Merci Suárez Changes Gears

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Train Merci’s Teachers”

In this activity, students will demonstrate their understanding of the thematic motif of class differences by creating a training document for teachers at Merci’s school.

For much of the story, the teachers at Seaward Pines Academy seem to mean well, but they don’t do a very good job helping students like Merci feel like they truly belong. In this activity, you will create a training document for Merci’s teachers to help them understand how to make Seaward Pines a more welcoming environment.

Identify Areas for Improvement

• Review the book and look for the things that make Merci feel as if she does not really belong at the school.
• Make notes about these problems, grouping them together so that you end up with no more than three or four main categories.

Research Solutions

• Conduct research into the best ways to create a welcoming and inclusive environment at school. You are looking for evidence-based suggestions for teachers and administrators that will help solve the specific problems that Merci faces in this story.
• Be sure to keep track of your sources, as you will need to cite them in your document.

Create Your Document

• Your document should be organized into three or four problems and their solutions.
• Explain what each problem is, how it impacts students, and how to solve it.
• At the end of your document, create a list of your sources.

Share and Compare

• Read at least two other students’ training documents. Take a few notes about their organization, ideas, and sources.
• Write a one-paragraph reflection about how your own work compares to your peers’ work: What are your document’s strengths and weaknesses?

Teaching Suggestion: If students struggle to generate examples or categories, you might prompt them to think about things that other students do and say to Merci, school programs that stigmatize scholarship students, opportunities that Merci cannot take advantage of, and so on.

Students will need internet access to complete the research section of this activity. If this is impractical, you might prepare some materials in advance that they can use to do their research. You may need to clarify for them what it means to find “evidence-based” strategies for school staff to use and give them precise directions about the kinds of sources that you will accept. You can adjust the difficulty of this assignment by requiring more or less rigorous sources and by specifying how well-developed their responses need to be.

The directions for this assignment ask students to cite their sources. They will need to know what type of source list you expect them to create. If your students are not already familiar with citation creation sites, this is an opportunity to direct them to a reliable one and coach them in its proper use. If students do not have internet access and hand-creating citations is beyond their present ability level, you might eliminate this requirement.

Differentiation Suggestion:  Students who may struggle to review large amounts of text—such as those with reading or attentional challenges—might be allowed to work with a partner or small group to generate a list of Merci’s problems at Seaward Pines. The time involved for these students might be further decreased by allowing them to work on the research and document in groups or by reducing assignment expectations. They might, for instance, identify and solve just one of the problems Merci faces at school.