded Assessments.

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 11 meet the criteria that materials provide teachers with strategies for meeting the needs of a range of learners so the content is accessible to all learners and supports them in meeting or exceeding the grade-level standards.

The Planning the Unit section at the beginning of each unit provides information on differentiation so that teachers can personalize instruction through customizable pathways such as the English Language Arts Pathway, Language Development Pathway, and a Flexible Pathway. This allows teachers to plan the unit in the best way in response to a range of learners including English Language Learners (ELL), struggling or below grade level readers, and above grade level readers. This section also includes Unit Resources at a Glance, which offers English language development support, and foundational language skills support. Throughout the Activities and lessons, teachers encounter Leveled Differentiated Instruction features that provide scaffolding for challenging tasks. The differentiation model includes six levels, and the first four—Beginning, Developing, Expanding, and Bridging—correspond to World-class Instructional Design and Assessment (WIDA) level descriptors. The next level is listed as Support and is recommended for students who may not be English language learners but still need support to perform at grade level. The last category is Extend and provides opportunities for students to further challenge themselves. Teacher to Teacher boxes also provide suggestions from veteran classroom teachers on how to enhance, support, differentiate, and extend lessons and activities. The Resources section at each grade level also contains a variety of graphic organizers teachers can use to supplement and scaffold instruction.

Some examples are as follows:

• In Unit 1, The American Dream, Planning the Unit provides teachers with strategies for non-English speakers or those who are at the beginning level of vocabulary development. For example, “Consider giving students who are at an early stage of English language development the option of reading a text in their home language.” Teacher to Teacher suggestions in the Teacher Wrap include additional guidance for teachers. “To build oral fluency, students could provide a quick book talk about their selected texts.”
• In Unit 3, American Forums: The Marketplace of Ideas, The Leveled Differentiated Instruction located in the Teacher Wrap for Activity 3.2 contains these accommodations:
• Beginning: Distribute the Unknown Word Solver graphic organizer. Model using the organizer with the word peaceably: The root is peace, which is the opposite of violence, and the suffix -ably means “done in a certain way.” The word peaceably must mean “to do something without violence.” Work through the rest of the terms as a group.
• Developing: Have small groups work through the list using the Unknown Word Solver graphic organizer.
• Expanding: Distribute the Roots and Affixes Brainstorm graphic organizer and allow students to collaborate to dissect the terms.
• Bridging: Give students copies of the Roots and Affixes Brainstorm graphic organizer and encourage them to use this handout while reading Krimsky’s text and subsequent texts.

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 11 meet the criteria that materials regularly provide all students, including those who read, write, speak, or listen below grade level, or in a language other than English, with extensive opportunities to work with grade level text and meet or exceed grade-level standards.

The Planning the Unit section includes a Spanish cognate dictionary to encourage students to notice the connections between their primary language and English to help them develop academic vocabulary more quickly. For English language learners whose primary language is not Spanish, teachers are encouraged to “ consider using an online translator or dictionary to support comprehension of vocabulary terms.” The Activities at a Glance feature also provides teachers with guidance to determine which activity includes ELL support with the use of icons. Throughout the activities in each unit, teachers encounter Leveled Differentiated Instruction features that provide scaffolding for challenging tasks. There are six levels to this differentiation model, and the first four—Beginning, Developing, Expanding, and Bridging—correspond to World-class Instructional Design and Assessment (WIDA) level descriptors. The next level is listed as Support and is recommended for students who may not be English language learners but still need support to perform at grade level. The suggested texts for independent reading include Spanish titles. The Glossary at the end of each grade level includes Spanish entries alongside the English ones. Because teachers have the flexibility to create different pathways through the unit that relate to students’ needs, those who are learning the English Language or who need additional support in meeting grade-level standards have many opportunities to practice their skills through Language Workshops and Foundational Skills Workshops.

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 11 meet the criteria that materials regularly include extensions and/or more advanced opportunities for students who read, write, speak, or listen above grade level.

Each unit includes an overview of a “flexible pathway” to allow teachers to make choices from the supplementary materials to meet the learning needs of students. Suggestions for Leveled Differentiated Instruction are built into the Teacher Wrap within each unit. One of the support levels is Extend and is designed to provide ways “to stretch students who are ready for a challenge.” The teaching model provided in the Teacher Wrap follows a Plan, Teach, Assess, and Adapt structure, and often in the Adapt portion, there are suggestions for ways in which teachers can engage their students in a greater challenge. The Flexible novel units also allow for extension opportunities.

Some examples are as follows:

• In Unit 1, The American Dream, the Extend recommendation for Activity 1.6 is for students working on their analysis of rhetorical devices in a text. Materials prompt teachers: “Have student pairs share their completed responses. For which types of rhetorical devices did they have similar examples, and for which ones did they have different responses? How did their appraisals of the effects of the rhetorical devices differ?”
• In Unit 3, American Forums: The Marketplace of Ideas, during Activity 3.19, the materials provide an Extend option when students are discussing how sentence structure makes satire humorous: “Explain that cumulative or loose sentences are a popular tool for humor and satire writers such as Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift. Have students explore this technique by researching it in Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Have them present their findings and additional examples from literature to the class.”

The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 11 meet the criteria that materials provide opportunities for teachers to use a variety of grouping strategies.

The materials provide frequent opportunities for students to learn, practice, and perform in a variety of grouping configurations, and teachers use these formats to accentuate their instruction. Students often work in pairs and small groups and take part in whole-class activities as well. These groupings are often used in sequence as a strategy for enhancing learning. When students conduct a first read of a text, they do it in a variety of groupings. The materials provide teachers with speaking and listening strategies that encourage collaboration, including but not limited to the definition and purpose of debates, role-playing, literature circles, and Socratic seminars. In the Teach step of the Plan, Teach, Assess, Adapt teaching model, teachers learn how to effectively use grouping strategies. The supplemental Close Reading Workshops are also useful in a variety of student groupings; however, it is important to note that these workshops are not a part of the core curriculum and require additional time and planning.

The following are examples of groupings that occur frequently across all four units:

• In Unit 1, The American Dream, students read the poem “I, Too, Sing America” by Julia Alvarez during Activity 1.11. For the First Read, the teacher conducts a shared reading, pausing periodically to check student comprehension. At the conclusion of the shared reading, the teacher guides a whole class discussion of the Making Observations questions. The Teacher Wrap suggests that the teacher adjust the reading mode based on his/her/their observations of the first readings such as Echo reading or other groupings. Students then work in small groups to reread the text and answer the Returning to the Text questions. They then work individually on the Working from the Text task and Check Your Understanding task. Finally, they work in pairs as they develop their essays for the writing prompt.
• In Unit 2, The Power of Persuasion, while preparing to read The Crucible by Arthur Miller during Activity 2.2, students “study primary source documents to build their knowledge of the historical context of the play.” During the activity, the materials offer the following guidance for grouping students to allow them to discuss their KWL charts: “Divide the class into four new groups. Assign each group one aspect of the setting: social, economic, political, religion. Once the groups are formed, have them complete student steps 22, 23, and 24.”