Authored by Katherine Oliver
What is the biggest fear incoming teachers have when preparing for their first classroom? While there may seem to be a myriad of options from poor classroom management to a student uprising, at the heart of every worry is the ability to get student buy-in. Student engagement, behavior, and work ethic can all be tied back to how valuable they feel the content is. In a subject often characterized by mundane worksheets on grammar and classic novels no teenager would choose to read, a new English teacher must navigate the balance between curriculum standards and making lessons relevant to students’ lives. Most importantly, they must ask themselves, ‘How do I make students feel the value of what I’m teaching them?’
As a student teacher of Secondary English myself, I grapple with this question constantly. I worry I will be unable to inspire my students to want to learn, and how, amid a literacy crisis, I will get my students to believe their English skills matter for their futures. But after being introduced to C3 Framework and the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) built by C3 Teachers, I realized there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Secondary English is built on the foundation of centuries of human creation, connectivity, and the power of one’s words and ideas to reach another. An ELA classroom is a place where students are meant to create and articulate their individual thoughts on media and culture using sound logic. If we truly want that for our future generations, there must be time in between lecturing for student-led involvement. We must give them the tools and trust them to come to their own conclusions by scaffolding skills using questions, tasks, and sources. While typically geared towards Social Studies, this is what IDM can do for ELA.
When writing English-based inquiries using a model that centers the exploratory, source driven nature of Social Studies, I asked myself how I could use sources and textual evidence to make students want to participate in what English class can be, aka student buy-in. The answer is very simple and currently listed within KY ELA standards—multimodality and a variety of materials, including recent pop culture. By giving students recognizable and versatile texts and trusting them to work as a group without direct interpretation from the teacher, sources like excerpted lyrics of “Stupid Song” by Olivia Rodrigo or the newest Meta Ai advertisement can teach students about the importance of English analytical skills without any lecturing. Allowing teenagers to investigate media they enjoy that is already encompassed within the English disciplines can help increase students’ participation and individualized thought.
Clearly, this does not mean giving students free reign of the internet and sitting down at the desk to grade. Sources are guided by a main compelling question and a subset of supporting questions students should be able to answer through their analysis of the texts. These are reinforced by formative tasks given along the way. By working with this structure, creativity for the inquiry teacher and students can flourish. As an incoming teacher worried for my students, I believe that by giving them real world, current examples of how English is seen in their lives, they will come to know the value of English Language Arts. Connect to students’ prior knowledge and guide it with questions, and the rest will follow.
