Jim Lawrence
Instructional Writing Sequence Draft 1
11.03.07
Part 1 – Drawing on Previous Assessments
A major curricular focus for student learning during the seventh grade year at my placement is the writing process. Students have completed two major writing assignments up to the last week of October; a descriptive paper about them spending time in one of their favorite places, and another essay about a person they admire. To this point, the focus of student writing has been placed on the self. The next major writing assignment requires students to begin to branch out from the self through a five paragraph persuasive essay. They will be required to state a claim concerning a topic of their choice and support it with evidence. The transition from personal to more a more argumentative, expository writing style should be eased by students being able to select a high-interest topic of their choosing. That is, students should still be invested in their writing, as they seemed to have been in the first two writing assignments about a favorite place and admired person. The persuasive paper will serve as a medium through which students can state their convictions while attempting to sway the reader into agreement with their various claims. Middle school seems a logical place for maturing students to learn the value of their opinions and how to state their opinions and beliefs in ways that can affect others, while learning that there can be two potentially valid sides to an argument. In working through the persuasive paper, students will hopefully learn to consider multiple sides to the issues that they find important, analyzing and evaluating their own thoughts in the process. Another goal is that students will realize the value and utility in developing effective argumentation skills; the ability to state one’s opinion on a matter and support a claim with valid evidence is a fundamental life skill and is necessary to become an active member of any community, as well as a responsible citizen.
My plan is to explore both the procedural and declarative knowledge necessary for this writing task. Thus, it is necessary to reflect upon the literacy inquiry and first student work analysis to better inform my choices in planning and instruction. Based on the literacy inquiry, it is important for me to provide plenty of models to students during instruction on the persuasive essay. Unlike the PMI and descriptive Norman Rockwell warm-ups discussed in the inquiry, I need to be explicit in my instruction. The lesson must necessarily become both diagnostic and instructive; I must gauge how students approach the assignment and what they believe about persuasive essays, and then try to inform their approaches and teach them strategies for effectively drafting their arguments. I plan to hold a discussion on persuasion and what it means (and doesn’t mean) to be persuasive with the students in order to increase their declarative knowledge concerning the task at hand. Student models will be introduced soon after, and these models will be broken down into more manageable parts so that students may not feel as overwhelmed at the prospect of turning out five paragraphs of text (while teaching them how a persuasive essay can be broken down and examined, i.e. intro, body, conclusion, etc.).
Based on the assessment of the first two writing assignments and examining the first student work analysis, I have learned that some students may have little experience with making claims and supporting them with evidence. Fundamentally, this seems to stem from a lack of detail in some student writing. For example, in the first assignment, some students would bring up some aspect of their favorite place while offering little information to support that aspect (i.e. It always smelled so great, and that made me happy. My question to this writer would be “How or why did it smell great, and why did that make you happy?) Problems with lack of detail resurfaced in the “admired person” paper, which I examined in the student work analysis. My friend is caring, funny, and athletic, a student might claim, without showing us how or why through detail, whether that detail be the actions of that person, memories shared with that person, or their physical traits. Based on what I have learned about many of my students’ writing, a major goal for this assignment is to have students focus on the importance of detail in strengthening their writing, having them ask themselves, “Do I have enough evidence written here to support my claim and persuade my reader that my position is the best?” I will design some activities that allow for practice in making claims and supporting them with solid evidence in order to increase students’ procedural knowledge in the task of writing a persuasive essay.
After I feel that the class has arrived at a level of mastery concerning the task at hand, I will continue to re-teach the notion that “writing is a process” as they prewrite, draft and edit, working toward a more polished paper in which they can take pride. Students have responded well to the idea that their work will be published by my mentor in a book of seventh grade writing for the year, and enjoyed the “Writer’s Café” activity where they volunteered to share one of the first two writing assignments in front of the class in a fun, low-key setting. Keeping in mind that publication, sharing, and celebrating student writing has been shown to be one of the best ways to strengthen writing development and motivate students to produce strong pieces of writing per individual student ability (Dornan, Rosen, Wilson, Within and Beyond the Writing Process, 2003), I will continue to remind my students of both the publication of their work and the opportunity that they will have to share it with their peers.
Part 2 – Task Analysis
Using Hillocks and McCann for guidance, break down the task you have set for students: what will they need to know or be able to do to complete it? Please take into account Hillocks’ distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge: Students composing an argument will need to know not only what a thesis statement is, but how to write one.
Part 3 – Gateway Activity and Sequence
Once you have analyzed the task, you will decide what activities will help students learn to do it. Some of these activities will have to happen early on, tapping into what students already know and laying foundations for others. For example, you might begin by videotaping a class debate on a hot topic and then use clips to show students how they are already using reasons, claims, and warrants.
Part 4 – Assessing progress
What evidence would show you whether students have learned something, and how will you gather it? During your sequence, you should use both writing and talk to assess student progress. For example, at the end of your sequence, you might ask students to share and discuss their thesis statements, or hold another debate to compare their use and awareness of reasons, claims, and warrants to the first.
Throughout each part, you should consider what you might learn from this experience (about yourself and students) that would inform future teaching, either of this sequence or in general.