Common Core Exemplar for High School ELA: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

This exemplar has been developed to guide high school students and instructors in a close reading of Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.” The activities and actions described below follow a carefully developed set of steps that assist students in increasing their familiarity and understanding of Lincoln’s speech through a series of text dependent tasks and questions that ultimately develop college and career ready skills identified in the Common Core State Standards.

This unit can be broken down into three sections of instruction and reflection on the part of students and their teachers, which is followed by additional activities, some designed for history/social studies and some for ELA classrooms.