Home Teaching Resources Composition Archive CO150 2009-2010 Syllabus Tuesday, September 29

Tuesday, September 29

Day 11 (Tuesday, September 29th)

Lesson Objectives

Students will

• Complete the blog workshop
• Discuss, practice, and plan revision of their blogs

Prep

You’ll need to decide which revision activities you want to present to your class. If you like, review the workshop sheet, identify any gaps, and design questions to fill those gaps based on the needs of your students. Organize and arrange the activities according the needs of your particular classes. 

Materials

PHG
Revision activity materials (in case students finish workshop early)

Lead-in

Today students will begin revising each others’ blog postings and beginning to compose a response to others’ blogs.  It is important for the students to consider their peers’ blogs rhetorically, seeing how these address a public audience. 

Activities

Attendance and introduction (2-3 minutes)

Begin class by letting students know how much time they’ll have to finish workshopping.

Assignment 2 workshop (you determine the time)

Break students into groups of three. This might be a good time for you to consider reasons for determining how to form groups. Cliques may have arisen. Reticent students may be quietly congregating n the back of the room. Feel free to create workshop groups based on getting students out of their comfort zones.

Revision activities (you determine the time)

Depending on how much time your students need to workshop, design two (or three or four) activities that will show what revision can mean.
Discuss the textbook reading first, reminding students that “in practice, a writer’s process rarely follows the simple, consecutive order that these four stages [collecting, shaping, drafting, revising] suggest.”  Ask students to describe their writing processes up to this point.  Use Neil Petrie’s “Athletes and Education” along with his postscript as a reference point—would students describe their process similarly?

Then focus on revision, which seems to be the often-overlooked aspect of the writing process.  Are there ways in which students have already revised?  There probably are—we “re-see” some things as we write.  Show students some revision methods.  Here are some ideas (draw on your own experience as a writer-who-revises as you decide which activities to do):

• Work through question #4 on page 49 to see what it means to revise for a different audience (some of your students may need to do this if they have not targeted their audience carefully).
• Give students some blank paper (unlined) and ask them to write a troublesome passage on it in a way that will enable them to see it “new” (perhaps they write it in large letters, or in cursive, or they ask a peer to write it for them). 
• Read a paragraph aloud several times for students, and then ask them to rewrite it.  They can do this for each other, too.
• Allow students time and space to read aloud parts of their paper (or to have a peer read it aloud) so they can hear the language rather than see it.

Revision plans (as time allows)

Allow students time to get their revision ideas onto paper so they can remember them when they sit down to revise.  Revision plans can include whats (“connect more with my reader”), as well as hows (“quote more from Lyons’s article so my readers understand the situation”).  You might ask students to explain their revision plans to class.

Review the assignment sheet (you decide the time)

Ask students to reread the assignment sheet and to ask you any questions they have.  Be sure students know what they will need to turn in next time, and remind them to use a folder to contain all of the process work.

Conclude class and assign homework:

• Revise your blog entry.  Print the final version and bring to class in a folder with [insert your requirements here—remind students of policies regarding late work, grading, etc…].
• Post your final draft of your blog to the writing studio. 
• Bring 3 hard copies to class to share with your responding group.

Connection to Next Class