Day 13 (Wednesday, September 19)
Lesson Objectives
Students will
Connection to Course Goals
Students learn more about rhetorical situations through their role as readers of peers' drafts. Giving and receiving feedback enables revision, an important phase of an effective writing process.
Connection to Students’ Own Writing
Workshops enable students to get feedback on almost final drafts. Peer response requires reading texts as a reader and as a writer, so it helps students get ideas for revising their own papers.
Prep
You don’t have a whole lot of prep to do for today! You might decide that a different version of workshop would work better for your class; if so, plan it carefully so that students give feedback that relates to the assignment but that doesn’t require them to evaluate or “pre-grade” papers.
Materials
Workshop instructions (students should have handouts from last time)
Paperclips
Lead-in
In an ideal world, each one of your students has drafted a letter for today’s class and has printed three copies of it. The likelihood of this happening corresponds with the effectiveness of your workshop policy and is complicated by any number of factors outside of your control. Expect a few students to come to class with no draft, with partial drafts, or with only one copy of a draft. You might have an absence or two as well. For these reasons, it may be best to arrange groups during today’s class. Students may come to class today unsure of their writing and of workshop (though the summary workshop should have helped with this, as should the practice workshop last time).
Activities
You might begin class today by asking about your students’ drafting processes. Take a few minutes to allow everyone to arrive, and then collect workshop drafts (which you’ll redistribute in a bit). You probably won’t have inquiry questions to add to the list today.
There’s potential for mayhem here, but if you ask each student to write his/her name on all three drafts and to paperclip them together, you should be fine. Decide ahead of time what you will do with incomplete drafts: will you allow them to be workshopped? If you do, try to distribute them throughout the room so that one group doesn’t have three incomplete drafts to read.
You can allow students to choose workshop groups (aim for groups of 3), you can have them count off, or you can assign them—whatever will work best for your students.
Remind students of the goal of a workshop, and explain the setup of today’s workshop: groups will read drafts written by two other class members, will make their own notes on the drafts and then will discuss their ideas to write revision suggestions for each writer whose draft they read. Since you practiced this on Monday, this should go smoothly and quickly.
Distribute the workshop instructions and allow students time to read over them. Explain why you are asking them to respond as readers before they offer revision suggestions.
You might have students form their groups after the explanation, then re-read the assignment sheet to give you time to organize the drafts before distributing them.
Writing a Letter Workshop
In this workshop, you’ll work in a group of three to collaborate on feedback for other writers.
As a group, decide which paper you will read first. Read (silently) the writer’s description of his/her audience, then read the letter itself and make your own notes on the draft:
When everyone in your group has finished reading and writing comments, talk as a group about the draft. Share your reader responses and your revision suggestions. Come to a consensus about a few revision suggestions. On a separate sheet, write an end comment that summarizes your discussion and revision suggestions. Each group member should sign his/her name to this end comment. Paperclip together all of the drafts and your group’s end comment and then move on to the next draft.
Students should be ready to go after having done the practice workshop. They can take their time today, as they’ll have time on Friday to finish. Or you can require that for homework students finish reading and making individual comments on the drafts they don’t finish today (this can be motivation for groups to stay on task).
Conclude class by explaining that you will give groups time to finish workshopping on Friday. Try to get a sense of how far along groups are, and determine whether or not they’ll need to work on commenting for homework. Also, assign the following:
Homework for Friday
Read about the writing process on pages 34-48 of the PHG. Please bring your book to class with you.
Be sure to be on time to class on Friday, and to bring your peers’ drafts with your comments written on them.
Remind students how essential it is to be in class on Friday with their peers’ drafts.
Connection to Next Class
Friday’s class is a continuation of today’s class: students will finish workshopping and will have an opportunity to review the feedback they receive and to make revision plans. Also, you can define “revision” and explain how it fits in to the writing process.
