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Class Plan -- Unit One, Day 4
Goals Assignment for Day 5
Reading - In PHG, pp. 146-157 (stop at end of response example); "summary Shaping," pp. 179-182; "response shaping," pp. 182-84. Read (or re-read) Rodriguez, p. 244, Coleman, p. 346, Leive, p. 323 in EL and Rose, p. 110 in PHG.

Writing - Write a one-paragraph summary of each of the four essays. On a separate sheet write a 1-2 page response to one of the essays you read. Post a brief response to the instructor's message on the Web Forum.* Be sure to bring a written copy or print out of the Web posting to class. Also, read the postings of two others from the class and respond to their postings.

Activities:
Daily - Summarizing Personal Literacy Reflections. [20 minutes] Students will reread their own essay and write a brief summary. Basically, we are asking them to write a one-paragraph (4-5 sentence) summary of what their essay is about.

Next, have students exchange essays with someone other than someone with whom they workshopped. They will read their partner's essay and write a summary of the essay.

Finally, they will read the summary their partner wrote of their own essay, comparing and contrasting it with the one they wrote of their own essay.

Discussion of Daily - [10 minutes] Pull the class together for a discussion of what they did in their summaries, i.e. what they included and left out, and how their summaries of their own work was similar to or different from what the partner wrote about their essay. Try to get them to talk about why their summaries differed. This should lead up to discussing reading as an interactive, constructive, interpretive act, in other words, how reading is a transaction between the reader and the text. What we "get out of a text" depends on both the text and what we bring to it. That should make a nice bridge to introducing the response assignment.

Read one of the shorter articles assigned for homework and summarize it together. [25-30 minutes] Either Rose or Coleman would work. Leive might, too. Rodriguez is too long. You can read together aloud or have students read silently. If some students finish before all are done, have them jot down the thesis and main ideas of the article.

As a class, collect on the board the thesis and main idea of the article. Students are likely to be concerned about how they distinguish the thesis and, more likely, how they decide what the main ideas are. Help them see cues in wording and structure that alert us to these.

Introduce the Response assignment - [10-15 minutes] Pass out the assignment sheet with a reminder that there is more info on the Web. You might at least ask if anyone used the Web version last time and how it helped. When I pass out the assignment, I focus on the goals and an overview of the schedule. I ask them to read it carefully outside of class and bring questions back. I will spend some time discussing how summarizing, responding, and critical reading are used in other academic classes.

If time, do a brainstorm on the board of what we do when we read and connect that to the reading/writing connection, why we read in a writing class, and how academic reading different from other types.

Collect Personal Literacy essays now if you have not already!

* You will need to give students a handout of directions for posting to the Web Forum that include how to access the class page.

For the Forum posting, you should create a prompt on language issue. One that we tried this summer asked students to recall a time when they were an outsider because of language such as when visiting a foreign country, when they had a different accent or vocabulary from a group, or when they were in a class in which the teacher seemed to be "talking over their head." Be sure to put explicit directions for responding in your prompt message.