Twelfth grade English and AP Literature teacher Rachel Broudy has been teaching at McKinley Technology High School in Washington, DC, for seven years. Originally from Philadelphia, Broudy moved to the area when she attended college at American University.
At McKinley, she is the sponsor of the poetry club where students like to try out spoken word poetry. The school holds a monthly open mic event where students can read their pieces. Some students also attend open mic events outside of school at venues like Busboys and Poets.
Broudy learned about the One World Education Writing Program from a colleague who was using it in his 10th grade classes. She liked what she heard and offered to help create the 12th grade curriculum that is now being used in schools across the city, including in her classroom.
Her specialty is literature, as it is for many of her English teacher colleagues, and she said she feels confident in her ability to teach students how to read and analyze texts. The OWEd curriculum has helped her become more confident about teaching students to conduct research and construct an argument, too, something she hadn’t really tried doing with them before.
She’s noticed that her students have appreciated being able to choose their research topic. “It offers them a sense of ownership over the assignment that they don’t normally get in an English class,” she said. “Normally they are writing about literature and ideas that other people have, but not the ideas they have.
In their Reflection essays, they tackled issues like the gender and racial pay gap, if there should be more aggressive laws against hazing, and whether or not students should have to pay extra money in college if they decide to change their major and have to stay longer than four years to complete the coursework. “I was really impressed by the breadth of the topics the kids chose,” she told me.
“When they gave their final presentations, they really spoke like experts. They answered questions and could point to data and statistics supporting their position,” she said. “They felt a sense of pride in being able to talk about a topic that not everyone else knew, including me. They gained a lot of empowerment by the end of the project.” She also confided that their final presentations were better than she anticipated at the start of the unit.
Several students shared with Broudy that even though they were seniors, they had never done this level of research for any other assignment. The opportunity to practice public speaking was also new and beneficial to them. “The skills they gained speaks to the significance the project had on them,” she concluded.