Recognizing the students bring knowledge with them

Wed. Oct 5

This was a really good day. They turned in their project 1.1 assignment, so I started the day with a metacognitive qw (I explained why I ask them to do this writing about writing as well). The QW was: Describe the experience of writing this essay. How did you go about it? What was challenging and how did you meet these challenges? What are you proud of?

Next, we build a class vocabulary for discussing writing. I had already introduced "project" as the word I wanted to use instead of thesis or argument and I talked through this again. Then I asked students to come up with words they associated with writing or thought were helpful for thinking about writing. What really surprised me was that they mostly came up with New Criticism reading terms (rising action, foreshadowing, climax, etc). I had expected them to give me words such as voice, tone, etc.

For a moment I panicked. But then I told them that those terms were really useful and we often used them as readers. I asked them how we could imagine using them as writers. This worked really well. Foreshadowing has become signposting; climax is the stakes or so what of the piece.

Next I brought up some of the other terms I thought they would say and then we generated more terms. (We came up with class definitions for all of them as well).

Next, we read the Sontag piece aloud. We sat in a circle and talked about her project and the climax of the piece.