A teacher recently posted that she had just learned she would be teaching sophomore English—and that her school had not renewed the grammar program teachers had used for years.
Everything had suddenly changed and so she needed suggestions for everything: novels, short stories, grammar.
That kind of announcement can make it feel as though you need to immediately start assembling three separate pieces of a curriculum. But I wouldn’t think about them separately. They are three ingredients in the same recipe for building competent, confident, and critical readers and writers.
For grammar, I’ve had much better luck with short, focused mini-lessons connected to students’ actual writing. Introduce a sentence or paragraph that uses the grammatical tool you’re teaching and have students unpack what they see. Figure out what rules may be applicable to that example. Then look at the actual tools being used. Talk about how writers use the tools. Talk about what they do for the reader. Then ask students to find places where they might use, or intentionally not use, it in their own writing.
Instead of grammar becoming something students complete on a worksheet and promptly forget, it becomes part of the decisions they make as writers, and part of my pedagogical recipe.
That idea is what led me to create Grammar Conversations. The units are built around focused instruction, discussion, mentor texts, and students’ own writing rather than endless sets of isolated exercises.
I’d take the same connected approach to literature.
Rather than feeling pressure to plan an entire year around novel studies, I like sprinkling engaging short stories into units that feature longer works chosen by students. Short stories give us room to introduce new ideas, experiment with different kinds of discussion and writing, learn what interests a particular group of students, and complete entire narrative arcs while also helping students learn who they are as readers.
Short stories can also open surprisingly rich conversations about identity, power, belonging, choices, consequences, relationships, and the way people navigate their communities.
That’s one reason I built the Curated Short Stories Library for middle and high school teachers. I wanted teachers to have stories they could draw from throughout the year, along with essential questions, writing prompts, audio and video adaptations, paired nonfiction texts and novels, and planning resources—without having to start the search from scratch every time.
The bigger opportunity, though, is not simply finding a grammar resource, a stack of short stories, and a list of novels.
It’s deciding how those pieces will work together to create a learning environment that will support all of your students..
A story can become the mentor text for a grammar conversation. A quick write can grow into a longer piece of writing. A discussion about a character’s choices can lead into an argument students want to make. A sentence from a student draft can become the starting point for talking about syntax, punctuation, or style.
Reading, writing, grammar, and conversation don’t have to occupy separate corners of the curriculum.
And if you suddenly find yourself building a course without the program you expected to have, this might be the most useful place to start.