Teacher: Dedric Starks Course: World History
Room: 204 Email: [email protected]
In 2014, the Shelby County Schools Board of Education adopted a set of ambitious, yet attainable goals for school and student performance. The District is committed to these goals, as further described in our strategic plan, Destination 2025. Destination 2025 establishes common goals and expectations for student learning across schools and are the underpinning for the development of the 7th Grade World History & Geography curriculum framework.
In order to achieve these ambitious goals, we must collectively work to provide our students with high-quality and College and Career Ready standards-aligned instruction.
This document presents a framework for organizing instruction around the Tennessee State Standards for 7th Grade World History & Geography so that every student is able to meet or exceed their age specific requirements for college and career readiness.
Our collective goal is to ensure our students graduate ready for college and career. This will require a comprehensive, integrated approach to literacy instruction that ensures that students become college and career ready readers, writers, and communicators. Students must employ essential literacy strategies that explicitly demonstrate the application of reading, writing, and thinking strategies to support learning in social studies.
To reach our collective student achievement goals, Lowrance Middle School has moved to a 1 hour 50 minute block for all core classes. Students will attend each core class three times a week, twice in the block and once in a 55-minute class period.
Instructional practices will be aligned with the three College and Career Ready shifts in instruction for Literacy: (1) regular practice with complex text and its academic language, (2) reading, writing, and speaking grounded in evidence from text, and (3) building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction.
Every student is expected to actively participate in the learning process, which will cover an array of activities that will include whole group instruction, small group activities, audio-visual assignments and student presentations.
All students will be taught the proper way to outline the text and how to apply various thinking maps (graphic organizers) to specific reading assignments. It is the student’s responsibility to organize his or her notes summary within the outline framework and to apply the correct thinking map to a selected text section. Although cooperative activities will be used, individual learning will be my primary focus.
Materials/Supplies Needed:
3-ring binder or notebook, and pen
Classroom Expectations:
Students are expected to:
- Follow the directions given by the teacher.
- Bring required materials to class daily.
- Respect all individuals within the class.
- Be prepared to participate.
Grading:
10% Homework
25% Participation (Do Know/Bell-ringer Activity, Closure activity, Brain Pop, CNN 10, Channel One)
40% Classwork (Current Events, Video Quizzes, Class/Lesson Activities)
25% Assessments (Chapter Tests, Section Quizzes)