The teacher needs to be more than master of his or her disciplinary knowledge, he or she also needs to be able to apply these concepts in the discipline and demonstrate how these central concepts apply to issues across and outside of the discipline. The application of disciplinary ways of knowing to the discipline and to interdisciplinary and real world problems makes the discipline more relevant to students.
For English, this standard means that teachers need to find ways to apply the core skills of English both inside and outside of the discipline. Skills like analysis and evaluation are central to the discipline of English and to thinking and reasoning beyond the discipline. In my English 10 class at Blacksburg High School, students read and annotated articles from National Geographic, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other periodicals. This activity demonstrated the applicability of English analytical skills to life beyond the school. Here is a link to the New York Times lesson plan similar to the one that I used to support students in annotation: Annotating Articles.
Another application of this standard I have used in my teaching is the application of English skills to students’ personal life stories. Elevating their life stories to the “product” for English skills gives their stories significance and builds lifelong writing skills. As an exercise for one of my classes at Hollins, I worked with middle school students to create a personal history related to one aspect of their lives. This was a powerful lesson, as these students had often been asked to think of history, but never of their own as valuable. Here is one student’s “playground history”: My Personal History.
Another way in which I address this standard is through the implementation of differentiation tickets to achieve a learning outcome. The “Ticket” differentiation strategy offers students a choice of tasks they can complete to fulfill the assignment, allowing students to work in preferred or unconventional modes. Here is an example of a “ticket” assignment based on Poe’s story “A Cask of Amontillado”: AmontilladoTicketApplication.
