Essays of the Week

The following is an excerpt from a piece I wrote for another blog, which covers the topic of instituting regular formal and informal writing assignments, especially for ELA classes. As obvious as it seems to have students write early and often, sometimes writing takes a spot on the back burner with so much other content to cover. Here are a few ideas to get your writing program up and running:

As the second week of our new school year drew to a close, it was time to begin implementing some of the classroom assignments/systems I had envisioned over this past summer. One of these ideas was to assign an essay of the week--which I borrowed from highly-esteemed educator, Rafe Esquith. Esquith describes this system comprehensively in his book Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire. The general gist is to assign an essay to the class every Friday to be due the following Friday. Students brainstorm ideas and may draft their writing over the weekend and then refine throughout the week. For Esquith, the essay of the week is an effective assignment, in part, because it drives students to take responsibility for self-pacing throughout the course of the week. So often teachers mandate that assignments be due the following day that students may not pick up the long-term work habits they will need in the upper grade levels and beyond.

In room 204, the first essay of the week was to write a five paragraph (three body parag.) essay on how they have used one of our school's core values to the betterment of their own lives, or those around them. Students chose from of any of the core values they had explored through lessons during the first two weeks: honesty/integrity, humility, friendship, perseverance and responsibility.

As this was the first real assignment of the school year in Literature/Composition--and also one that could be quite difficult for many students lacking in formal-writing experience--it was important to usher students toward success with a highly structured approach.

The directions (linked below) were precise, and included a pre-structured outline that students could fill in during the planning process.

For example, all students were instructed to write a thesis as the second sentence of their essay that fit the following structure:

I have found [insert core value here] is an important value to practice while approaching many different types of goals, like ____(example 1)____, ____(example 2)____, and ____(example 3)____.

Once students had completed their brainstorming over the weekend, outline for homework on Monday, and first draft (written on looseleaf) for class on Wednesday, it was time to implement a system of peer revision. My goals were give students a position of responsibility (editor) over another's work that would give them a sense of ownership over (and invest them in) the essay of the week assignment while also forcing them to review the requirements of the essay. This second motive would remind students what they needed to be thinking about as they returned to write the final draft of their own essays. See the peer-editor handout linked below.

Peer editing was a highly structured in-class activity--even though it involved student-to-student interaction and some logistical "excitement." Students who had written their draft but "left it at home" were not permitted to edit others' work. Instead they were given a separate writing assignment to complete in class that day. These students worked independently for the duration of the period. Students who had not yet written their draft, and who had come to class unprepared, worked on their writing in class and were positioned at the silent detention/work table at lunch to continue "catching up" with the rest of the class. This was effective and seemed to be a logical consequence, rather than a vindictive one. Students who took part in the peer-editing process completed three readings of their peer's work. The first "pens down" reading was to get a broad sense of the ideas and content within the essay. The second reading was done as the student went through the editor's checklist (as previously mentioned). It was stressed that this was the stage of "revision." Finally, on the third reading, student editors concerned themselves with proofreading (as opposed to revising) and were permitted to make neat edits on their partner's work in the same style as they do on our morning everyday edits (http://www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/archives/edit.shtml). Once students had finished grading each others' work they executed a "peer-to-peer conference" on the floor somewhere along the perimeter of the room. Students used the backs of Home Depot self-made whiteboards as clipboards. This helped me see what stage various groups were at and meant that students could whisper-talk to one another separated from students still focused on reading and revising.

When developing a grading rubric to assess student essays I knew I had already developed my final vision for the assignment from the start when I created the outline and student editor's checklist. I took criteria right off of these documents and pasted them into a rubric that mirrored the six traits but fit this assignment directly while assigning point values that reflected my amplified interest in student ideas/content and organization at this early point in the year. (See attached grading rubric.)

On Friday, following the submission of essay 1, students received the prompt for essay 2, which should prove to be a fun narrative. Students had just finished reviewing the five stages of plot structure in class on Friday so I will be stressing this type of organization in student writing across the upcoming week. Here's the second topic, which I generated after our class discussion on the London riots:

Students show up to school but there are no adults. What happens next?