At Fishtank, we love to celebrate the amazing things our teachers are doing in the classroom. We are particularly excited to celebrate one of the many accomplishments of high school ELA teacher Deion Jamison: He was named the 2023 South Carolina Teacher of the Year! Deion is a 9th and 10th grade ELA teacher at Legacy Early College with the South Carolina Public Charter School District.
We recently had the opportunity to speak to him about why Fishtank ELA was the right choice of curriculum for him and his students and the impact Fishtank ELA has made in his classroom.
What makes a curriculum great?
The first thing we wanted to talk to Deion about was what he thought made a great curriculum and how he decided what materials to put in front of his students.
Deion started off by sharing that “one of the things that's most important in terms of choosing curriculum or creating materials is that I have a grasp of the material myself.” He explained that he needed to understand the end goals and how each particular assignment aligned with that end goal in order to make the best instructional decisions for his individual students.
The second key feature of a great curriculum was that it was culturally responsive. The curriculum needs “to be centered around things that they care about” and allow them to think critically beyond just the context of their classroom.
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“So when we're in class, for instance, talking about similes and metaphors all day, that's great and whatnot and it'll help them be successful on a test, but how does that help this student to be a better citizen?” -Deion Jamison
Why was Fishtank ELA the right choice?
With the need to find a curriculum that both honored teacher expertise and student experiences, Deion eventually landed on Fishtank ELA. He was immediately excited about the topics covered and “choice of texts and how engaging they are” within the 9th Grade and 10th Grade curriculums.
As he reviewed the lessons, he found that the questions were “literally the same types of questions that I would have come up with if I were building my own curriculum so it's nice that someone is thinking the same way that I think in terms of what discourse should sound like in the classroom.”
Additionally, he felt that the questions “are grounded in the text, they're grounded in our standards, but they take it a step further to where the kids are starting to explore real world concepts, and they can apply them to their own lives. It takes into account what students know, and it gives them that extra push to think critically about the things that they may not know or the things that they thought they knew.”
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“My thing has always been, if we teach our kids like the critical thinking necessary then they'll do fine on the test and I think Fishtank does a really good job at providing those questions that require the kids to think critically and the scaffolds to get them there if they're not already.” -Deion Jamison
He knew he wanted a curriculum that allowed him to “feel as though I'm the content expert and that I can make those instructional decisions that are best for the kids that are in my room at that particular moment.”
Deion was able to focus his attention on how to deepen student understanding because Fishtank units and lessons had already taken care of some of the work: “You have all of the assessments there that I can easily read over so I know what those goals are. And then what I typically do is plan backwards and it's like, Fishtank has already done that! With the assessment and the Essential Questions and all of the other things that a teacher needs to know before diving into a unit, it's already there. So, I can focus on reading and understanding the text and trying to understand how the text aligns to an essential question or the assessment.”
The last key thing Deion appreciated about the curriculum was the availability of scaffolds and opportunities to easily make adjustments to the lessons if he needed to: “The kinds of scaffolds within Fishtank are sometimes not available in other curriculums, and it just makes planning for me way easier. I can quickly make the decisions that I need to make if something is missing or if I need to cover a standard that is not going to be covered within the next couple of units. I know how to integrate that in the Fishtank curriculum seamlessly as opposed to a curriculum that is so tightly packaged that I can't figure out where to place things.”
How have students responded to Fishtank ELA?
Deion was excited to talk about the impact Fishtank has had on his planning, but he was even more excited to tell us how much his students have enjoyed it.
He told us about his 10th grade class: “So we’ve finished the first unit in there that discusses the Letters from Birmingham Jail and all those excellent texts, and we're now on the unit that discusses cancel culture. Real quick aside, when I introduced this unit to the students and we were discussing cancel culture and for homework I was asking them to define ‘What is cancel culture?’ and the student was, like ‘social media cancel culture?’ and I was like yes. And she says, ‘Oh I love this class.’”
Throughout the Censorship, Truth & Happiness in Fahrenheit 451 unit, he has seen huge improvements in student discourse: “In this particular unit, and in the previous unit actually, it's been cool to experience both sides of the perspective with the text. They're thoughtfully chosen. I think what is most engaging for the kids is to see that they can form their own opinions based on reading both perspectives and trying to decide ‘I align with this author or I align with this author’ and here are the reasons why. They can pull information from the text to support. At the lesson level, it's been really cool to see them synthesize knowledge from both of the takes and be able to make those decisions in terms of where they stand and where they fall according to the various perspectives that exist. That's one of the biggest things that I've witnessed thus far in terms of them just engaging in discourse with each other about their perspectives. It's been really cool to watch—I love hearing them talk.”
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Many thanks to Deion for sharing his experience using Fishtank ELA! Want to be the next teacher we Spotlight? Tell us how Fishtank has impacted you and your students.
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