Ohio Standards Connection Writing Process Benchmark A Formulate writing ideas, and identify a topic appropriate to the purpose and audience. Indicator 1 Generate writing ideas through discussions with others and from printed material, and keep a list of writing ideas. Indicator 3 Establish and develop a clear thesis statement for informational writing or a clear plan or outline for narrative writing. Indicator 4 Determine a purpose and audience and plan strategies (e.g., adapting formality of style, including explanations or definitions as appropriate to audience needs) to address purpose and audience. Benchmark C Use a variety of strategies to revise content, organization and style, and to improve word choice, sentence variety, clarity and consistency of writing. Indicator 6 Organize writing to create a coherent whole with an effective and engaging introduction, body and conclusion and a closing sentence that summarizes, extends or elaborates on points or ideas in the writing. Lesson Summary: Students brainstorm personal experiences and create journal entries that reflect these experiences. They select and develop one of these journals into a personal narrative. They revise and edit their narratives through peer response writing and editing groups. Estimated Duration: Three hours of successive class time (additional time for journaling prior to undertaking assignment to be polished) Commentary: Teacher-reviewers credited this lesson for its clarity, effective preassessment, repeated journaling and group work. Teachers noted particularly the value of the opportunities to reflect on life experiences and required embedded reflection. One teacher noted the value of hearing multiple corrections. Another remarked, Students not only have to write their own pieces but they also have to engage with a peer... Pre-Assessment: Distribute Draft: A Terrible Accident, Attachment A. Ask students to revise each sentence, correcting sentences form, usage and grammar. When all students complete the exercise, pair students to share their corrections and agree upon one revision between them per sentence. In whole class discussion, encourage pairs to share their corrections. Using overhead transparency or discussion, review the revision possibilities for each sentence. Scoring Guidelines: Collect the students individual corrections. Because each student s sentence corrections may be different, use the revised sentences as an initial guide for grouping students with varying language abilities in heterogeneous revision and editing groups. Post-Assessment: Each student drafts, revises and edits a personal experience narrative. A peer reviews the final draft of the narrative, using the Personal Narrative Rubric, Attachment B, prior to its submission. Each writer completes a Personal Narrative Writing Reflection, Attachment C. Collect the final draft of the personal narrative, the peer s rubric evaluation and the reflection. 1
Indicator 7 Use a variety of sentence structures and lengths (e.g., simple, compound and complex sentences; parallel or repetitive sentence structure). Indicator 8 Use paragraph form in writing, including topic sentences that arrange paragraphs in a logical sequence, using effective transitions and closing sentences and maintaining coherence across the whole through the use of parallel structures. Indicator 9 Use precise language, action verbs, sensory details, colorful modifiers and style as appropriate to audience and purpose, and use techniques to convey a personal style and voice. Indicator 12 Add and delete examples and details to better elaborate on a stated central idea, to develop more precise analysis or persuasive argument or to enhance plot, setting and character in narrative texts. Indicator 13 Rearrange words, sentences and paragraphs, and add transitional words and phrases to clarify meaning and achieve specific aesthetic and rhetorical purposes. Scoring Guidelines: Paired students respond to each other s personal narrative, using the Personal Narrative Rubric. Collect the completed rubric, the final draft of the narrative and the writer s reflection. Using the same rubric, evaluate each writer s personal narrative and re-teach individual indicators as necessary. Instructional Procedures: Day One 1. Brainstorm topics with students that could become enriched personal narratives. 2. For five to six days provide students with ten minutes per day for journaling about one of their selected topics. With each journal, students create an overview of one story developed from the brainstormed list. 3. After five or six journal entries have been drafted, ask the students to reread each journal story and select one to develop into a polished personal narrative. 4. Before students begin enriching their narrative idea, select a short first-person narrative from class anthology or from outside sources to read in class and discuss its narrative element and development. These elements include the narrative lead and events, dialogue, effective rhetorical devices, embedded reflective elements, flashback, etc. 5. Provide students with in-class opportunities to develop their personal narratives. 6. Teach elements of style, precise language and sensory details and targeted audiences, using a writer s handbook or a writing textbook, which provides examples for students to revise and discuss. 7. Ask students to re-examine elements of their own narrative to reflect precise language, sensory details and sentence development that reflects an understanding of their own narrative style. Instructional Tips: One method of brainstorming personal narrative topics involves modeling the process by telling three or four personal stories. No story should be more than a summary of the experience and last more than two or three minutes. After retelling the story, ask students to recall whether they too have had similar experiences. Use stories that are both poignant and funny, etc. Stories about car accidents, job-related issues, pets, athletics, embarrassing moments, fears, etc. can provide the basis of a personal narrative. 2
Writing Applications Benchmark A Compose reflective writings that balance reflections by using specific personal experiences to draw conclusions about life. Indicator 1 Write reflective compositions that: a. use personal experiences as a basis for reflection on some aspect of life; b. draw abstract comparisons between specific incidents and abstract concepts; c. maintain a balance between describing incidents and relating them to more general abstract ideas that illustrate personal beliefs; and d. move from specific examples to generalizations about life. Writing Conventions Benchmark A Use correct spelling conventions. Indicator 1 Use correct spelling conventions. Benchmark B Use correct punctuation and capitalization. Indicator 2 Use correct punctuation and capitalization. Once the students understand the concept of a personal incident short summary, have them keep a list of possible topics. The list of topics should be composed of phrases to jog the memory (e.g., my car accident, the death of my dog or the championship soccer match ). Remind students that this particular narrative includes peer evaluation. Caution them against choosing this assignment for their most personal and/or secret moments. Although students draft for ten minutes each day, the remainder of the class period may also provide opportunities for minilessons on those editing skills found lacking in the preassessment. Depending upon the length of each class period, teach other concepts, skills and/or literature along with the development of the personal narrative. Part Two 8. Prepare the students to respond to their peers writing by randomly selecting students for the groups. Use the preassessment as a guide to assure heterogeneity. Each group should be composed of four or five members. 9. Provide groups with a non-threatening collaborative writing activity to initiate their revision work. Use a Bio-Poem Outline, Attachment E, and require students to describe a cartoon character or an action hero; OR use a cartoon layout where students provide the character s words in the strip s balloons. 10. Have each group orally share its creation. 11. Ask each student to write a reflection of their group writing experience. 12. Address the class with general comments about their reflections (after having read them) to help the groups refine their collaborative efforts. 13. Provide the members of each group with a Personal Narrative Response Guide, Attachment D. Each student completes a revision response guide for every other member of the group. Part Three 14. After students revise their personal narratives, place students in final editing pairs or triads. Again, use the pre-assessment as a guide to ensure diverse skill levels make up each group. 15. Ask each student to proofread the peer s personal narrative using the Personal Narrative Rubric, Attachment B. 16. Ask each student to complete the Personal Narrative Writing Reflection, Attachment C, after collecting the personal narratives and peer rubrics. 3
Benchmark C Demonstrate understanding of the grammatical conventions of the English language. Indicator 3 Use correct grammar (e.g., verb tenses, parallel structure, indefinite and relative pronouns). Differentiated Instructional Support: Instruction is differentiated according to learner needs, to help all learners either meet the intent of the specified indicator(s) or, if the indicator is already met, to advance beyond the specified indicator(s). Students listen to each others personal narrative topics to gather their own topics. Grouped students assist each other during the drafting, revising and editing stages of the writing process. Students write about a topic specific to their own experiences and from their own viewpoint. Provide a scribe for students requiring one and/or make other accommodations as needed. Consider working as a peer with one or more students. Extensions: Students can orally present their personal narratives to the whole class. Students narratives can be compiled into an Our Stories booklet, complete with an introduction about their classroom writing experiences. Students apply personal narrative writing skills to the development of a third-person narrative. Home Connections: Students talk with family members to more vividly recall narrative incident. Family members who recall the narrative incident can be encouraged to create their own narrative of the incident, providing another view point for the story. Interdisciplinary Connections: Foreign Language Communication: Communicating in languages other than English Benchmark: I. Create presentations on a range of original authentic expressive products. Indicator: 11. Create texts (e.g., short stories, poems, skits) based on themes/perspectives (e.g., family, dating, careers, music) from the target culture. 4
Materials and Resources: The inclusion of a specific resource in any lesson formulated by the Ohio Department of Education should not be interpreted as an endorsement of that particular resource, or any of its contents, by the Ohio Department of Education. The Ohio Department of Education does not endorse any particular resource. The Web addresses listed are for a given site s main page, therefore, it may be necessary to search within that site to find the specific information required for a given lesson. Please note that information published on the Internet changes over time, therefore the links provided may no longer contain the specific information related to a given lesson. Teachers are advised to preview all sites before using them with students. For the teacher: For the student: all attachments, personal stories, overhead projector and transparencies writing paper and utensils and personal stories Vocabulary: Dialogue Embedded reflection Flashback Narrative lead and events Rhetorical devices Sensory images Technology Connections: Students develop their personal narratives using word processing program. Students use email or chat rooms monitored by teacher to discuss and revise their stories. Research Connections: Arter, Judith and Jay McTighe. Scoring Rubrics in the Classroom: Using Performance Criteria for Assessing and Improving Student Performance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2001. A holistic rubric gives a single score or rating for any entire product or performance based on an overall impression of a student s work. An analytical trait rubric divides a product or performance into essential traits or dimensions so they can be judged separately one analyzes a product or performance for essential traits. A separate score is provided for each trait. Holistic rubrics work best for: Judging simple products or performances Getting a quick snapshot of the overall quality or achievement Judging the impact of a product or performance Holistic rubrics, however, do not provide detailed analysis which helps plan instruction. Analytical rubrics address some of the limitations of the holistic rubric. These manage to Judge complex performances involving several significant dimensions Break performances into traits in order to more readily grasp the components of quality Provide more specific feedback to students, parents and teachers. 5
A general rubric can be used across similar performances. The same rubric can be used for all open-ended mathematics problems or all writing assignments. Task-specific rubrics can only be used for a single task. Arter & McTighe include a metarubric or A Rubric for Rubrics summarizing the qualities of good, average and unacceptable rubrics. The qualities of the good rubrics are included here. Content/Coverage Content is based on the best thinking in the field. If counts of anything are included, the counts really do reflect quality. Definitions of terms are correct and reflect current thinking in the field. Number of points on the rating scale makes sense. Content is selective yet complete. The rubric is insightful; it helps students understand the nature of quality. Clarity Rubric s clarity assures different teachers would similarly rate the same product or performance. A single teacher can use the rubric to provide consistent ratings over time. Words are specific and accurate. Terms are defined and samples provided, if necessary. Rubric provides just enough descriptive detail. Basis for assigning ratings is clear. Practicality The rubric is manageable, including only enough traits to be easily remembered and internalized. Results translate clearly into instruction. When the skill is complex, the rubric is analytical rather than holistic. The rubric is usually general, rather than task-specific. The rubric is broadly applicable to the content of interest. Task-specific rubrics are used only where justifiable (the task is sufficiently complex or the nature of the skill being assessed is complex). The rubric can be used by the students to revise their own work, plan their own learning and track their own progress. Technical Quality The rubric language is appropriate for the diversity of students found in typical classrooms. Wording is supportive of students it describes status of a performance rather than judgments of student worth. Atwell, Nancie. In the Middle: Writing, Reading and Learning with Adolescents. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1987. Group Share Sessions 6
Group share meetings end each writing workshop and feature all the elements of individual conferences with one key difference. Here all writers respond to an individual writer s work. It s not show-and-tell but purposeful dialogue. Editing Conferences Sample skills taught in editing conferences: Edit using a different pen or pencil. Put the date and draft number on every piece. Use to indicate new paragraphs. Watch for too-short, choppy paragraphs. Combine these. Circle words that need spell-checked. Read pieces softly to yourself and put periods where your voice drops and stops. Proofread slowly to yourself. Watch for saying the same thing more than once. Mini-lessons are 15- to 30-minute direct-instruction lessons designed to help students learn literacy skills and become more strategic readers and writers. In these lessons, students and the teacher are focused on a single goal; students are aware of why it is important to learn the skill or strategy through modeling, explanation and practice. Then independent application takes place using authentic literacy materials. Many researchers recommend using a whole-part-whole organization for teacher skills and strategies. Students read and respond to a text that is the whole; then teachers focus on a skill or strategy and teach a mini-lesson using examples from the text whenever possible this is the part. Finally, students return to the text or another text to apply what they have learned by doing more reading or writing or doing a project this is the whole again. The skills approach to reading is described as part to whole, and the holistic approach is described as whole to part. This approach considers both. Instead of isolated drill and practice activities that are often meaningless to students, this approach encourages teachers to clearly connect what students are learning in mini-lessons to authentic literacy activities. Calkins, L. M. When children want to punctuate: Basic skills belong in context. Language Arts, 57, (1980): 567-73. Decades of research demonstrate that teaching grammar as a school subject does not improve most students' writing, nor even the "correctness" of their writing. What works better is teaching selected aspects of grammar (including sentence variety and style, punctuation, and usage) in the context of students' writing-that is, when they are revising and editing their writing For improving editing skills, it is most effective and efficient to teach only the grammatical concepts that are critically needed for editing writing, and to teach these concepts and their terms mostly through minilessons and writing conferences, particularly while helping students edit their writing. Palinscar, Annemarie S. & Kathryn Ransom From the Mystery Spot to the Thoughtful Spot: The Instruction of Metacognitive Strategies. The Reading Teacher, 41 (1988) 784-789. Metacognitive knowledge is strategic knowledge used during reading. It consists of all of the strategies used to actively construct the meaning of a passage. It is very useful for 7
comprehension; good readers stop to look at a figure, sound out an unfamiliar word, reread a troublesome sentence, think about what they have read, underline important information, and read chapter summaries first. Metacognition then is students conscious awareness of their thinking. Readers and writers use metacognitive strategies to monitor and evaluate their comprehension. Zemelman, Steven, Harvey Daniels and Arthur Hyde. Best Practice: New Standards of Teaching and Learning in America's Schools. Portsmouth, WRITING All children can and should write. Help students find real purposes for writing Encourage students to take ownership and responsibility Organize writing workshops where students journal in a cooperative, workshop setting Realize effective writing programs involve the entire writing process Give students real audiences and a classroom context of shared learning Extend writing throughout the curriculum Teach grammar and mechanics in context, at the editing stage of students writing Attachments: Attachment A, Draft: A Terrible Accident Attachment B, Personal Narrative Rubric Attachment C, Personal Narrative Writing Reflection Attachment D, Personal Narrative Response Guide Attachment E, Bio-Poem Outline 8
Attachment A Draft: A Terrible Accident Directions: Read each of the following sentences. Revise the language and/or usage in each. 1. The story I am going to write about was about the time I broke my leg. 2. While I was riding my bike when I was twelve. 3. It has been a sunny day and I and my friends went to the park on our bikes. 4. I had almost gotten to the park when I decided to show off my bike s riding ability. 5. My friends Dominic and Bart were right behind me. 6. Waiting for me to lead the way up the curbing. 7. I can feel they re eyes on my back and I pedaled faster to get some speed up. 8. Just when I reached the curb I pulled a wheelie, at which the front wheel of my bike reared up about two feet off the concrete. 9. And then it happened. 10. Instead of whirling on my back bike wheel, I flipped over the handlebars of the bike. 11. I fell on my back and rolled over on my arm. 12. My arm broke in two places. 13. I screamed my bikes broken. 14. My friends and I started to laugh even though I was in a greatly lot of pain. 15. I didn t do any more wheelies for a long time on my bike. 9
Attachment B Personal Narrative Rubric Directions: Place a check beside each accurate statement. Student Teacher 1. The narrative s lead effectively begins the story. 2. The narrator is consistent throughout the story. 3. The narrative s body develops the incident fully. 4. The narrative s incident develops logically or chronologically. 5. The narrative s setting is clear and precise. 6. The story contains no extraneous story elements. 7. The narrative s conclusion is appropriate or surprising. 8. The narrator has embedded self-reflection into the story. 9. The narrative is free of word choice and spelling errors. 10. The narrative is free of punctuation and capitalization errors. 11. The narrative contains sentences that are varied in length and complexity. 12. The narrative contains effective sensory details and action verbs. 13. The narrative is paragraphed appropriately. 14. The narrative employs elements of show, don t tell writing. 15. The narrator employs direct quotes. Teacher comments: 10
Attachment C Personal Narrative Writing Reflection Writer: Directions: Respond to each of the following questions, as you reflect upon your personal narrative writing process. 1. What do you consider the most successful element of your narrative? What makes it so? 2. What part of the narrative might you further revise, expand upon or cut if provided the opportunity? Why would you make this further change? 3. From whom did you receive revision assistance? How did that group or individual help you see the story s development more precisely or differently? 4. What aspect of the narrative writing was most difficult for you? How did you overcome that difficulty? 5. How will your writing process on this personal narrative impact upon the next essay you write? 11
Attachment D Personal Narrative Response Guide Writer Reader Directions: Respond in writing to the following questions as they apply to the piece of writing being read. [Remember: Show the author that you listened well! Try to remember (or jot down) something that struck you as memorable in the narrative.] 1. How does the narrative s lead get the reader into the story? What is successful about this lead? How can the lead be improved? 2. Is dialogue (direct quotes) used in the story to move the plot along or to develop characterization? Is it effective? Can some exposition be re-written as dialogue to improve the movement of the story? Make suggestions. 3. Is reflection developed in the narrative? What does the writer say was the impact of this incident on his/her life? 4. Name one scene in the story you would like to see expanded. What might the writer add to the scene to develop it further? 5. Does the narrative ramble anywhere? Does the story get off focus anywhere? If so, make some suggestions to tighten the storyline so that it flows better. 6. Give the writer some examples of effective show, don t tell writing; or, make suggestions to correct the tell language into show language. 12
Attachment E Bio-Poem Outline First name Four Traits that describe your character (adjectives) Relative of (brother; sister; friend; etc ) Lover of (three things or people) Who feels Who fears (three items) (three items) Who gives (three items) Who would like to see (three items) Resident of Last Name ====================================================== EXAMPLE: Oscar Friend to Big Bird Lover of anything dirty or dingy or dusty Who feels grouchy, cranky, contrary Who fears leaving his trash can, a clean-up on Sesame Street, being alone Who gives up nothing that s rotten or ragged or rusty Who would like to see scenic landfills of America Resident of Sesame Street The Grouch ====================================================== 13