Week 4: Monday, September 15th  Friday, September 19th

Week 4, September 13 - 17:  Overview

Goals for this Week
  • Discuss the role of an overall claim in a response. Explain how an effective overall claim provides focus and clarity for an essay that addresses a specific audience. Explain that an effective claim can help students “map out” a response that is then a matter of development. Explain the notion of the essay map. Your discussion should help students move beyond generalized responses and begin thinking about how an overall claim reflects their purposes and audience needs, focuses their response, and helps shape an organizational structure for their essay.
  • Review portfolio requirements for the summary/response and address student concerns about meeting those requirements. Reinforce student understanding of what is involved in writing an effective summary/response essay.
  • Discuss sample summary/response essays.
  • Review peer review techniques and conduct a full workshop on their drafts of the summary/response essay they choose to use for the portfolio evaluation.
  • Develop evaluation criteria (rubric) for the summary/response essay, making sure that they understand that focus (of purpose, audience, and message) is the number one evaluation criterion. Clarify that development of the argument is the next concern for you and for them, and that reasons must be accompanied by evidence. Also clarify that better papers will then go the next step to provide a level of discussion and explanation for the connection between evidence, reasons, and overall claim. Make sure that they understand that mechanics (grammar) are a lower level concern but that carefully written, well-edited and proofread manuscripts send a strong message that the writer has taken special care to present a polished product. If you develop a consistent evaluation approach that follows these guidelines, then your expectations will be predictable for your students—and by the end of the course they will have gone some distance toward accomplishing a deepening of the substance of their writing, rather than just focusing on superficial mechanics.

You may want to use the “Evaluating Student Writing” idea from the Activities Bank that accompanies this syllabus. This classroom activity helps students become better evaluators of their own work and familiarizes students with “rhetorical terminology” that composition instructors commonly use, especially when evaluating (grading) student work.
  • Discuss the requirements of the letter to the editor component of Portfolio 1.
 

Activities for this Week
Detailed lesson plans are available for the first four weeks of the course. Beginning in the third week you will be encouraged to take over the writing (or rewriting) of all introductions, conclusions, and transitions. You will also notice more activity choices in the third, fourth and fifth weeks.  Beginning in the sixth 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.