In grade 9, students join in conversations and participate in groups to constructively share their insights through listening and speaking. They analyze how genres enhance the meanings of works and delve deeply into substantive literary and informational texts. When revising their writing, students create consistent tone and point of view for greater coherence. Grade 9 students become increasingly aware of authors’ perspectives and how writers emphasize particular examples or details to create theme, tone, and mood. Students identify bias and logical fallacies in arguments and support their analysis with both inferences and citations drawn from credible sources. They write in narrative, informative, and argumentative modes and blend them to suit their audience and purpose. By grade 9, students have developed vocabulary skills, including knowledge of Anglo-Saxon, Greek, and Latin roots, to determine the meanings of increasingly complex words. They intentionally use and revise for parallel structure in their writing. With regard to research, students develop clear, concise, defensible thesis statements and present their findings in short and long formats, skillfully blending quoted material with ellipses and brackets. Their analysis and creation of multimodal content is more nuanced, and their predilections for particular genres during independent reading and writing are more fixed.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a research-based framework for improving student learning experiences and outcomes through careful instructional planning focused on the varied needs of all students, including students with visible and non-visible disabilities, advanced and gifted learners, and English learners.

Some general ideas for implementing the UDL lens in an ELA lesson, PK-12, are provided in this chart.

These exemplar lesson plans showcase best practices for English language arts. These lessons are aligned to the Oklahoma Academic Standards and bundle together multiple objectives to showcase the recursive nature of ELA. Each lesson plan includes helpful explanations about the instructional plan and steps. Teachers can review these sample lessons on their own, with a colleague, and/or with their professional learning community, to reflect on the highlighted ELA practices and how they mesh with their own current classroom practices.

Lesson plans are available for each grade featuring texts from the following genres: fiction, nonfiction, & poetry.

Moreover, an exemplar lesson plan sequence regarding Standard 6 research is available for each grade band.

This suite of writing resources includes:

• student-friendly checklists for the narrative, informative, argumentative, and research modes
• editing checklists for the beginning and middle of the school year
• examples of teacher feedback on student writing
• a peer feedback lesson plan with a slideshow and handout

• Engagement Strategies
• 9th Grade ELA Standards (pages 96-103)