Standards and Assessment 

based on 8th Grade English Language Arts Common Core Standards (found at www.isbe.state.il.us/common_core/default.html)

The goal of our unit is to cover three Common Core Standards, focusing on one standard each of the three primary weeks of our lesson. Most of our assessment will be from the students’ final unit projects, but each week we try to have an activity that allows us to track students’ progress.

• RL.8.5. Compare and contrast the structure of two or more texts and analyze how the differing structure of each text contributes to its meaning and style.

Our goal for the first week is for students to understand what narratives are and how they vary. We will accomplish this by having them compare and contrast narratives in writing and narratives in text. For our purposes, we are considering music a text throughout this week. First, we will assess students’ understanding of this through their song choice at the end of the week. As a checkpoint for the final project, each student will have to choose a jazz song or a classical music song and explain what story or part of a story it tells and why he or she chose it for his or her mix CD. By having this checkpoint assessment, we can determine whether we need to review any of the week’s material before moving on to the next week’s material. Because our final week is solely devoted to working on the final project, we have room to push the schedule back or review any concepts during that week if needed. We can make a final assessment on the students’ understanding of these concepts in their final projects, because they have to similarly justify how their CD tells a story and explain each song choice.

• RL.8.4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including analogies or allusions to other texts.

We leave narrative during our second of the unit and focus on how words and musicality combine to create another level of meaning. We will be able to assess this throughout the week through our performance day. Each student will have the option to compose a blues poem or a slam poem and will perform it for the class on that day. After the performance, we will ask each student why they made the choices they did for their poem and assess what they learned through that. Students will also choose another song and justify it. Once again, we will be able to make a final assessment of the students’ understanding of these concepts through the final project.

• RL.8.2. Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to the characters, setting, and plot; provide an objective summary of the text.
  

As week three picks up where week one left off, our learning standard deals once again with structure. During this week we go a little deeper, looking at how an artist develops, maintains, and plays with a theme throughout a text (music included), specifically in concept albums. Since the concepts from this week are also the overarching concepts of the final project—they are making their own concept album—we will rely on that for our assessment of this standard. However, we are not simply going to assess them once their final projects are finished. We will utilize the workweek by checking up on each student’s progress. Once again, if we see that students are not understanding the primary concepts of this, we can review them for a part or a whole of any day that week.