I first became familiar with the pre-writing portion of this assignment during a C3WP session I attended in 2019 through the National Writing Project. C3WP stands for College, Career, and Community Writers Program. If you are unfamiliar with the National Writing Project, it is an amazing network of literacy educators that often think outside of the box when it comes to teaching reading and writing. There is also a mission entrenched in the idea of “teachers as writers,” and continuing professional development as an integral way to continue building skills as an educator. Many of the writing sessions that are geared toward both adults and children focus on the inspiration from the life of the writer as a way to access the entire writing process.

Back in 2019 when I first wrote about generative writing, I said:

“...generative writing really is at the heart of all writer’s workshops because it uses the students’ interests and personal experiences to create the topics, provide the organization, and make the connections that are so necessary for engagement and comprehension.”

The term “generative” writing has a few different meanings in the world of writing.

It can take the form of an idea brainstorming in creative writing. It is often unedited and looks like a stream-of-consciousness exercise where the writer is not concerned with conventions like grammar, spelling, or punctuation. The cool thing about generative writing is that the students are the prompts. Your job as a teacher is transformative when you help facilitate the writer to discover their own writing process-including idea generation. Generative in the sense of this post means the ideas are generated from the writer’s life and then transposed into a variety of genres. This post will walk you through how to do this with argumentative writing, and then apply it to a writing workshop. 

Arthur O’Shaughnessy in his 1874 poem “Ode” wrote: “Yet we are the movers and shakers/Of the world forever, it seems.” I love the term “mover and shaker” because it reminds me of dancing, but what it really lends is to people who make an impact on the world. It is no secret that one of my favorite units to teach is research. I love the choice, the process, and the hard work it takes to produce the product. I also love seeing middle schoolers wrap their brains around the formatting of this project (MLA), and how they get excited about solving problems. One of my favorite things, after all, is to solve problems.

The MLA Research Paper unit I do each winter going into spring focuses on activism. Students identify a problem in their school, community, or world and then research that problem, Inevitably, they see causes, effects, and hypothesize solutions as well. This post will walk you through some mentor texts and resources, strategies, and pacing of the overall unit.

Independent learning is always the goal. Biographical reports each year mark one of the first big projects where the gradual release of responsibility actually happens. Biographies are more than about choosing a person that seems interesting, it is about giving students the ability to show interest and make choices in what they are learning. The goal of all teachers should be to teach our students to go find the answers that they seek. A natural curiosity is what drives the passion behind real learning. There is always a moment with this project that I step back, listen to the fingers clicking and clacking on keyboards, see the focus in eyes on screens and books, and the drive to write down facts, and I think to myself: “Learning looks like this.” This post outlines my entire process from directions to the beginning of assessment for biographical report writing in my middle school English Language Arts classroom.

Before we begin the project, students are guided through practice paragraphs. It is always interesting to me where teachers think students should and should not be in terms of writing ability when they reach middle school. Year after year, the review of paragraph writing is one of the critical elements in moving forward into larger projects later on in the year. I start by finding 4-5 articles that are about interesting people. They are specifically high-interest people to start gaining traction with the project before we begin. The first people I grabbed this year were Serena Williams, Bethany Hamilton, Helen Keller, and Nina Simone. We take notes on paragraph writing, watch video clips, hear audio clips, and then practice writing a biographical paragraph together. After that, I assign clockwork partners and release them to practice on their own with other classmates.

The idea of constantly evolving and changing how we shape lessons is one of the many reasons I am still a teacher. I have changed how I teach argumentative writing from shorter on-demand projects to longer multi-genre projects. We have done paragraphs. We have done essays. Normally for this particular project, I connect the topic choices to the novel we just got done reading. However, I always have to remind myself to be inclusive and responsive to the class that I am teaching. Here is the bottom line: My class just wasn’t into Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor. After trying to get a grasp on history, having great class discussions, and talking about plot elements in the text, my class was simply ready to move on. This feeling of wanting to press on along with the feelings of wanting to do more cycles of argumentative writing gave way to the approach I took for this project. I have combined many aspects of how I teach argumentative writing over the years. You will see essay packets, example essays and mentor texts, and the various ways I try to grade throughout the process to make sure I stay above the paper line. However, this post will also outline the intention of showing our students that learning this process can be ultimately tied to the debate process, and the issues we are talking about genuinely have an impact on our lives now. With a class that seemed a little out of touch, nothing can be a better tool to put them back in touch than an argumentative essay.

…The same call for inclusivity in the beauty industry is also in the same call for the materials that we put in front of our students. This necessity drives the movements behind #WeNeedDiverseBooks and a call for diverse classroom libraries. We have to make materials available to our students. 

I bring up this description of skin tone though as a conversation starter for how skin color is often depicted in works of fiction. If we focus on diverse literature, it is important to look at how characters are being represented on the page. How are our students able to describe themselves? What descriptions do they see while reading? What is included in our weekly read aloud? These questions impact the makers of stories in the publishing industry, and they impact the strategies we are using to teach our children. These questions are necessary to bring up and think about in terms of engaging with my young writers that need to have access to mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors in our classroom.

