Secondary Language Arts Adoption

Inquiry By Design changes expectations about what all children are capable of achieving in reading and writing—including children who struggle academically or simply don’t engage in more traditional language arts classes. The inquiry-based approach combined with scaffolded tasks and repeating cycles of work provides many students with their first true sense of accomplishment in reading and writing

Children don’t grow minds and hearts in a room by themselves. They need to interact with other ideas, be pushed to explain and explore, to challenge their own ideas and others. Inquiry By Design creates language and literacy classes that are communities of active learners who, individually and together, explore content-rich challenging texts through authentic writing tasks and respectful, student-driven conversation.

The work begins with complex, engaging, idea-rich texts, extends through task sequences that scaffold, support and stretch practice, and features regular step-back moments informed by a practice of assessment that is actionable and personalized for each student. All this is nestled inside a language-rich environment that has students reading, writing, and talking often and daily.

• Study mythology and read Rick Riordan’s "The Lightning Thief," along with informational texts about the elements of mythology and famous Greek myths. Students use what they learn to create their own hero’s journey. 
• Consider how people formulate and use rules to live by. They read "Bud, Not Buddy", a story about a young run-away who creates his own rules to live by, and speeches by Barack Obama and Steve Jobs. 
• Read Laurence Yep’s "Dragonwings," and excerpts of Yep’s biography to determine how culture and experiences shape authors’ writings. They read informational accounts of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco and write a newspaper article about life for Chinese immigrants in San Francisco. 
• Consider the benefits and drawbacks of the use of DDT as they read the novel "Frightful’s Mountain" and informational texts by famous environmentalist like Rachel Carson. 

• Explore the experiences of the people in South Sudan during the second Sudanese War in the novel "A Long Walk to Water." Students focus on one key theme: how individuals survive in challenging environments. The novel is paired with informational texts about Sudan. 
• Analyze how people, settings, and events interact in literary and informational texts. Students read "Lyddie" and learn about César Chávez as they consider the role that workers, the government and consumers play in improving working conditions. 
• Focus on the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, with attention to understanding how he uses language in powerful ways and how he tells his story in order to serve his purpose of working to abolish slavery. 
• Explore adolescent brain development and the effects of screen time on the brain. Students read informational texts to build knowledge about adolescent brain development and research the issue of screen time and how it may affect teenagers. 

•  Study the refugee experience of fleeing and then finding home with the novel "Inside Out and Back Again" about a Vietnamese girl whose family flees during the fall of Saigon. They also read informational text to learn more about the history of Vietnam. 
• Study the theme of taking a stand and read speeches by people like Shirley Chisholm, Sojourner Truth, and Lyndon Johnson. They read "To Kill a Mockingbird" and engage in the character study of Atticus as he willingly takes a stand for others. 
• Read the young adult novel "Unbroken," the story of an American POW in a Japanese camp alongside a biographical account and informational text about Japanese internment during World War II. 
• Explore food production in the United states as they read "The Omnivore’s Dilemma." They engage in a research project in which they investigate the consequences of each of the food chains. 

• Read short stories, poems, and plays and analyze how different authors develop themes in the works of authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Karen Russell, and Rainer Maria Rilke. 
• Read "Oedipus the King" and informational texts to explore the concepts of fate, guilt, hubris, agency, and tragedy. 
• Learn about Temple Grandin’s work "Animals in Transition" and focus on animal intelligence. Students use what they discover to conduct their own research. 
• Explore the history of the global sugar trade in Sugar Changed the World and develop their argument writing skills as they compare it to modern day fashion and food factories. 

• Analyze the characters and themes of memoirs, novels, and classic poetry by Christopher Marlow, William Carlos Williams and Sir. Walter Raleigh and in contemporary novels such as "The Joy Club" and "Friday Night Lights." 
• Examine efforts to ensure equal rights for all while learning about argumentative rhetoric and perspective through the work of poets, activists, and scholars such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Julia Alvarez, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel Prize laureate. 
• Investigate medical ethics and equity in health care, in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" and use their reading to launch independent research. 
• Consider the concepts of tragedy, leadership, morality, and chaos through the work of E.B. White, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Shakespeare. 

• Consider the concepts of voice and who gets to tell a story through works by authors like Robert Browning, Shakespeare, and Virginia Woolf. 
• Explore the ideas of prejudice and oppression, and identify formation as they study works by figures and writers such as W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Audre Lorde. 
• Learn about genocide, resilience, compassion, and what we owe to one another. Students read Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize lecture as a foundation to begin their own research. 
• Read works by writers like Tim O’Brien and Louise Erdrich as mentor texts to study, develop, and write their own narratives. 

• Consider ideas like equity, identity, and oppression while examining the narrative techniques in texts such as "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" and “Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit.” 
• Grapple with the relationship between the individual and the state as they read texts by William Shakespeare and Thoreau. 
• Explore the drivers of social success or collapse through the work of Jared Diamond’s "Guns, Germs and Steel" before embarking on their own research. 
• Analyze the concepts of identity as they extend their narrative writing skills with texts like “The Overcoat,” "The Namesake," and "A Streetcar Named Desire."