English Program Overview
Our secondary English program is designed to deepen all students' language arts skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. These literacy skills contribute to the success of all students as critical thinkers, collaborators, and productive citizens.
We encourage students to:
- broaden their study of literature. To that end, we have included in our canon literature selections that portray enduring themes as well as contemporary and diverse perspectives and experiences. Our goal is to develop discriminating, sophisticated, and responsible lifelong readers.
- generate, organize, and communicate ideas effectively. We affirm the teaching of writing as a recursive process that includes a variety of pre-writing techniques, multiple drafts, revision, and editing. We encourage peer feedback and constructive collaboration. Teacher-generated and student-generated topics and the inclusion of writing experiences stimulate creativity and critical thinking.
- be responsible consumers and producers of information. We teach students to critically evaluate the validity of information sources, including print and non-print texts.
- actively seek and listen to the ideas of others. We shape our own ideas and concerns into clear and effective speech and written expression.