Holly+Jarjosa

School Violence: Writing for Change Unit Plan

Violence is an extremely prevalent threat to our society today, especially to our youth. Our media glamorizes it. Sometimes, it's even rewarded. Children as young as two or three are now being exposed to the dangers of violence on a daily basis and are mimicking the actions or words of violent figures in their lives. It's crucial that we allow students to be exposed to this issue in a safe classroom environment where they are free to understand the seriousness of violence, how it's effecting our youth and how they can make a difference. Bullying, media and violence and environment are three of the main points that I will touch on during this unit plan in helping students understand the causes and effects of school violence.

In terms of writing, I centered my unit plan around helping students to learn the most prevalent forms of writing that we use in our everyday lives. Each week, students will be using a different writing technique in order to learn about school violence. The first week will focus on persuasive writing techniques (research based papers, works cited pages, etc.). The second week will focus on creative writing (poetry, play writing, fiction writing, etc.). The third week will focus on real life writing (letter writing, newspaper headlines, directions, etc.). The last week will focus on the multi-genre projects, which the students will be working on throughout the entire unit.

I anticipate using real life examples, media footage and contemporary literature to allow my students to understand the effects that school violence can have on their lives and on the lives of the people around them. The final project will be a multi-genre presentation done by each individual student at the end of the unit. This multi-genre project will help student's to understand the negativity of school violence and will help them understand school violence from a multitude of different angles.

My four week long unit plan will be based off of a daily 7-period class schedule, with each class lasting 50 minutes. This unit plan is created for a junior year English class in a suburban school setting with 20-25 students. My unit plan will focus on establishing the following objectives:


 * Gain strong familiarity with the issue of school violence.
 * Become familiar with the research surrounding the correlation between school violence and our three main points.
 * Develop argumentative skills, backed up by research based knowledge.
 * Demonstrate how to use writing as a way to persuade others.
 * Give and cite specific examples of violence in the media and how it can desensitize it's viewers to repercussions of violence.
 * Gain awareness of the different types of violence that are exposed to youth daily.
 * Gain understanding of their own reactions to various types of violence.
 * Gain understanding of the need to limit the amount of violence viewed by youth.

__**Writing assignments:**__ Each student will turn in one writing assignment per week, totaling up to four main writing assignments throughout the entire unit. However, the students will be doing plenty of free writing during their time in class, and will be writing at least once a day.


 * Week One Writing Assignment:** Persuasive Writing Paper

The persuasive writing paper will utilize the techniques we learned in class during our violence in the media lessons. Students will use research from books, newspaper articles, scholarly articles, journals and other reputable forms of writing in order to establish validity in their persuasive argument. Students will become familiar with different resources that will help them research their argument. The paper must be based off of our weekly lesson plan, violence in the media, and have a clearly stated opinion on the topic within the first paragraph. The following body paragraphs must contain valid research to support their argument. I will provide them with a prompt to work off of for this paper.


 * Week Two Writing Assignment:** Piece of Choice

Students will choose one of the pieces that they composed within that week to turn in. Along with their piece of writing, they will provide me with a one page paper explaining why they chose to turn in that particular piece and why they felt it was their most effective writing from that week. Students will be choosing from a variety of creative writing prompts they explored that week, ranging from poems and songs lyrics to scripts and fictional stories.


 * Week Three Writing Assignment:** Letter to the School Board

Students will compose a letter to the editor of their school board addressing some of their concerns about the correlation between environment and school violence. This letter will provide the school board with ideas to implement in schools in order to deal with the issue of school violence. They will utilize the knowledge they gain throughout the unit to complete this letter, which much include both the use of opinion and research backed facts.


 * Week Four Writing Assignment:** Multi-genre project

Students will present multi-genre projects to the class in the last week of the unit, which will address the negative effects of school violence and how they can write to prevent it. A multi-genre project will provide student's with the opportunity to see school violence from all different angles and in all different forms. This multi-genre project can address any of the topics that we discuss during our unit (bullying, environment, media, gangs, cartoon violence, etc.) but the connecting idea for all the genres must be the broader topic of school violence. Students can use any type of writing genre that they choose and will compose a project including at least 5 different genres of writing.


