I talk a lot about “big ideas.” What ideas are priorities in your state standards? How is that reflected in the curriculum/units/lessons/activities delivered on a daily basis in your classroom? And why is it important at all to consider this?

So I was wondering–if I had to sum up what it was exactly that any student of mine could be expected to learn after sitting in my classroom for an entire school year, what would it be? If I had to sell my English-Language Arts class–to both writers of legally-binding state standards, as well as parents and administrators, what would I claim to teach students, and then what could I point to that would reasonably assure them of a reasonable chance to master said learning?

I keep changing the wording here, being more or less wordy, adding or removing elements that I find, that moment, critical or not, but roughly this is what I keep coming up with:

People use a variety of tools to communicate with specific audiences for specific reasons.

Of course, the “tools” are the nuts and bolts of ELA skills and concepts: tone, diction and general syntax; persuasion and propaganda; structural elements, both obvious and subtle, and so on. And notice I didn’t say “Authors use a variety of tools….” This is an important distinction, as the idea of only studying master writers, while wonderful in doses, cannot be your only resource, because you are not trying to create master writers. Your classroom is full of future mechanics, dancers, lawyers, artists, UPS drivers, singers, and so on, and while it’d be great if they all could write masterfully–and hopefully they will–it is not the goal of your state standards, no would it be for many students. Understanding the world around them–building “intra- and inter-personal literacy”–is certainly acceptable however, and seems to be a far more reasonable “distilling” of a comprehensive ELA framework.

This also makes the connection to understanding as a goal of your curriculum far more natural, as it sets students up well to be able to transfer the ideas and skills that they receive in your classroom in the real world. So, on a scale, how to write trumps who wrote what, and *why* to write trumps them both.

There is also implied all of the core ELA ideas: author purpose, audience awareness, theme, thesis, general and specific elements of language, and so on, but this idea is the metaphorical umbrella that I should then expect that all of my units would not only “fit” beneath, but those units should be expected to individually somehow address that overarching concept, and collectively prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt to any learner that completes all of the coursework.

I need to go review some older units, as well as some local and national standards, and see how naturally they all align with this statement, and then go back and revise it as necessary, but as of right now, Friday, June 26th at 5:37 p.m., this is what I’m thinking.

I’ll go into how exactly this “revelation” is useful next. Until these overarching ideas are precisely executed on a basic, simple scale within curriculum however, they simply remain impotent rhetoric.