Product Description

Designed for educators by the teacher who nurtured and created the Freedom Writers, this standards-based teachers’ guide includes innovative teaching techniques that will engage, empower, and enlighten.
In response to thousands of letters and e-mails from teachers across the country who learned about Erin Gruwell and her amazing students in The Freedom Writers Diary, Erin Gruwell and a team of teacher experts have written The Freedom Writers Diary Teacher's Guide, a book that will encourage teachers and students to expand the walls of their classrooms and think outside the box.
Here Gruwell goes in-depth and shares her unconventional but highly successful educational strategies and techniques (all 150 of her students who had been deemed “un-teachable” graduated from Wilson High School): from her very successful “toast for change” (an exercise in which Gruwell exhorted her students to leave the past behind and start fresh) to writing exercises that focus on the importance of journal writing, vocabulary, and more.
In an easy-to-use format with black-and-white illustrations, this teachers’ guide will become the essential go-to manual for teachers who want to make a difference in their pupils’ lives and create students who will make a difference.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24895 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-02
• Released on: 2007-10-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780767926966
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION

The Freedom Writers Diary Teacher’s Guide takes students through a three-stage process that will maximize their understanding of The Freedom Writers Diary while supporting the central message of tolerance. For best results, I suggest that you begin teaching the Engage Your Students activities first, following the order presented–which mirrors the timeline in The Freedom Writers Diary. The activities in Enlighten Your Students and Empower Your Students can then be taught according to what best suits your individual curricular needs and weekly schedules. There are no specific time allotments designated for the activities presented in this Teacher’s Guide. Teachers can implement activities in one class period or over multiple days.


The Engage, Enlighten, and Empower Model

Engage Your Students: This section includes lesson plans and activities for you to share with your students before they begin reading The Freedom Writers Diary. The goal is to establish a collaborative and supportive academic environment that will draw your students into the learning process, help them make connections between who they are as individuals and who they are as students, and encourage them to discover commonalities with their classmates.

Enlighten Your Students: This section offers lesson plans and activities that help students delve into literary themes, topics, and concepts while reading The Freedom Writers Diary, and concludes with a unit on the film, Freedom Writers (2007). Due to its range of contents, Enlighten Your Students covers various categories for ease of use: writing, vocabulary, grammar, oral communication, culminating activities, and Freedom Writers film activities. Students will practice different kinds of writing and public speaking, and become critical thinkers as they explore their own opinions, reasoning, and reactions within a “real world” context.

Empower Your Students: This section encourages students to achieve positive changes in themselves and in their communities by bringing the outside world into the classroom, and taking their classroom into the world. Nontraditional activities, such as inviting a guest speaker into class or taking a field trip, can expose students to new social and academic perspectives.

The Teachers Guide promotes a holistic approach to language arts: We integrate reading, writing, vocabulary, and grammar with a variety of learning modalities, all focused on a common theme. Each lesson plan for the Engage, Enlighten, and Empower sections of the book contains five important educational elements: implementing different learning modalities, the use of visual graphics, journal writing, adherence to academic standards, and authentic assessment. What follows are brief introductions to each of these elements.


Learning Modalities

Many of the Freedom Writers struggled with learning disabilities (dyslexia) or behavioral challenges (Attention Deficit Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). In addition, some were English Language Learners. As a new teacher, I desperately tried a variety of ways to engage my students and bring my activities to life.

Little did I know that my wacky idea of bringing in two sandwiches and some clumsy drawings of sandwich ingredients to teach about writing would prove successful. Later, I found out why this technique worked. Dr. Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor, advanced the theory of multiple intelligences to illustrate that all human beings have a repertoire of skills for solving different problems; within these repertoires, however, individuals have different learning modalities. By bringing in sandwiches, sketches, and other elements to teach the writing process, I managed to activate my students’ linguistic, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, and interpersonal learning modalities. (*)

Following suit, your students will have opportunities to use different learning modalities as they move from activity to activity. Each lesson plan includes a list of materials that you will need, ranging from popular culture (music and movie clips), to food items (peanuts and Froot Loops), to art supplies (crayons and poster boards). Be sure to check ahead of time what you will need for each activity. We also suggest that you have a television and DVD player, a CD player, and a computer.


Visual Graphics

I found that traditional note taking was often a significant challenge for the Freedom Writers. Allowing my students to process information and demonstrate their comprehension through visual techniques greatly enhanced the learning process. I am not artistic by any means, but I found that admitting my lack of talent seemed to bolster my students’ sense of artist confidence. Suddenly, my creative students were tempted to submit their own visual graphics.

We have included student-drawn visual graphics with each activity in this guide, as well as explanations for how to use them. Your students may think these visual graphics are corny, so play off their reaction and challenge them to do better! Your students can create their own visual graphics for an activity using a black marker and blank sheet of paper. Add their names along with a copyright symbol at the bottom of the original, photocopy,
and distribute to the class. Have contributors come to class early and draw their images on the board so that you can use the new graphic while modeling the activity for the class.