 * Other Assignments:** I will be having students create different pieces of writing throughout this unit. Diary entries, lists, narrative and play writing only a select number of the pieces of writing I will have them do. They will also be putting together a writing portfolio on the last Tuesday of our unit, which will help them see physical representation of all their writing.

__**Four Week Unit Plan: Individual Lesson Plans**__ **Week One: The Media**

"A lot of people in the movie industry tend to run and hide from it like ostriches. Movie industry people are definitely in denial right now, but you do become desensitized to violence when you see it on the screen so often. Let's face it, violence exists for one reason in movies, and that's to get an effect, create an emotion, sell tickets." - Madeleine Stowe, Actress


 * Monday: Syllabus day.** Introduce unit to students. Introduce projects, papers, and any other assignments they will work on during the course of this unit. Discuss details of the Multi-Genre project that is due at the end of the unit. Permission slips distributed to students to be given to their parents for certain YouTube videos shown in class.


 * Tuesday: Introduce persuasive writing techniques.** Present my own research and stats on the correlation between violence and the media. Go over persuasive writing checklist. Assign and go over persuasive writing essay prompt.


 * Wednesday: Read around.** Ten minute clip from "Elephant". Write down thoughts. Introduce students to the concept of read arounds and ask them to share their writing with this technique. Ask students to find some statistics and research at home for their debate that will take place the following day.


 * Thursday: Debate.** Show clips from movies and TV. Split class into two. One group will debate that media violence is effecting our youth, one group will debate that media violence is not effecting our youth. Each group must come up with an argument and must list their main points on the board. I will provide them with research based material for them to look over and work off of.


 * Friday: Computer lab - Work on multi-genre projects.** I will give the students time every Friday to work on their multi-genre presentation in the computer lab. This will give me the opportunity to be there in case they have any questions or concerns while creating their project.

//**Materials:**//


 * Clips for class:**

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 * Persuasive writing checklist, rubric and prompt:**





[|Prompt]

**Week Two: Bullying**

"I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ‘The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these words he epitomized the history of the human race." - Bertrand Russell, Philosopher


 * Monday: Persuasive writing paper due. Bullying and creative writing introduction.** What is creative writing? What forms of creative writing are there? Talk about poetry, fiction, memoirs, narratives, etc. Expose students to all the different forms of creative writing that they may utilize at some point in their future. How can people expres s their feelings on school violence through creative writing? Share a piece of poetry on bullying. How did this piece of writing effect you? How would you feel if you were the subject within the poem?


 * Tuesday: Difference between male and female bullying.** We will watch two different clips about bullying, one from the male perspective and one from the female perspective. Then, students will write a piece of creative writing (poetry, fiction, memoir, etc.) from the point of view of the opposite gender, helping student's get a first person idea of how female bullies are different from male bullies.


 * Wednesday: Play writing.** Students will separate into 3 groups and each group will create a script for a different scenario involving bullying. They will have 30 minutes to collaborate and create a scene in which a student is bullied and they come up with a solution for the bullying. Scenarios can be made up by the individual groups, or I can provide them with a few examples to work off of (scene in a hallway where student gets in a fight, student brings gun to school, student gets overly upset in class, etc.)


 * Thursday: No Bullying Pledge.** I will read an excerpt from the book __Speak__. Discuss excerpt and how the characters conveyed the idea of bullying in her high school. Is it realistic? How can we stop it? Student's will separate into 5 groups and each group will create a No Bullying pledge that will ensure that their classroom is a safe environment. They will collaborate with their group members to come up with the best pledge possible. The students will share their pledges at the end of the class.


 * Friday: Computer lab - Work on multi-genre projects.** Remind students to pick their piece of writing they want to turn in for this week and have them go over and edit it at home over the weekend.

