paragraphing

On Wednesday, we spent some time in class talking, discussing, observing, and hopefully learning about paragraphing. It was a fun lesson for me, as a teacher, and I thankfully got lots of good feedback from students as well. I took some pictures of the notes, of which two are below. 

We started thinking about what teachers tell students about paragraphing. That's listed in the top picture in blue. Students came up with things like: must be 5 sentences, must indent, essays must be 5 paragraphs, and in some classes students pointed out the names of different paragraphs--opening or introduction, closing or conclusion, and body in the middle. It was nice to hear that students remembered some of what they've been taught, even if it doesn't always make it to the page or I don't agree with it. 

Then I asked the students to guess how many paragraphs might be on any random page in a "normal" text (what a librarian might call a chapter book maybe, either fiction or nonfiction). Those numbers are in the top picture, in the grid on the left. Then I had the students turn to a random page and count the number of paragraphs. I didn't keep that list of numbers, but you can see that the average was a bit higher than their original guess. We then did the same for nonfiction articles--their guesses are the second column and the article counts are the far right. The averages are significantly different, which is exactly what I wanted the students to see.

After we made these observations, we needed to try to answer some questions, so we could learn from the texts and apply that learning to our own writing. So I basically just asked the question: why? Why are there more paragraphs in fiction than we originally thought? Why are there so many paragraphs in a nonfiction text? This led to another question--how do we know there's a new paragraph?

The answers were all based on observations from students, and I'm super proud of them. The class went well, and lots of focused discussion took place. Meaningful questions were raised, and observations from our books led us to some answers. But the answers are not right/wrong or black/white. The answers could apply in one situation, but not in another. And that makes me happy as a teacher, because it means the students are understanding that there are nuances to writing based on the situation, which is likewise based on the audience and purpose. Did I say it was a good day?

self-awareness

From a September 10th Freewriting Reflection:

Question: 
If you were to score this piece of writing for the writing skill and thoughtfulness it shows, what score would you give it, and why?
Two Student Answers:
1 - "I would give  myself a 3 out of 5 because it might not be clear to some, and I usually don't see some things I need to correct."
2 - "I would give it a 5/10. I just wrote not caring what I wrote." 

I chose to showcase these two student responses for the self-awareness that they display. Eighth graders that display this level of self-awareness are well on their way to achieving their goals, because they have the ability to accurately assess their situation. Much too many eighth graders inaccurately assess their ability in everything, including school-specific skills like organization, study habits, or content specific knowledge.

Beyond self-awareness though, each student makes a great "writing" connection in their respective responses.

The first student is aware that he doesn't "see" the things that he may need to correct, as a writer. I'm so glad that this is pointed out. Understanding what to look for, and how to see what you're looking for, is a skill that I still work on in my writing. Further, understanding that a writer can't "see" everything (that's why professional, paid writers have editors!), is important for students AND teachers. In class, we've been working on sentence level writing skills that incorporate using proper internal and end punctuation, with a proficiency in interchanging phrases and clauses to build a variety of sentence structures.

The second student is aware that caring about what you write usually has an affect upon the score that a writing will earn. This student gives himself (yes, it's a guy) a failing score. Hopefully the self-awareness mentioned earlier is rooted in a causal connection: not caring about your writing = bad writing. So what's the first step to improving writing? Caring about what you write. How do I get students to care about what they write? Give them choice. Give them time. Talk to them to help them find things they care about. I try all these things. It takes time, but it's valuable time.