Week 3: Monday, September 8^th - Friday, September 12^th

Goals for this Week

• Help students understand the importance of reasons and evidence (textual, personal experience, analysis) in a response.
• Connect development of responses (through reasons and evidence that support the specific response types) to the overall portfolio goals and make connections between this portfolio and the larger course goals.
• Provide students with the means and opportunity to revise their agree/disagree responses to Atkinson’s proposal.
• Apply the writing situation model to the articles by Sacks, Williams, Bollinger, and the Thernstroms.
• Introduce the second and third types of response - interpreting/reflecting and analyzing the text. Ask students to use the analytic type of response for either Sacks’ or Williams’ essays. Ask students to use the interpretive/reflective (text effectiveness evaluation) response type for either Bollinger or the Thernstroms.
• Introduce and discuss the concepts of assumptions and implications. Connect these concepts to the use of reasons and evidence in an interpretive response.
• Introduce and discuss development of criteria and making judgments about the effectiveness of texts using sufficient reasons and evidence in support of an
• Start building a set of debatable issues drawn from newspaper clippings and summaries posted to Syllabase.

Activities for this Week

Detailed lesson plans are available for the first four weeks of the course. Beginning this week, you should start writing your own introductions, conclusions, and transitions. Suggestions will be made in the lesson plan, but you will be expected to revise these suggestions. Starting in the fifth week, you will be expected to choose activities from a set of suggested activities and/or develop your own activities that will help you and your students achieve the course goals for a specific week.