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. 

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.