50 Essential Lessons

Tools and Techniques for Teaching English Language Arts

By Jim Burke, Burlingame High School, California

Jim Burke’s lessons focus on core cognitive and personal skills—reading, writing, speaking and listening, taking notes, taking tests, and managing oneself—that are required in school, on state tests and college entrance exams, and in life.

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ISBN 978-0-325-00857-8 / 0-325-00857-4 / SKU E00857
2006 / 416pp / Bundle
Grade Level: 9th-12th

Topic: Curricular Resources

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Full Description

50 Essential Lessons is the result of the lessons Jim Burke learned while asking himself how to teach his students the skills they needed to succeed in school and in the larger world. Anchored in standards shared by a range of national literacy documents, these lessons focus on the core cognitive and personal skills—reading, writing, speaking and listening, taking notes, taking tests, and managing oneself—required on state tests and college entrance exams. Whether used to enhance your English Language Arts curriculum or as a stand-alone resource, 50 Essential Lessons will help you teach your students the academic essentials.

Components:

50 Essential Lessons (book of lessons) presents 50 standards-based lessons organized around the cognitive and personal skills students need for success in school and beyond.
Tools and Texts for 50 Essential Lessons provides a bank of teaching tools and lesson-related readings in a clear, reproducible format.
Tools for 50 Essential Lessons CD–ROM organizes the charts, forms, and other teaching tools in an electronic format that is easy to scan and print.

Key Features

Lesson preview notes situate the lesson into your English Language Arts curriculum and provide the information needed to jump in and get started.
The Teach section of each lesson offers Jim’s teaching demonstration, chronicling his teaching moves and language in a model lesson.
The Assess and Extend section of each lesson lists strategies for reinforcing or extending student learning and plans to help you tailor the lesson to the needs of your particular students.

Additional Resource Information

(click any section below to continue reading)

Samples

Try an Essential Lesson with your own class.

The following sample pages provide a complete lesson and its related teaching resources.

A Lesson from 50 Essential Lessons
50 Essential Lessons presents 50 standards-based lessonsized around the cognitive and personal skills students need for success in school and beyond. The lesson sampled here is Lesson 5, “Draw Conclusions from What You Read: Effective readers draw conclusions about the meaning and purpose of what they read.

Lesson 5: Draw Conclusions from What You Read

Annotated Walkthrough of Lesson 5

Tools for 50 Essential Lessons
90+ teaching tools support the essential lessons and scaffold strategy use with multiple genres and texts of varying lengths across the curriculum. These tools are provided in a reproducible format in Tools and Texts for 50 Essential Lessons. Tools for 50 Essential Lessons CD-ROM provides these same tools in an electronic format that is easy to review and print out. The following tools are referenced in Lesson 5: Draw Conclusions from What You Read.

Main Idea Organizer

Drawing Conclusions Organizer

Texts for 50 Essential Lessons
Jim’s model lessons draw on texts that are either common to English classrooms or are real-world readings that Jim uses in his class. These core resources are provided in a reproducible format in Tool and Texts for 50 Essential Lessons. The following real-world reading is referenced in Lesson 5: Draw Conclusions from What You Read.

Messages from the Heart

Writing Masters: Essential Lessons for Any Classroom

The 50 Essential Lessons are organized into six standards-based strands: reading, writing, speaking and listening, taking notes, taking tests, and managing oneself.

Reading
1. Make connections
2. Use a reading process
3. Develop a purpose question
4. Identify main ideas and supporting details
5. Draw conclusions from what you read
6. Make inferences about deeper meanings
7. Analyze the author's argument
8. Examine the author's purpose
9. Visualize what you read
10. Examine multiple perspectives
11. Examine the structure of a text
12. Ask questions about what you read
13. Use the language of literary analysis
14. Analyze character development
15. Analyze the author's style
Writing
1. Write to describe
2. Write to define
3. Write to inform
4. Develop a topic
5. Begin an essay
6. Craft an effective argument
7. Summarize
8. Write an effective paragraph
9. Paraphrase
10. Compare and contrast
11. Improve academic writing
12. Synthesize multiple sources
13. Write a response to literature
14. Write about a theme
15. Write an effective introduction
Speaking and Listening
1. Contribute to class discussion
2. Participate in small group discussion
3. Prepare a speech
4. Make an effective presentation
5. Listen and respond to speakers
Taking Notes
1. Take notes from expository prose
2. Take notes from lectures
3. Take notes from literature
4. Take notes from textbooks
5. Take notes from videos
Taking Tests
1. Take multiple-choice tests
2. Write likely test questions
3. Learn content for a test
4. Take essay tests
5. Analyze sample essays
Managing Oneself
1. Use a planner
2. Set goals and plan to reach them
3. Study traits of successful people
4. Manage your attention
5. Monitor your academic performance