This post outlines different strategies as they are observed in 16 different middle-grade and young adult works of fiction. I am using mentor texts here to show my young writers that the works of published authors are not only accessible but can be unlocked to show them how to write. This post will give a great starting point to the young writer that desires to describe their character AND also make connections to that character’s background, culture, or identity through the use of skin tone identification. 

I would like to take a second to pause out of all of the hustle and bustle of testing and the end of the month of May to realize that it is really, the end of the month of May. I have spent 9 months with my students. Thinking back about accomplishments, it is easy to see how far they have come. Then, I do what all teachers do, and I focus on what they don't know. My missteps, my come-up-shorts, my "yes, you tried, but you didn't quite make it" mentality. This is the ugly stepsister of make-up or catch-up growth: Realizing you still have a long way to go.

My #goals are constantly around trying to get unburied from a stack of paper. This week, I got through 64 argumentative essay rough drafts. I spent three hours total. Insert dramatic pause for reflection, thought, and awe. For any English or writing teacher, this may be making your brain go all fuzzy or blurry because before rubric coding I was spending 5-6 minutes per paper. That would have been 6.4 hours. How did I cut this time in half you ask? The power of rubric codes. 

This started on a Saturday, the Saturday before the Monday when I had to hand back rough drafts to my students. I wanted no part of them. I wanted nothing to do with them. Glancing at my comfy blanket and cup of coffee, I was a human replica of the emoji "ugh." Not wanting to embrace my stack of papers, I started texting a fellow English teacher about her method of using rubric codes. She uses numbers to correspond with different points on a rubric that come up over and over. We have had this discussion before, yet, I was resistant because I had always wanted to follow "traditional" feedback routes. Things I love: ink over typeface, writing in the margins, and seeing a child's face go, "You spent alllll that time on my paper?" Yes, yes I did. I have had many conversations about the writing process lately because it seems as ELA teachers, we all tackle this beast differently. I am not willing to budge on giving feedback on rough drafts, even though some instructional models no longer call for this step in the process. Rubric codes never seemed to fit...until it did. 

I have been spending some time reading books, blog posts, and other resources on the internet about how to manage giving quality feedback without going insane. It is part of my Paper Problem Series I am working on because I believe that if I can figure out how to maintain the level of feedback I am giving AND not work 15 or more hours on a weekend-I can stay teaching. A lot of the books, articles, and other resources I am looking at bring up (to no surprise) the five-paragraph essay. I cringe whenever I read these parts. I think back to a moment that has happened many times over the past seven years. One of my students will come up to my desk and state: "Mrs. H I have a ton more reasons for my thinking, do I have to narrow it down to three for my essay?” I always die a little on the inside. For the given assignment? Yes, you have to narrow it down. For the real world? Not at all. Another one of my students bit the proverbial dust of the five-paragraph essay form. This happens each year because I would like to admit right away...I teach the five-paragraph essay. 

If you haven't picked up on my vibes that I have been throwing out so far...the Achievement Gap is my nemesis. Not the kind that you read about in text books. Not that kind with data...necessarily. The kind where my general English Language Arts students and my advanced English Language Arts students are more than 3 grade levels on average apart from each other in terms of reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. 

Essay Packet: a workbook for students that contains all the steps of the specific essay assignment included; life saver for the teacher of writing; communication method for parents

In part 5 of the Compare/Contrast Essay Series, we explore the beauty of rough draft feedback.

Time for the handing back of rough drafts! Students have put together their introduction rough drafts, body paragraph rough drafts, and conclusion rough drafts to form a first draft of their Compare/Contrast Essay about the topic:

Is our modern American society more similar to or different from the Uglies Dystopian Society/World?

My love-hate relationship with technology in the classroom continues as I reflect on the use of Padlet for conducting a peer review. I like visual feedback. I like looking at how different people respond to writing, and I like seeing how different teachers use feedback to help their writers improve. Students created their first rough draft of their Dystopian Compare/Contrast Essays for a peer review after they participated in a Conclusion Workshop.

Welcome to the second part of the series The Essential Guide to a Compare and Contrast Essay! Today, Advanced English 6 and I went through our adv-compare-contrast-essay-2017 packets and checked off what we had accomplished so far.

The assignment? A compare and contrast essay. The goal? Survive. While this seems dramatic sometimes, most of my students are really excited about their creative writing assignments that involve creating their own dystopian worlds. However, many are not as excited as the complementary assignment of a compare and contrast essay with comparing our modern American Society with the Uglies Dystopian Society. I have a secret...I may be more excited about the academic formal paper (and you know I love creative writing). This will be the introduction to a five-part series about how to craft a Compare and Contrast essay with a focalized topic.

After doing some reflection over break, I got to thinking...how can my students remember the setup for the claim and the punctuation? CLAIM-TERPILLARS OF COURSE!