By: Chloe Kannan
Hello TCRWP followers, Language Arts Masters, and Middle School Educators,
It has been awhile since my last post. If you are a teacher, you know how crazy the year gets. Right after this unit finished, we jumped into memoirs in 7th grade, took a nose-dive into a tech integration project with memoirs after that, and 8th graders dove into “You Choose” writing units. With one child turning in a 39 page draft of dystopian story, I knew that giving feedback to kids needed to be the priority. I have 2 weeks of school left, and I hate not finding out the ending. Especially to a good story…
Someone on Twitter asked a short time back, WHAT HAPPENED in that unit?
I look at the screen shot below and sometimes I think I am a teacher psycho.
How can you possibly teach an argumentative unit with two papers and a project-based learning aspect in 12 instructional days? You also have to give draft feedback on both papers. And then you add another content area and their standards to the equation.
The answer is you just believe in your colleagues, your curriculum, your kids, and of course, your own judgment.
March Madness is Upon Us: Measles, Mumps, Hep B, Pertussis, Diptheria
We had five class days to get this paper done. Spring Break was coming upon us fast (beginning of March), and we had to give time to prepare for their final school-wide PBL presentations. If you remember from earlier posts, students had to write an argumentative science research paper addressing the World Health Organization; students needed to argue that their disease needed to be the priority for the upcoming year to be eradicated through vaccine. Considering at the time, all of these diseases were reappearing in the United States, it was a perfect paper to do alongside science.
We had built their argumentative skills, and science had been doing source evaluation. Now it was time to combine forces.
I gave the science department a basic outline that could help kids plug their research and findings into after they had selected their disease.
Students brought that outline to mine and Velicia’s classes and we gave them one 80 minute class period to draft, reminding them of all of the argument skills they had already learned.
The next few days was a whirl-wind (Each number below will represent a class period)
- We walked kids through a mini-lesson on how we take research and make it compelling enough to become an argument. We didn’t want science fact sheets!
Then we did flash debates orally. They found compelling evidence from their drafts, caucused, and debated with a peer. They incorporated new evidence for homework
- Students read through a peers’ paper with a different disease, found his or her strongest evidence, and made a counter-argument orally. Then the student incorporated this new counter-argument into their paper.
- We taught organizational structure by walking students through different options. We modeled with different diseases and then asked students to think about which structure made sense for their paper. They talked it out and then wrote a paragraph justification for the structure they chose. Kids worked together to give feedback on the structure.
4A. Run-Ons and Fragments: The True Argumentative Horror Story- Language Usage is always a fun one. We took sentences out of kids’ actual papers and kids worked to fix them. Then they had to fix each other’s and then their own.
4B. Connotative Language Part Two: We had fun showing them how severe some of their language was in some of their papers and how this would NOT work in a science journal for the WHO:
Attacking your body and gripping onto your cilia, the terrifying disease starts to torture you inside out. Once the wretched creatures have reached their desired location, they release harmful toxins that damage the cilia and cause inflaming in that region.
Kids then worked to fix connotative language in their paper and students gave feedback.
During this time, Velicia and I worked frantically to give individual feedback in documents. Many kids met with us individually before school, after school, and during lunch to ask about feedback and to get more clarification.
Then the papers were due and we had a project-based learning event to somehow get together in one class period before the kids presented in front of the school…
One more post to come…I will discuss how TCRWP Units of Study can help you leverage curriculum, the results of our unit, what we can learn from working with other content areas, and the final PBL Presentations.
Reading, Writing, and Keeping it Real 