Journal Writing

To mirror the Freedom Writer experience, we recommend that you provide journals for your students prior to reading The Freedom Writers Diary.
By keeping journals, students learn to value writing as a process. Journal writing is an avenue through which your students can respond to events in their personal lives and in their academic lives. Because all the students will keep journals at the same time, they bond as a community of writers, reflecting on their individual and shared experiences at school, at home, and in their neighborhoods.

The license to write freely, without fear of criticism or judgment, is central to the success of student journals. The Freedom Writers method allows students to voice their own truths, however painful or awkward, in honest, unvarnished prose. Too often, I believe, writing is rewarded merely on the basis of standard spelling, punctuation, and usage. Teachers should also value vivid, forceful student writing that actually says something.
Encouraging students to use their own voices unleashes their potential for powerful self-expression and deeply effective storytelling.

The Teacher’s Guide also includes activities that require students to use different writing styles in different contexts for different audiences. As students learn to edit their own and each other’s prose for a specific purpose, they develop skills essential to success in the classroom and beyond. Since many educators have used The Freedom Writers Diary as a launching pad to discuss specific themes and inspired journal writing in their classrooms, we have provided writing prompts for every diary entry in Appendix B.


Academic Standards

The Freedom Writers Diary can easily be taught as literature on its own. However, using this Teacher’s Guide will help you fulfill the requirements established by English Language Arts national standards. The current trend in education is for all curricula to be standards-based. As teachers, we must abide by the standards that our state and districts have adopted to ensure that our students are meeting their achievement goals in each academic area. We have aligned each activity in this guide with the Language Arts standards formulated by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Standards can be daunting, something imposed from the outside. However, the language of the NCTE standards does a good job of emphasizing the learner at the center of the academic process.

I understand that most states have their own specific standards, but there are also many commonalities that you will find reflected in the criteria listed in Appendix C. It is these common and interrelated themes that we address and that are specified in greater detail on the Web site for the National Council of Teachers of English: www.ncte.org.


Authentic Assessment

Standardized tests are a reality of our educational system. Regardless of how teachers may personally feel about the effectiveness of such testing programs, there is no way around them. But it does not follow that teaching to the test is the best way to educate our students, or even to help them achieve top scores. I believe that the best teaching and the best learning happen when you teach to a student, not to a test.

This Teachers Guide does not include quizzes, multiple-choice tests, or standardized essays. Instead, every activity is organized around the idea of authentic assessment. In authentic assessment, students are asked to demonstrate their language arts skills through meaningful and relevant tasks; teachers, meanwhile, monitor the strengths and needs of their students as they progress from activity to activity.

The Teacher’s Guide employs multiple forms of authentic assessment:

• Visual graphics: The graphics associated with each activity provide an immediate way of measuring the level of student engagement.

• Open-ended questions: Activities include open-ended language exercises that allow students to employ imagination, creativity, and critical thinking skills.

• Language arts assessment: A range of writing assignments, including interviews, letter writing, and a feature story, provide opportunities for evaluating student progress in reading and writing.

• Portfolios: We suggest that all assignments be collected ...

Customer Reviews

Freedom Writers Diary Teacher's Guide
The Freedom Writers Diary is an incredible book for teenagers to read, and this book will help any teacher use the FWD to motivate and inspire students. The Teacher's Guide contains practical activities that tie into the book but can also be used independently. Several of the activities, such as the Line Game and the Toast for Change, were featured in the Freedom Writers movie. All of the activities are tied to NCTE standards, and they are all ready to use. This book will help educators teach reading and vocabulary skills, but it will also help them reach their students. The Freedom Writers Diary is an incredibly powerful book for teens, and the Freedom Writers Teacher's Guide is the best teacher's guide I've ever used.

A Great Tool
I have been using the Freedom Writers Diary for eight years in my class. Students love this book. I teach at risk kids who struggle reading and getting them to read any book is a major achievement. The Teachers Guide helps teachers: use the Diary, introduce other books and create a sense of family in your class in the order of Room 203. You will find that this book will become worn out from use.

High School Book Not @ High School Level
This book was recommended to me because I teach an autobiography unit in my class. However, this "guide" (as well as the text it is supposed to accompany) is completely useless if you have ANY teaching experience what-so-ever. This guide is neither "in-depth" nor "unconventional." Examples such as Coat of Arms, the Line Game, Getting to Know You Bingo, KWL, and 5WsHow are all activities that are included in the most basic of methods classes in college or student teaching experiences. Some of the vocabulary activities here are word searches which don't TEACH anything nor do they check for understanding or mastery. Besides the "touchy-feely" aspect of these activities, they are so basic in nature that if I were to use them in my high school class (of a Title 1 nature just like Ms. Gruwell's site), my students would laugh, sigh, and roll their eyes and consider them a situation of me talking down to them as if they were immature elementary students. Getting to know your students and establishing a rapport of respect in your classroom is important and must be nurtured from day one. But if ALL you care about is having warm and fuzzy feelings for your students, then this is the book for you. If your students are of elementary level, then this is the book for you. If narrative writing (and other personal assignments) is the only thing you plan to assign your students, then this is the book for you. If however you need to help your high school students master a wealth of state standards across a variety of reading and writing methods, then I would look for a book that is more useful for a high school level.