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**//Materials://**


 * Poem for Monday:**

__My Walk to School__

Fist punch. Foot crunch. Hand hit. Mouth spit. Eye swells. Can’t see. Please, Please, Let me be. Rips my homework. Steals my money. Grabs my lunch. Thinks it’s funny. //I won’t tell, I swear I won’t.// //Please don’t do that. I said “Don’t!”// Sticks and stones may break my bones … Sissy Prissy Four-eyes Geek Fatso Schizo Nerdy Freak … but names can really hurt. Through the doors. Up the stairs. Face is bloody. No one cares. In the washroom. Clean up the mess. I’ll be safe Until … recess.

//By Andrea Wilson//

Clips for Tuesday:

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Link to Excerpt from "Speak"

**Week Three: Environment**

"Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence." - Alice Walker, Author


 * Monday: Writing piece on bullying due. Environment and real life writing introduction.** Why is environment a factor in school violence? Dicuss the different types of environments that students are exposed to (family, school, community, etc.). List the different environments on the board, and then proceed to list the different influences within each environment. Example: Under family environment, students could list abuse, money issues, neglect, etc. Under school environment, students could list gangs or setting (rural, suburban, urban, etc.). Under community, students could list lack of after school activities, economy shifts, ethnic mix, etc.


 * Tuesday: News reports.** I will give students sample articles and news reports on past acts of school violence. With these examples, students will create individual local news reports on an environmentally related act of violence. We will leave ten minutes at the end of class for students to share some of their news reports.


 * Wednesday: Diary of a gang member.** I will show students a couple of videos on some facts and statistics on gang violence at schools. They will use this newly acquired knowledge to create a diary or journal of a gang member. They will create their own character and write 5-10 journal or diary entries from a first person perspective of this gang member. I will provide students with journals.


 * Thursday: Letter to the School Board.** Students will collaborate and write a letter to their school board addressing their concerns about the negative environmental impacts that influence school violence. Their letters would be one to two full length pages, and must present valid research to back up their opinion that is stated in the letter. Letter will be due at the end of the class period.


 * Friday: Computer lab - Work on multi-genre projects.**

//**Materials:**//


 * Example Letter to the School Board:**

Dear School Board Administrators:

School violence has reached epic proportions. Because of it, lives have been lost, and precious time has been wasted by school authorities in adjudicating cases involving students' violent beha-viour. Sometimes, teachers and students are hurt physically and emotionally.

Therefore, one may ask: How can the monster of school violence be dealt with? I recommend the following measures:

1. Parents should tell their children that violence is not the solution to conflicts. Tolerance, forgiveness and dialogue should be emphasised. 2. Conflict resolution should cut across school curricula and not be left within the domains of guidance/counselling classes. 3. Military personnel should be deployed in volatile and violence-prone schools to quell any violent flare-ups. 4. Students should be taken on trips to the prisons to see the condition of life of inmates. I suppose they will behold the unpleasant consequences of criminality, and avoid situations that can land them there. 5. Our schools should have, in addition to devotions, some sessions for moral instruction. On such occasions, pastors and other Christians can speak to the issue of violence and peace. 6. Anger-management workshops should be conducted in schools for students and their parents under the aegis of parent-teacher associations. 7. Since the school is the microcosm of the society, we, the adults, should set good examples in how we deal with conflicts.

To address the issue of school violence in Jamaica is to secure the future of this country.

Sincerely, Ugochukwu Dureke

(This was a letter addressing a Jamaican man's thoughts after seeing a photo of a young girl who was badly beaten by a boy at school. I felt that the student's could work off of some of his ideas that he lists in order to help eliminate violence in school.)


 * Video for Gang Violence:**

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 * Child Gang Members :**

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Sample Artciles for News Report Assignment

**Week Four: Wrap Up Week/Presentations**
 * Monday:** **Unit plan wrap up discussion.** What did you learn about school violence? How did you feel that you could use writing to understand the issue more? How do you feel more prepared to handle the issue of school violence in the future? After discussion, students will each choose one form of writing and present their opinion of the unit to me through this.


