The English Department left Saint Louis U. High last Friday for a day-long round of meetings at Saint Louis University to discuss their curriculum. The work was part of the multi-year curriculum review the school is completing.

The process began several years ago as a way to evaluate the existing curriculum and decide what changes to improve student learning.

“We had started this process several years ago with establishing our goals as a department-some practices, habits, and the things we teach that we value,” said English teacher Jennifer Carroll.

“Some of the time we spent on full department level work, other times we broke into grade level,” said the First Year English Department chair, Frank Kovarik. “I kind of mapped out the day, and moderated some of the group discussions.”

The teachers made sure that the skills they teach are applicable in real life and they discussed how the students could transfer their knowledge from year to year.

“We wanted to look across the four years. As students move from freshmen to sophomores to juniors to seniors, how can we better ensure that the content and skills they are gaining will transfer from year to year so that senior year we can be confident that we’ve produced an English student that fulfills the goals of a grad at graduation that fulfills the ideals of Jesuit education,” said Carroll.

One of the primary points was the profile of what a SLUH English graduate will look like once they go out into the real world.

“As readers I want them to be proficient at understanding the characterizations ad understanding and applying techniques such as comparing and contrasting,” said English teacher Terry Quinn.

The group also discussed how to lay a better English foundation for students in the early years at SLUH.

“We worked on our freshmen, sophomore, and junior placemats, kind of our transfer goals, our essential understandings, the big questions, trying to make sure we have a clear vision for the first few years,” Kovarik.

As a result of the ongoing curriculum work, the freshman English teaching team has decided to cut the formal study of grammar from the curriculum. That means no more direct grammar instruction or grammar tests.

“We’re not going to do the traditional grammar instruction, because we have seen that it doesn’t lead to direct improvement in student writing,” said Carroll. “We’ve decided to not teach the grammar directly, but look at the problems students have in their essays, and try to review that. We’ve decided to shift the focus on how we make freshman better writers by the way we teach grammar.”

Quinn doesn’t think that the change will affect his sophomores much in the future. “I feel confident in the freshman teachers to come to those decisions. I don’t expect it to have any effect on student writing,” said Quinn. “What the sophomore teachers have discussed— or what we have been discussing— is specific sentence structure work we can do with sophomores that is less about the grammar and more about expanding their toolkit of sentence types. That will involve teaching them some grammar, but not focusing on it,” said Quinn.

Overall, the department is working on refining its goals for student performance.

“A big thing I want to do is lead the department through these important curriculum reviews,” said Kovarik. “Overall, we want students to develop with a nimble mind, and agile mind, to be able to present clear ideas in their writing and use writing as a way to understand themselves and their world.”