Times And Handouts

Students are given a paper with three sample introduction paragraphs on it. They need to identify the high, medium, and low in that set of three (yes, all three levels are present). Then, for each paragraph, they need to list at least two reasons why that paragraph is a high, medium, or low.

• All Five Introduction Inspections (PDF) (Word)

Milestones

1. Students work silently for two minutes to rank these paragraphs on their own.
2. Four minutes to work with up to three colleagues: Reach consensus on the ranking of each paragraph and move on to provide each paragraph with at least two reasons for the ranking.
3. Share out.
4. My first whole-class question is to identify the low paragraph. This almost always works and kids hit that one quickly. I tell them I agree and then ask why it’s a low. We follow this discussion for about another five minutes, branching out to why each paragraph is different than the others, whether that makes the paragraph stronger or weaker.

I start out with a heavy hand here (“No, that actually is a complete sentence, so that’s not a problem,” “I disagree; you can have summary in the intro, it’s just not the only thing you should have”). I am hoping to back off this part of the discussion in the remaining two handouts.

Why

I’m hoping to gradually move students to a point where they can see the difference in the quality of writing without the paragraph screaming out, “HELLO! I have TONS of grammatical errors and I DON’T EVEN MAKE SENSE!” I have a total of five of these handouts for this first time through. I took the writing from their last in-class essay, modifying it a bit in places to create what I need. The first handout is the one with the most obvious distinction between the levels. It gets fuzzier from there until we end up with the exact same paragraph on handouts four and five, just edited to fit those performance levels (high, medium, low). By the end, I have the low as a paragraph that is mostly free of error, makes sense, but still doesn’t do the job because of poor focus, sentence variety, and level of vocabulary.

Differences

This activity presents a limited amount of work for students to evaluate. In the past, I’ve had students working on grading entire essays, while this only asks them to focus on a single paragraph. And I’m clear in that there are three performance levels present, making the evaluation a touch easier than without those guidelines. Further, I free the students of actually attaching a letter grade to this, favoring something more like a ranking system. When we finish, students have copies of all of this writing along with reasons for their rankings. We take about twenty minutes total to work on these and only discuss this two days a week. Since I’m spreading out the work over time, I hope to keep them thinking about good and bad writing for the majority of the semester, instead of packing all that thinking into a day or two, concentrated toward the end of a writing unit. I also hope to continue this kind of thing in the future, moving to body paragraphs next (Body Builders?), making our way to conclusions (Concluding Creations?) by the last few grade periods.

What do you think about this? Could you see a way to use something like this for each part of the writing process? Do you see value in this kind of examination of student models? Have you done anything similar?Similar Posts:

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Students read them. They vote on which is best. They talk about why they like them. They find identifying characteristics that explain what one does better than the other. Dead silent classes and phrases straight off a rubric that are meaningless, this almost never changes the way students create whatever I’m asking them to create. And, almost as often as not, students vote in droves for the weakest example provided.

If students don’t know why sentence A is vastly superior to sentence B, and even believe that the opposite is true, what do I do about that? If that’s the case, why even bother showing models? Why not resort to direct instruction on one version of a successful sentence? Why not simply have all examples be high marks? Am I going about this wrong by showing highs and lows? Am I expecting too much out of my models? Maybe a long view is in order and the fruits of these labors will come to at a later date. Or maybe those fruits are even impossible to see.

An example: I’m using AFI’s curriculum, as I’ve noted already, with my Speech class. On the first day, we had five videos in the room to look at. I tried my best to just facilitate the group’s discussion of the videos, hoping that they would naturally reach conclusions about why one product was better than another. According to the class, all of the videos did the job, had the right number of camera angles, the correct tone, and pulled it off.

Of the five videos, one had the actor laughing the entire time (the scene is meant to build tension and anxiety), another had one steady shot the whole way through (the requirements stated five shots as a requirement), and a third was the exact same movement over and over filmed from five different angles. There was one video that clearly was better than the rest, but the students didn’t see it quite that way until I pointed a few things out. And at that point, the criteria becomes teacher centered, not student generated. I think that’s the exact opposite of the purpose of models. They have no ownership of that so it likely matters far less than if they reached those conclusions themselves.

I have a hard time separating myself from the use of models, but I also have a hard time gathering up data to advocate for their use. What has your experience been like? And I’m talking any “text” here, not just literature and not just writing. Art, math, science, history, what have you. Drawings, video, labs, live performance, what they do.

Handouts

These are some of the things I’ve used that come from student models.