 * Tuesday:** **Putting together a writing portfolio.** I would like my students to have documentation of their writing throughout this unit, so I would like to spend a day helping them put together a few sample pieces of writing that they can look back on in their next English courses.


 * Wednesday: Multi-Genre Presentations:** Each student will have roughly 5-8 minutes to present their multi-genre projects to the classroom. This presentation will include showcasing all of their multi-genre pieces and will include sharing at least one piece with the class.


 * Thursday: Multi-Genre Presentations**


 * Friday: Multi-Genre Presentations**

**__Additional Materials/Comments:__**


 * Permission slips:** Because of the nature of this unit plan, and the frequent discussion of violence in our classroom, I will need parents to sign permission slips stating that it would be OK for their child to participate in this unit plan. This permission slip would mainly address the YouTube clips I will be showing them, which can easily be changed in case several parents disapprove of them. I would plan on bein in contact with all parents throughout the unit just in case they have questions or comments about what is happening in the classroom.


 * Books about School Violence:**

The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Piccoult City Boy, A Love Story, About A Guy, A Girl, and a Gun by Dianne DiFrisco Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo Project X by Jim Shepard If I Grow Up by Todd Strasser


 * Movies about School Violence:**

Bang Bang You're Dead Bowling for Columbine Elephant Mean Girls Precious Bridge to Teribithia Freedom Writers


 * Links to Websites about School Violence:**

[|CDC School Violence Prevention Website]

[|National Center for Children Exposed to Violence]

[|Center for Prevention of School Violence]

[|National PTA Website on School Violence Prevention]


 * The following Michigan Content Standard Objectives will be met within my unit plan: **

CE 1.1.2 Know and use a variety of prewriting strategies to generate, focus, and organize ideas (e.g., free writing, clustering/mapping, talking with others, brainstorming, outlining, developing graphic organizers, taking notes, summarizing, paraphrasing).

CE 1.1.3 Select and use language that is appropriate (e.g., formal, informal, literary, or technical) for the purpose, audience, and context of the text, speech, or visual representation (e.g., letter to editor, proposal, poem, or digital story).

CE 1.1.4 Compose drafts that convey an impression, express an opinion, raise a question, argue a position, explore a topic, tell a story, or serve another purpose, while simultaneously considering the constraints and possibilities (e.g., structure, language, use of conventions of grammar, usage, and mechanics) of the selected form or genre.

CE 1.2.1 Write, speak, and use images and graphs to understand and discover complex ideas.

CE 1.2.2 Write, speak, and visually represent to develop self-awareness and insight (e.g., diary, journal writing, portfolio self-assessment).

CE 1.2.3 Write, speak, and create artistic representations to express personal experience and perspective (e.g., personal narrative, poetry, imaginative writing, slam poetry, blogs, webpages).

CE 1.2.4 Assess strengths, weaknesses, and development as a writer by examining a collection of own writing.

CE 1.3.1 Compose written, spoken, and/or multimedia compositions in a range of genres (e.g., personal narrative, biography, poem, ﬁction, drama, creative nonﬁction, summary, literary analysis essay, research report, or work-related text): pieces that serve a variety of purposes (e.g., expressive, informative, creative, and persuasive) and that use a variety of organizational patterns (e.g., autobiography, free verse, dialogue, comparison/contrast, deﬁnition, or cause and effect).

CE 1.3.2 Compose written and spoken essays or work-related text that demonstrate logical thinking and the development of ideas for academic, creative, and personal purposes: essays that convey the author’s message by using an engaging introduction (with a clear thesis as appropriate), well-constructed paragraphs, transition sentences, and a powerful conclusion.

CE 1.3.4 Develop and extend a thesis, argument, or exploration of a topic by analyzing differing perspectives and employing a structure that effectively conveys the ideas in writing (e.g. resolve inconsistencies in logic; use a range of strategies to persuade, clarify, and defend a position with precise and relevant evidence; anticipate and address concerns and counterclaims; provide a clear and effective conclusion).

