When I was in the classroom I came across Odell Education’s Developing Core Proficiencies. They were very thorough. They taught close reading, evidence-based claims, research and argument across grades 6 to 12, and they were openly licensed. I have been building and sharing OER since before there was a term for it. I learned too late that they don’t always last forever. In a few instances, I had the foresight to download copies of my own or rebuild from what was available. They are either hard to dig for or no longer on Odell’s websites. In addition, the PDF formatting isn’t very useful in the context of modifying and adapting, online use, enhancing accessibility, updates, etc. The license still lets anyone share and adapt them for noncommercial use, so I took one unit, Making Evidence-Based Claims for Grade 12, and revised it to see what a careful revision could look like.
The unit is built on two speeches: Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address (1981) and Hillary Clinton’s remarks to the APEC Women and the Economy Summit (2011). Yeah, I know, exciting. I kept Odell’s teaching sequence. Most of what changed is in the materials around it. I have a habit of taking some of the things I’m least interested in and seeing how far I can push things to see if I can make them more interesting and useful. The first ELA lessons I ever taught were for a 10th grade grammar class and it went so well I figured if that was the worst it could get then maybe this teaching thing was for me.
The revision logged 151 changes, and 52 of them are corrections. There’s plenty more I’d like to do with them. Get this… The Writing EBC Handout gives students a model paragraph to show how to quote a speech. A handout that teaches students to quote exactly was misquoting its own text! Most of the other corrections are smaller (a quotation that starts a line earlier than its reference says, a word dropped without an ellipsis), but a student checking their work against the model was checking it against something wrong. Sound familiar? It’s the same kind of thing we warn students against when they are using AI responses! The more things change, right? We were already doing these things ourselves in the B.C. era (Before Claude/ChatGPT).
The rest of the changes fall into a few groups:
- Accessibility. The tools were untagged fillable PDFs with fields named “Text 1” and “SE1a.” A screen reader user couldn’t tell which box went with which claim, and the PDFs don’t work well on Chromebooks or phones. They’re now labeled web pages, and every tool and handout is also a Google Doc.
- Inclusion. The original said independent reading could move into class “if scheduling and student ability do not support” reading at home. Class time is now the default, with supports built in. Students without quiet time or a device at home shouldn’t start every Part behind.
- AI. Three new activities have students check AI-written claims, a summary and a set of quotations against the speeches. Checking a claim against the text is what this unit teaches, and students now meet confident, fluent text that gets the source wrong every day.
- Supports. The two main tools now come in versions with sentence starters and a worked example, and both speeches have printable copies with the original line numbers and a column for notes.
- Interactivity. I am currently working on building some H5P modules to go along with the materials as well.
Every change is listed with the original wording, the revision and the reason, so you can see what I changed if you’re interested. The errata doc is long and boring and I’m glad I have an LLM to help organize all that.
The revised unit is free. The case study and the sign-up for the links are at inclusiveaistrategies.com/literacy-units/. The original units are linked there too, with no sign-up because I just happen to have saved a copy many years ago.
There are 30 more units in the series. Would revised versions be useful to you? If so, sign up, and if there’s a grade or strand you’d want next, reply to the email that gives you the links. The sign-ups will tell me whether to keep going and where to start.