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Section 1: Overview

What’s Next?

We will read and discuss texts that will help us decide on a postsecondary pathway, from attending a four-year college or two-year community college to entering a vocational or technical profession or joining the military. These texts will assist us in making actionable steps toward our adult, postsecondary lives. We will also review the Culminating Task and begin creating artifacts for our portfolios for the walkthroughs at the close of the unit. We will begin to tackle the Central Question: How can I prepare for life after high school?

  • Lesson 1:

    We will learn about the unit’s Central Question: How can I prepare for life after high school? We will analyze the Culminating Task, identifying specific knowledge (postsecondary readiness) we are expected to gain throughout the unit, plus specific skills we will need to succeed on the Culminating Task. We will also learn about the unit, review the Unit Text List to better prepare for the unit, and complete a closeout survey.

  • Lesson 2:

    We will review the survey from the previous lesson, and in groups, we will read sections of “The College Payoff: Education, Occupations, Lifetime Earnings” by Anthony P. Carnevale, Stephen J. Rose, and Ban Cheah and summarize our findings via a jigsaw activity.

  • Lesson 3:

    We will complete part 2 of the jigsaw by sharing our summaries of our assigned section of “The College Payoff: Education, Occupations, Lifetime Earnings” with our home group. We will learn about the importance of paying attention to authors’ use of language and will begin compiling powerful and interesting sentences in our Mentor Sentence Journals.

  • Lesson 4:

    We will learn about text-dependent questions: how to use them to guide reading and how to respond to them in ways that are thoughtful and complete.

  • Lesson 5:

    In this lesson, we will read and discuss “Professional Degree vs. Academic Degree: What’s the Difference?” by Northeastern University, and “Three Educational Pathways to Good Jobs” from Georgetown University.

  • Lesson 6:

    We will examine each pathway choice, determine our individual pathway, and begin preparing for the Section 1 Diagnostic.

  • Lesson 7:

    We will write a multiparagraph informational response detailing the pathway of our choice.

  • Lesson 8:

    We will review feedback on the Section Diagnostic. We will use the feedback to make revisions to our work.

  • Lesson 9:

    We will commence an Independent Reading Program in which we choose texts to read independently as we progress through the unit. We will learn how to choose texts, what activities we may complete, about the final task, and about any materials we will use as we read our independent reading texts. We will begin by reading our texts, using tools to help us take notes and analyze important textual elements.