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Alternatives to the five-paragraph essay: Reading narratives

November 1, 2008 By 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: Collaborative Essays

October 30, 2008 By 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. Students begin by writing informal responses to their reading, which become the basis for small-group discussions and written exchanges between students. In their exchanges, students should practice the following:

  • 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 6 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 or Teenage boys and high school English, I cannot recommend them highly enough. (If you’re an Ontario teacher, you can borrow a copy from the Ontario College of Teachers library — if I don’t have it out at the time, of course.)

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Five paragraphs: Impediment or support?

March 19, 2008 By 5 Comments

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 has heavily influenced my thinking about teaching writing. He questions the five paragraph essay format (comparing it to painting by numbers), stating that,

… 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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