A Middle-School Curriculum Unit on Persuasion

In this Education Week article, Lesli Maxwell reports on the rollout of a five-lesson curriculum unit titled “Persuasion Across Time and Space.” Written by a Stanford University team led by Kenji Hakuta, the unit is designed for grade 7-8 classrooms with a mix of native-language and ELL students and incorporates Common-Core ELA standards. Here is the core content in each lesson:

• Lesson 1 – Advertising in the Contemporary World: An Introduction to Persuasive texts; this lesson features a Canadian TV spot, “Can You Live With Dirty Water?”
• Lesson 2 – Persuasion in Historical Context: Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
• Lesson 3 – Ethos, Logos, and Pathos in Civil Rights Movement Speeches: Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Robert Kennedy’s “On the Death of Martin Luther King” speech, and George Wallace’s “The Civil Rights Movement: Fraud, Sham, and Hoax” speech
• Lesson 4 – Persuasion As Text: Organizational, Grammatical, and Lexical Moves: Barbara Jordan’s “All Together Now” speech
• Lesson 5 – Putting It Together: Analyzing and Producing Persuasive Text; Severn Suzuki’s “The Girl Who Silenced the World for Five Minutes” speech (by a Canadian 11-year-old).

This unit is available at http://ell.stanford.edu/teaching_resources/ela 

“Model Common-Core Unit Piloted for ELL Teachers” by Lesli Maxwell in Education Week, Jan. 16, 2013 (Vol. 32, #17, p. 1, 15), http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/01/16/17ellstanford_ep.h32.html

From the Marshall Memo #469