Due:
- Two copies of the workshop from the last class.
Goals:
- To give students an opportunity to discuss the critiques of
each others' work
- To teach students how to create a revision plan
- To give students an opportunity to begin revising in class.
Assignment:
- Literacy Essay Due! Bring (5-7) copies of your essay to class,
one for the instructor and the rest for other members of the class.
- NOTE: You should plan ahead for how many copies your students
will need. In the next class, you'll break them into groups of
five or six (three groups of six for an 18-student class) and
have them exchange drafts. You'll also need to have them include
a draft to turn in to you.
Setup Needs:
- Sample revision plan on overhead.
Sequence:
To start the class, have the following prompt on the board or
an overhead:
To start the class today: Find your workshop partner from last time.
Sit down together and discuss your responses to each other's essays.
Make sure your partner fully understands the comments and suggestions
you made, and don't let your partner off until you feel you have
something that will really help you revise your own essay. Use the
guidelines for good workshopping that we generated last time. Take 15
minutes.
- As students come in, get them working and start circulating,
giving help, suggestions, and further prompting as necessary.
Try to quickly check up on each set of partners, collecting your
copies of their workshop comments and checking for drafts. If
the workshop looks like it's going really well and folks need
more time, take an extra five minutes.
- After a maximum of 20 minutes, get everyone's attention.
Take a few minutes to explain any submission guildelines you'd
like your students to follow (you can use the list following this
lesson plan as an example).
- Then, explain how to do a revision plan. To set it up, simply
explain that a good revision plan has the same effect as prewriting,
allowing you to think about what you have to do a piece at a time
rather than all at once. A good potential format is a three-column
chart with areas to work on in one column, plans for improving
those areas in a second column, and priority numbers in the third,
like so:
Areas To Improve Suggestions Priority
My audience needs to Include short definitions of the terms 2
have technical terms in parentheses.
explained.
My focus needs to be Make a clearer statement of the focus 1
clearer in first in the first paragraph, and add
several paragraphs. transitions to show my reader how the
next few paragraphs relate to it.
The grammar gets Proofread/edit, etc. 3
confusing in places
(see draft).
- Spend about 5-10 minutes having your students design a revision
plan for the sample essay you workshopped last time.
- For the rest of the hour, have your students create their
own revision plans and then begin revising their essays. Be sure
to suggest that they show some of their revisions to their workshop
partner to see if their changes clear up the problems from the
last draft. As before, keep circulating, helping, encouraging,
prodding, answering questions, etc.