English
Welcome to the English Department at the Academy for Software Engineering!
Per Engage NY, “The Common Core Learning Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy define general, cross-disciplinary literacy expectations that must be met for students (Standards) and characteristics of CCLS instruction. The Standards are organized into four overlapping strands: Reading, Writing, Language, and Speaking/Listening. Because the CCLS present an integrated model of literacy, the Standards mutually inform one another.”
- Here is the link to the NYS Common Core ELA Standards
At the Academy for Software Engineering, we believe that literacy is a core skill practiced across all subjects and disciplines that seek to elevate students’ literacy levels in three critical areas: Prose, Document, and Quantitative literacy. We continuously reflect on each grade’s ELA curriculum to ensure that students’ identities, cultures, prior knowledge, and personal gifts are brought into the classroom as vehicles for learning and appreciating the diversity within the classroom. If you would like to know more about New York State’s Initiative to promote and implement a culturally responsive-sustaining framework, please see the link below:
Teachers across all subjects and grades engage with students through a variety of approaches, strategies, and projects, such as project-based assignments, debates, creating podcasts, crafting stories through NanoWrimo, defense of learning, and presentations to name a few. Teachers combine real-world topics and authors that reflect our community to educate, inform, and teach 21st-century skills that will translate to success after high school.
Core skills taught across all grades:
- Crafting an effective claim that is grounded in strong evidence
- Identifying, citing, analyzing and discuss evidence
- Dissecting perspectives and positions to understand and craft counterclaim arguments
- Synthesizing information from multiple, different types of primary and secondary sources
- Contributing personal and new thoughts to the conversation/topic/assignment/task
- Make connections to self, others, and the world
These skills are modeled and taught to students in a variety of ways scaffolded at various levels appropriate to each student’s performance level, needs, and learning styles in order to prepare them for a variety of post-secondary opportunities as well as standardized tests that enable students to graduate and apply to college and/or post vocational programs. Below are links to the various websites that reflect the variety of college-ready tests we prepare students for: