King Lear Collaborative Essays
December 14, 2009 by Brad W · Leave a Comment
The Grade 12 students have been busily working on their King Lear collaborative essays and I’m anticipating some good holiday reading once they’re all handed in by Friday.
Throughout the unit, students were asked to publish two blog posts per week on the class blog portal. Students came up with questions that they had about the play, attempted to answer their own questions, and commented on their classmates’ blog posts. These blog posts, comments, and replies, are now the starting point for their collaborative essays.
For the King Lear collaborative essay, I asked the students to first think of the topic that they were most interested in writing about, and to think about their own opinion and ideas regarding that topic. Then, students went to the class blog portal and noted all of the relevant comments from their peers.
Once the students have stated their topic and their own opinion, and they’ve listed their peers’ key ideas and their own key ideas, then students are ready to arrange their essay around their reasons, their defence of those reasons, and rebuttals to their critics.
Some of the topics they’ve come up with include:
- Who is the hero of “King Lear”?
- Why did Cordelia refuse to give her father the answer he was looking for?
- After being banished by Lear, why does Kent return?
- When does Lear lose his sanity?
- Did Lear give up his kingdom too early?
I’m excited to read these collaborative essays; they’ve really originated with the students and spring from the dialogue that they’ve been having on the class blog portal. The collaborative essay assignment requires the students to think for themselves and to be themselves; it requires students to put their oar in the water and join the 400-year old conversation that has revolved around the Bard.
I like Mr. B-G’s recent comments on teaching students to write:
How do we teach students to write? We teach them to think. We teach them to develop content. We help them understand ideas like elaboration and explication. We provide them with opportunities to stretch their minds and flex their intellectual muscles. We give them opportunities to pump out words and ideas without fear of judgement. We teach them how to think critically and make sense of their musings and meanderings. We show them how to tailor and edit and rethink and resee and rearrange. We empower them to be creators.
This King Lear collaborative essay assignment is so much more interesting for the class than the 5-paragraph essay format; it is free of the shackles of the 5-paragraph essay format that has been suffocating any potential talent. A collaborative essay assignment is… real.
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Collaborative essay success
June 6, 2009 by Brad W · Leave a Comment
I’ve been marking the collaborative essays that my Grade 12 University level students recently submitted, and I must say that I’m thrilled.
Polished, perfect, thesis-argument-conclusion papers, they are not.
What they are is simply wonderful. They represent some of the finest thinking that I have seen expressed in high school writing to date.
In brief, the collaborative essay assignment asked students to select an interesting question about Hamlet and then, using the class blog portal, find other students who expressed different ideas about that question. Each student was expected to either work directly with or at least quote extensively from other students’ writing on the topic to create a unified final essay.
And the essays are truly fantastic to read. My hunch is that because they are in dialogue with one another, students are not intimidated by “expert” or “critical” opinions. Instead, faced with alternative opinions, students are considering the ideas, weighing the evidence, and then constructing their own arguments in response. The resulting essays have genuine purpose, instead of artificially constructed and horribly bland theses.
My hope is that they will remember this experience and be able to translate the thinking and writing to situations where they are dealing with published critics’ opinions.
Adjusting our essay expectations
November 13, 2008 by Brad W · Leave a Comment
I’ve just returned from a great department meeting. A major topic of discussion was the essay and our expectations around that for each grade and level.
There were a few things about our conversation that encouraged and even inspired me in my work:
We were actually having a conversation about essays.
I know that for some teachers in some schools, talking about the sacred essay with an intent to alter expectations for it is simply not an option. I am grateful that I work with a team, and a department head, who are willing to review topics like this.
We all agreed that the five-paragraph essay can be over-used.
One of my colleagues described Grade 11 students who became anxious when she suggested that a topic might be better addressed in seven paragraphs instead of five. Another spoke of senior students asking for handouts to complete an essay.
Our consensus was that we will introduce the five-paragraph essay format in Grade 9 only, and explain that it is a crutch we are providing. Thereafter, fill-in-the-blank handouts and forms are going to be avoided, as many of us have already been doing.
We all agreed that we will use a greater number of alternate assessment tools.
The Ontario Curriculum has changed, and Media Studies now occupies one of four strands. (The other three are oral communication, reading, and writing.) With this shift, we agreed that we need to be introducing more multi-media projects as tools for assessment rather than relying on the essay to do so much.
In very practical terms, we sat down and hammered out the minimum number of essays and other standard written projects that we will expect from each level. This allows us to achieve some consistency across courses. (For example, all of the Grade 10 Academic students will complete a minimum of one essay and one persuasive piece, regardless of who they have as a teacher.)
All in all, I’m pleased with the progress that we made together in this meeting. I’m also relieved that I don’t have to try to extract 6 essays out of my Grade 12 students next semester.
Alternatives to the five-paragraph essay: Organic essays
November 8, 2008 by Brad W · Leave a Comment
This is part of a series exploring alternatives to the five-paragraph essay. You may also wish to read the series introduction or about collaborative essays, scripted dialogues, reading narratives, and multigenre papers.
The organic essay is one in which the form is intimately connected to the content of the essay. I do not find this easy to teach, but I do enjoy the submitted essays so much more than those that have been crammed into five neat paragraphs.
As we read through a text, I ask students to note in their ThinkBooks (journals) moments of interest or confusion. When we are finished reading, we go back through those moments and develop one or two genuine questions. I try to discourage those obvious thesis-leading questions, as students tend to hunt for those when they know an essay is coming up shortly.
Once we have those interesting questions, I ask students to start to collect any evidence that might have some bearing on the question. I encourage them to consider themselves forensic detectives in this exercise, avoiding any conclusions until they have assembled all of the relevant data.
We then begin to sort the data into relevant groups. I like to have students use mind maps or graphic organizers at this stage. Students could also write one piece of evidence on a single small piece of paper (or index card) and then pile those pieces into groups.
Once they have their groupings in place, then students get to develop a tentative thesis. I remind them again of the forensic detective approach here — their approach here should be to test their theory with the evidence at hand before developing final conclusions.
And at this point they can create an outlined structure for their essay. I ask students to write one sentence that summarizes each grouping / pile of evidence. They organize those sentences into an order that seems to best convey their evidence. Each sentence in their outline tends to become the topic sentence of a paragraph in the essay, which makes for easier drafting.
As I mentioned at the start, this is not an easy approach to teach or evaluate. Students often need to be introduced to basic classification skills before we can start this. Many of them get stumped and frustrated not having the usual five-paragraph crutch at hand.
Almost all, however, eventually wind up thinking their way through the writing process and create something worthwhile in the end.
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Alternatives to the five-paragraph essay: Multigenre papers
November 3, 2008 by Brad W · Leave a Comment
This is part of a series exploring alternatives to the five-paragraph essay. You may also wish to read the series introduction or about collaborative essays, scripted dialogues, and reading narratives.
I first encountered the concept of the multigenre paper a year ago, and chose to use it as the course culminating activity with my Grade 12 College-level students. Throughout the year we had been asking what we called “life’s big questions” designed to get us all thinking about our values and ideals. The final project was an opportunity for students to pull their learning together and communicate what they believed.
Very simply, a multigenre paper comprises a variety of genres communicating ideas related to a focus theme or guiding question. Often students are asked to use a minimum number of genres in their final project.
If you’re curious, the Reflective Teacher has a great example of a multigenre assignment sheet. I’ve also found this fairly advanced outline helpful, although needing heavy modification for high school.
The multigenre approach worked very well. Students used a range of genres to explore and explain their core beliefs, and their submissions were thoughtful and creative.
I’ll admit that it was difficult for me to set aside so completely the five-paragraph essay with its comfortable limitations. Multigenre papers cannot be taught en masse with fill-in-the-blank handouts, and they aren’t easily marked. I’m glad I persisted, though, as the results were so satisfactory. Students actually enjoyed this assignment and really worked with the genres to express their beliefs.
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Alternatives to the five-paragraph essay: Reading narratives
November 1, 2008 by Brad W · 2 Comments
This is part of a series exploring alternatives to the five-paragraph essay. You may also wish to read the series introduction or about collaborative essays and scripted dialogues.
Reading is a process that involves setbacks, challenges, breakthroughs, and for many of us moments of joy. As we read our understanding of the text grows and changes. It’s easy for me, and I suspect others, to forget that comprehension forms in this way, and to treat it more as a target that students more or less miss.
Inviting students to reflect on the reading process is a memorable way to consider how we have interacted with the text in an unfolding drama.
To set this up, I had students keep their “ThinkBooks” (reading journals) open as we read the text. We paused often to note any questions, predictions, contradictions, surprises, or moments of interest. I modeled this as we started out, wondering aloud about why a character might be motivated to act in a certain way, or why a particular word is used, or to describe what I pictured as we were reading.
After reading the text, I asked students to go back through their ThinkBooks and create a story about their reading process. I encouraged them to especially include the bits where they were confused, and how that was resolved, or where the text upended their expectations, and why.
What emerged were some thoughtful, interesting reflections on students’ adventures in reading. They weren’t polished pieces of writing, but they represented some real wrestling with the subject. I noticed that students seemed a bit more emboldened about reading after doing this, which I suspect was because we had spent a lot of time embracing the messiness of the process. In effect, this exercise seemed to affirm for students that it’s okay to wonder about what they’re reading; in fact, it’s part of the point of reading.
A final thought for my fellow Ontario teachers: this alternative gets at that tricky metacognition expectation that many of us are searching for ways to evaluate.
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Alternatives to the five-paragraph essay: Scripted Dialogue
October 31, 2008 by Brad W · Leave a Comment
This is part of a series exploring alternatives to the five-paragraph essay. You may also wish to read the series introduction and about collaborative essays.
Encouraging students to consider multiple perspectives to a text is a challenge I enjoy and find quite rewarding. It’s frankly exciting to see students’ understanding of a text evolve into something far more nuanced than that with which they began.
I have found that asking students to create a dialogue between themselves and one of the characters or the narrator of a text is a terrific way to invite them into this type of learning. As we read through a text, I ask students to pay attention to moments when characters confuse them, interest them, upset them, or otherwise catch their attention. We keep track of those moments — sometimes as a class, sometimes in individual learning journals — as we progress through the story.
After we’ve finished reading, I ask students to choose one character who has caught their attention most often. Their next task is to develop a dialogue with that character. They start with a series of questions that they would like the character to answer, and then go about trying to answer them from the perspective of the character. The final product is a written dialogue, usually in the form of a script, although sometimes in the form of a letter or email exchange.
What I appreciate about this format is that it encourages students to explore a text, to wonder, to investigate without having a pre-fabricated answer in the form of a thesis. Students tend to finish the exercise more positively than they do that of writing a five-paragraph essay, which is always important for me. (I want to have students leaving my classroom excited about reading, not discouraged by it.)
I’d wager, too, that students have done at least as much hard thinking in the process of creating this dialogue as they have in defining a thesis and mustering evidence to support it.
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Alternatives to the five-paragraph essay: Collaborative Essays
October 30, 2008 by Brad W · Leave a Comment
This is part of a series exploring alternatives to the five-paragraph essay. You may also wish to read the series introduction.
The idea for the collaborative essay comes straight from Pirie’s Reshaping High School English
- actively listening to the other’s ideas
- considering how that perspective impacts their own thinking
- and explaining where they agree and differ.
This exchange can then be transformed into a shared product that develops some of the issues raised. It’s important to emphasize keeping the tone friendly and respectful, as the main goal of this exercise is to stretch students’ thinking and empathy for others’ perspectives. I haven’t tried this alternative yet, but it strikes me as one that lends itself remarkably well to the medium of the blog. In their own blogs, students could reflect on their reading and then comment on one another’s posts. The first round of written exchanges could be accomplished in this way, and would be done in a way that allows students to learn from a broader group of classmates. Using a service like Diigo, which allows for web annotation, I as the facilitator could comment on specific points without getting in the flow of the conversation. I imagine the final product could take the form of a web/wiki page or a paper-based document. The former would allow students to easily reference specific points from their earlier exchanges, thus highlighting their own progression in thought. The latter might be more rigorous, however, taking the discussion offline and putting it in black and white on paper. It’s an alternative that I’m planning on trying next semester with my Grade 12 University students. Providing our school internet security allows us to get onto blogs, of course.
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Alternatives to the five-paragraph essay: Series Introduction
October 29, 2008 by Brad W · 5 Comments
This semester I have been thinking about, reading about, and looking up alternatives to the five paragraph essay. I feel that I’m at a good point in my learning to take stock of what I’ve discovered and invite some feedback.
It probably comes as no surprise that I have become disenchanted with the five paragraph (or 32-sentence) essay. Why? I believe that thoughtful writing is a critical skill that we teachers have the opportunity to encourage our students to develop. I do not believe that every piece of thoughtful writing can be expressed in five neat paragraphs: introduction, three arguments, and conclusion. I believe that the structure of writing should emerge from the ideas and assist in expressing them, rather than strong-arming them into a neat format that, coincidentally, is easy to mark.
Five-paragraph essays are tidy; emerging thinking is not. I wonder if by relying on formulaic writing we are insulating ourselves from the messiness of teaching students how to develop and express an opinion? Teaching a form is relatively easy: a couple of fill-in-the-blank forms go a long way to completing the lesson. Encouraging students to develop and express their ideas is entirely different.
So in the upcoming days, I’ll examine alternatives to the five-paragraph essay that I’ve encountered. Some of these alternatives I’ve tried out in some fashion; some I haven’t yet.
Here’s what’s in store:
- Collaborative essays
- Scripted dialogue
- Reading narratives
- Multi-genre papers
- And what I’m calling “The Organic Essay”
One final note: Many of you will recognize Bruce Pirie’s fingerprints all over this series. It would be hard to overestimate the impact that his writing has had on my own teaching practice. If you haven’t read his Reshaping High School English
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Five paragraphs: Impediment or support?
March 19, 2008 by Brad W · Leave a Comment
One of my colleagues, who is one of our school’s best teachers of the essay, was commenting on a recent collection of student-submitted essays. She was pleased to have Gr. 11 College-level students submitting substantial essays several pages in length a day early – a medal-winning accomplishment in my opinion.
It was her next comment that prompted this post. She remarked that all of the essays were in the standard five-paragraph form, but despite this, students weren’t expressing their ideas well.
I’ve been mulling this over since. I wonder if it’s more a case of students not expressing their ideas well because of the five-paragraph form, rather than despite it?
As I’ve mentioned, Bruce Pirie’s Reshaping High School English
… an initial concern for the organic growth of ideas is overtaken by a concern for regularized form, with the machinery of topic sentences, paragraphs, and single controlling ideas. (76)
It certainly feels like form has dominated ideas in our teaching culture. When I hear a colleague wondering about the discrepancy between success with the form and success in communication, I am reminded of Pirie’s claims as to what the five-paragraph form actually teaches :
- there are rules to writing
- ideas can be forced into a cookie-cutter form
- structure is all-important because students’ success is based on their use of the assigned format
- and at the same time, structure is not important because students don’t have to find an appropriate form for their ideas
I think Pirie’s right. And if this is what the five-paragraph essay actually teaches, then it should be no surprise to us educators to find our students meeting the form expectations without actually saying anything worthwhile.
I am on the hunt for more authors discussing this tension between form and the growth of ideas. Serendipitously, I came across Doug Noon’s comments about teaching writing based on Graff and Birkenstein’s book They Say / I Say
Graff and Birkenstein feel that it isn’t enough to say true things that conform to a thesis statement, and support it with evidence, which is how the essay form is conventionally taught. They remind us that in the real world, people don’t usually express themselves without some provocation. Our writing is improved, they say, when we include the voices of the provocateurs in what we have to say.
They Say / I Say sounds like the type of work I’m looking for, and I have it in my shopping cart right now. None too soon, either, as I see from my course outlines that I am to be teaching the essay form to at least two classes in the next month.
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