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Christine Cziko's Freshman English Class, Thurgood Marshall High School
San Francisco, CA
School Type: Public
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School Setting: Urban
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Level: High
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School Design: Traditional
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Content Presented By:
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Center for Resource Management (CRM)
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The Education Alliance at Brown University
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Summary
The practice: Creating Responsive Classrooms
- Urban school with emphasis on college preparation
- 40% of students with GPAs of 2.0 or below at start of program
- High failure rate attributable to low reading comprehension levels in content areas
- 10-unit, yearlong course for all incoming freshmen that looked for ways to make it "cool" to unlock difficult text
- Reading modeling/apprenticeship where comprehension is something that can be learned -- not a mystery that you "get" or "don't get"
- Sustained Silent Reading that asked students to record what they learned about themselves as readers
At the Thurgood Marshall School, the Academic Literacy course began as a 10-unit, year-long course for all freshmen in Fall 1996. At that time, many students were failing, and reading comprehension was considered part of the problem. Offered through the Strategic Literacy Initiative, a research and professional development effort based in San Francisco, the course builds students' awareness of reading purposes and processes. They are prompted to think about their own relationships to reading, reflecting on questions such as "What strategies do I use as I read?" They make use of Silent Sustained Reading and are asked to reflect on discoveries about themselves as readers. After seven months of instruction students at Thurgood Marshall on average increased their reading comprehension by two grade levels.
This site also exemplifies the following practice(s):
- Making Connections to Students' Lives
- Having Students Interact with Each Other and with Text
- Roles of the Teacher
- Reading and Writing
- Speaking and Listening
- An Emphasis on Thinking
- Creating a Student-Centered Classroom
- Vocabulary Development
- Understanding Text Structures
- Recognizing and Analyzing Discourse Features
- Supporting the English classroom through literacy development
- Supporting the social studies classroom through literacy development
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