CE 1.3.7 Participate collaboratively and productively in groups (e.g., response groups, work teams, discussion groups, and committees)—fulﬁlling roles and responsibilities, posing relevant questions, giving and following instructions, acknowledging and building on ideas and contributions of others to answer questions or to solve problems, and offering dissent courteously.

CE 1.4.3 Develop and reﬁne a position, claim, thesis, or hypothesis that will be explored and supported by analyzing different perspectives, resolving inconsistencies, and writing about those differences in a structure appropriate for the audience (e.g., argumentative essay that avoids inconsistencies in logic and develops a single thesis; exploratory essay that explains differences and similarities and raises additional questions).

CE 1.4.7 Recognize the role of research, including student research, as a contribution to collective knowledge, selecting an appropriate method or genre through which research ﬁndings will be shared and evaluated, keeping in mind the needs of the prospective audience. (e.g., presentations, online sharing, written products such as a research report, a research brief, a multi-genre report, I-Search, literary analysis, news article).

CE 1.5.1 Use writing, speaking, and visual expression to develop powerful, creative and critical messages.

CE 1.5.2 Prepare spoken and multimedia presentations that effectively address audiences by careful use of voice, pacing, gestures, eye contact, visual aids, audio and video technology.

CE 1.5.4 Use technology tools (e.g, word processing, presentation and multimedia software) to produce polished written and multimedia work (e.g., literary and expository works, proposals, business presentations, advertisements).

CE 2.1.5 Analyze and evaluate the components of multiple organizational patterns (e.g., compare/contrast, cause/effect, problem/solution, fact/opinion, theory/evidence).

CE 2.1.6 Recognize the deﬁning characteristics of informational texts, speeches, and multimedia presentations (e.g., documentaries and research presentations)

CE 2.1.10 Listen to and view speeches, presentations, and multimedia works to identify and respond thoughtfully to key ideas, signiﬁcant details, logical organization, fact and opinion, and propaganda.

CE 2.1.11 Demonstrate appropriate social skills of audience, group discussion, or work team behavior by listening attentively and with civility to the ideas of others, gaining the ﬂoor in respectful ways, posing appropriate questions, and tolerating ambiguity and lack of consensus.

CE 2.2.2 Examine the ways in which prior knowledge and personal experience affect the understanding of written, spoken, or multimedia text.

CE 2.2.3 Interpret the meaning of written, spoken, and visual texts by drawing on different cultural, theoretical, and critical perspectives.

CE 2.3.2 Read, view, and/or listen independently to a variety of ﬁction, nonﬁction, and multimedia genres based on student interest and curiosity.

CE 2.3.6 Reﬂect on personal understanding of reading, listening, and viewing; set personal learning goals; and take responsibility for personal growth.

CE 2.3.7 Participate as an active member of a reading, listening, and viewing community, collaboratively selecting materials to read or events to view and enjoy (e.g., book talks, literature circles, ﬁlm clubs).

CE 3.1.7 Analyze and evaluate the portrayal of various groups, societies, and cultures in literature and other texts.

CE 3.1.8 Demonstrate an understanding of historical, political, cultural, and philosophical themes and questions raised by literary and expository works.

CE 3.1.9 Analyze how the tensions among characters, communities, themes, and issues in literature and other texts reﬂect human experience.

CE 3.4.2 Understand that media and popular texts are produced within a social context and have economic, political, social, and aesthetic purposes.

CE 3.4.3 Understand the ways people use media in their personal and public lives.

CE 3.4.4 Understand how the commercial and political purposes of producers and publishers inﬂuence not only the nature of advertisements and the selection of media content, but the slant of news articles in newspapers, magazines, and the visual media.

CE 4.1.4 Control standard English structures in a variety of contexts (e.g., formal speaking, academic prose, business, and public writing) using language carefully and precisely.

CE 4.2.5 Recognize language bias in one’s community, school, textbooks, the public press, and in one’s own use of language.