In doing this, Christensen models that teaching the skills necessary to write an essay is crucial in getting your students to write that "fire" paper. We cannot expect students to become excited or at all engaged in their writing when they are not explicitly taught how the process works! It is not to say it has to be the "5 paragraph" essay that has no playful writing, but I appreciate that she mentions,
"Essays have a set of conventions that most writers follow. Students need to be explicitly taught those conventions, so they enter the academic world and feel comfortable there".
I completely agree that we need to teach the basics of how to write papers in general. If we do not, you're always asking an impossible task of writing an organized paper with supporting evidence and direct quotations to support their main thesis. You can sometimes be speaking a different language to them using these kinds of terms. Therefore breaking down the material and expectations will alleviate the stress students may encounter when essay writing. She also mentions how modeling is a great way to show your students the different types of writing. This is where I underlined and wrote "YES!" a thousand times. I remember in high school not having much of a model when writing essays and even when we did, it was never an example of something that did not fall under the category of academic writing ("boring 5 paragraph essay). Showing that you can be descriptive and playful, sassy even, opens the door to new ways students will access work. I was personally never exposed to these different forms of writing or encouraged to step outside of the academic realm.
Reading Christensen's ideas about thesis writing, gave me a great idea for my future classroom. She mentions of having a thesis wall where students would write a "working thesis" on the wall that they can display and change whenever they feel appropriate. This could be used as a workshop tool for students when beginning their ideas and thesis of a paper. Writing on the white board different students thesis, they could work as a class to dig deeper into the meaning and find ways to improve it together. In doing so, the students are able to learn from one another as well as improve their thesis in the process. I say this all the time but I am definitely keeping this book!
B, I love that you included the term "fire" paper in your blog. This is something I didn't write about in my own blog, but really enjoyed. I want to motivate my students the way that Christensen did, and get them to see that the best papers we write are the ones that have "fire" in them!
ReplyDeleteI also read a lot of what she wrote and said "YES!". I was always taught the one way of writing an essay, and it was boring and pretty much useless to me as a creative writer and now a teacher in the 21st century. Thankfully, most teachers are changing their mentality of writing essays, and are giving students more freedoms in their writing. If we give them the freedoms they desire, they'll write some kick-ass pieces. Isn't that what we want???
Great post, thanks for sharing!
I'm really intrigued by your concept of a thesis wall where students post their thesis and then can publicly comment on others and revise their own. For me anyway the thesis was always the hardest part of writing the paper because of the way that essay writing is taught in a very linear manner. I think it's more intuitive to write first and then find the thesis afterwards, but it was often insisted that the thesis has to come first. Whenever I'd have to do that, it would always backfire because then I'd stuck and go, "Okay, so now I have this one sentence that's completely disconnected from anything else and everything has to be written around it. What do I do now?" As always, the key to teaching writing is to demystify it and break down the big process into manageable pieces that make sense to the students and things like this are definitely the way to go about it. Those fire papers are what we want to see, but first we've got to get to basics and make sure students know how to make fire.
ReplyDeleteYes, yes, yes!!! I agree that writing thesis statement is tough. I am so relieved that I am not only one feeling frustrated. I like the idea of thesis wall because I believe that the more we practice, the better we will write the thesis statements.
ReplyDeleteChristensen is one of the best teacher I have ever learned from! I admire her forever and am proud that she’s from Pacific Northwest! ;)
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