• Introduction Models (PDF) (Word)
• Picture Write Models (PDF) (Word)
• Body Paragraph Models (PDF) (Word)

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Handouts

• OFOCN Writing (PDF) (Word)
• Rubric (PDF) (Word)

Topics

My experiment for this year was going to be a list of recurring images in the novel along with page numbers. Fog (13,14,42,101,116,119,242…), Animals (13,55,61,142,169,257), Cold (10,31,32,52,67,88,89,100,122,130,237…), Machines, Laughter, Combine, Cross/Jesus, etc. Their job would be to pick one of those images and explain why it’s there, how it adds to the meaning of the novel. I even hinted to the students that this is what we’d be doing, left a few conversations open ended and unresolved because I figured that would be a slight prep for having to come up with their own answers at the end of it all. A brief discussion about McMurphy’s and Harding’s hands stands out as one of these — quotations on the board with no point made about the differences seen and no time to discuss it. I felt this would give them food for later thought.

But when I sat down tonight to create the handout, it seemed like another one of my vague writing assignments that students have bombed on in the past. While I feel like I’ve paved the way for this and I really want students to write about a topic they pick, I can already see the tragic papers I’d comb through. So I switched things to a more traditional and well-defined piece of writing about theme. We’ll work in groups to come up with some ideas about possible themes that exist and then pick from that list for a focus. Our impending Socratic seminar should also help refine some of these theme choices.

Quite a few years on this job and you’d think I’d have basic things like this sorted out in my head. Do you ever run into the trouble of knowing what you want to give to students, but seeing how they can miss the mark? How do you handle it? Did you get a chance to look at the assignment sheet? What do you think?Similar Posts:

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Option One: “Just start with ‘The window broke’ and see where it takes you.”

Some would make like they were pouring over slim feedback from yesterday’s peer editing session, writing tiny notes in the margin that may or may not make it into their final draft. Still others were simply re-reading yesterday’s draft and not putting anything new on the page, executing the perfect thoughtful gaze used to make any teacher just walk on by. But today they couldn’t. I’d throw out one of the two sentences and they had to finish the thought. That was their one task for the next few minutes.

Option Two: “The challenge today is to use dialogue, so start with this: ‘Did you hear that?’ Now finish the story.”

Some students took off from that point, one writing more than I’d seen him write so far in class on anything. So that’s my challenge all year: for every writing assignment, always carry around in my head at least two beginning possibilities to give to a student. Any student not writing during our in-class writing time is given a sentence to use. That will be their first line and using it in the final draft will not affect the final grade.

We worked on First Sentences early on in the year and I’m starting to think that’s an activity to return to, creating a list of possibilities for each prompt we have. I could put together a list of those first sentences after the fact, after I’ve finished grading. I like the idea of starting with models from novels and moving quickly into models from student writing. I also like the idea of a wall covered with great first sentences. Throughout the year, I won’t charge plagiarism if one of the sentences posted in the room begins a paper.

Handouts

All handouts today are Word documents.

• Zombie Writing: Part 2 (narrative)
• First Sentences
• “Michelle on Tape” (how the dialogue challenge entered our conversation about narratives)

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Buzzing : Grammar Errors

You can hear his words, right? But that buzzing’s distracting, huh? That’s something easily fixed with just a little more time and attention. Recording clear audio is obviously not beyond his capability given the technical knowledge shown by putting this video together in the first place. Grammatical errors are often the same. Didn’t proofread, hit print mere hours before the due date, saw the error but didn’t want to go back and find even more to fix, there are lots of reasons lighter than lack of ability why “then” gets put in place of “than” and such. Is the final piece understandable? Sure, but it’s distracting.

URL “Oops!” : Typos

And how about that flub with how to spell Mozilla at the beginning (0:40)? That doesn’t encourage the audience to trust what this author is about to say. Taking the time to record the audio over again (lay down another audio track, edit out the part where he got it wrong, etc.) would have made this a much stronger piece, something an audience would be far more confident putting faith in. Typos achieve the same drawback: they cause the audience to question the author’s expertise.

There’s More

“You can click on Extensions and add other Extensions” (1:19). But what if the audience doesn’t know what an Extension is? That’s a safe bet about an audience that doesn’t know how to change their Firefox Theme. That search for “status bar… something” (1:28)? Why did he even search for that status bar extension? I thought this was about setting a new Firefox Theme. Seems unplanned, right? Clicking on a Theme he’s “never actually looked at this one, Zune, or something” (2:10)? Shouldn’t he know where he’s going if he’s creating a video teaching how to do something? I haven’t found any spot where he’s wrong, so he has his facts down well, but I also must admit that I stopped watching when I heard “I’m going to skip ahead, skip to, like, twenty or whatever” (2:33). That shows an author who is wandering around without a clear sense of direction, just picking page twenty at random.

In my collection of anti-examples, I’ll keep this video at the ready. Play the first few minutes of this and ask for comments. Ask how this might relate to this class. Later, compare it to the beginning draft of the latest piece of writing. The ideas are coming along just fine, but it’s so clearly a first draft not ready for final publication. More editing needs to happen. Get a few more eyeballs on it and take suggestions. Maybe even having students write comments to this author would help with their peer editing. I’ll keep alert for a first-draft video that appeals to the non-computer constituency. But this video could work well in explaining why ideas, organization, conventions, and [fill in with areas of your writing rubric] matter.Similar Posts:

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