How would I build a progression towards a culminating project/assessment?
Invariably, I want two types of physical assignments out of students: annotated, analyzed, and well-understood core texts, and a coherent, complete, well-structured essay (hopefully, with some individual insight or thought, depending on the student). Rhetorical analysis begins with structured questions that guide students through the process explicitly, then gradually involves new concepts, and finally slowly removes supports.
Since this post is already a bit huge, please feel free to ask if you'd like me to go into detail about each of the skills I list below. Ultimately, I think core skills for any course should be able to be broken down to a list of around 10~15 foundational procedures kids need to be able to perform reliably ON THEIR OWN. Content is all well and good, but practicing academic skills until they're intuitive will allow students to access content on their own, ultimately, and in 9th grade, there is nothing more crucial than close-reading, structured writing, discussion, and note-taking skills.
There is a core set of textual analysis skills I emphasize and that students practice, practice, and practice some more in EVERY unit. They include:
- RTA:
- Rhetorical Appeals:
- Tone:
- Intended Audience:
- Thesis and Assertions:
- Evidence (The Evidence Pyramid and “Triple C”):
In every unit, I either introduce ONE of these skills while having students practice those they’ve already studied, or simply emphasize whichever of these a particular period is struggling with.
The writing skills we focus on are:
- Drafting & Essay Structure:
- Defensible Thesis and Assertions:
- Selecting Evidence:
- Justification:
- KISS:
At some point I begin including space for annotation and analysis and a list of the questions I expect them to address, but remove the specific questions as I scaffold them to independence. With essays, we begin with a very structured drafting sheet that breaks down every element of a successful essay by the sentence, then build to a less structured form. The begin peer-editing using Google docs, and put to use a peer-editing form (one which you’ve been watching me develop this year!) designed to get them analyzing their peers’ essays in much the way they would any article for class, with the goal of providing real advice (“your assertion isn’t clearly supporting your thesis,” “you need to choose evidence that justifies your assertion more clearly,” etc.).
In addition to these “end products,” I always expect daily notes from discussion, contribution and active engagement in critical debate in class, and thoughtful responses to discussion “seeds” (do nows, engaging smaller video or visual analyses performed as skills-based side projects as part of the larger unit, etc.).
I may also include a third category of product, usually assigned later in the year and depending on the focus on the unit in question. These are what I think of as “enhancement” products – assignments designed to add depth of understanding and another level of challenge when students are too stuck in a rut. They include speeches, structured in-class debates (I often run these “Law and Order” style, complete with the music and an expectation that everyone attends in courtroom dress), out of class research (interviews designed according to social science guidelines, recorded on podcasting software using cell phones as “microphones,” then processed to generate “data” students present as part of a paper), and presentations (I prefer Prezi to Powerpoint, and the kids generally dig it).
Even if these "enhancement" products aren't obviously in-line with the skills above, I make sure they DO line up - if I'm teaching Prezi, I teach them to think of their different points as Assertions backing up their presentation's Thesis, and to make sure all their Evidence is appropriately Justified by what they SAY when a slide is on the screen. I make sure they use Drafting skills to create a rough script to go with their Prezi. I'll tell them to read through their presentation aloud, listening for awkward errors (KISS).
You’ll notice: though the units and lessons may differ, my core skills, products, and approach are always the same. This means that, in essence, there's not as much prep as you might think; every time, I'm repeating myself. The variation doesn't come from some sort of flashy delivery, fancy lesson structure, clever activities, or what have you, but rather from the materials themselves - from the differences in essential questions and the discussions, the articles and the opinions they present, the surprise upsets of their misinformed assumptions.
What would prove to me that my students have learned what they needed to learn? How do I assess whether I’ve done my job?
As far as assessing your students’ success, this is almost impossible NOT to do if you’re at ALL serious about your job. That's not to say it's easy. I've found the hardest part is to manage assessing students regularly while not doing an extra 20-30 hours of grading per week. The tricks I've come to rely on are a series of quick, intuitive checks that allow me to gauge student success and comprehension in class:
- Discussion
- Annotation
- Writing
Discussion provides a surprising amount of information. A large group of students doesn’t want to and isn’t skilled at discussion. They have, as I mentioned, the idea that raising a hand in class is really an opportunity to either perform their own knowledge or be humiliated for lacking it. This makes it your job to push those students to interact; don’t forget the kids who want to talk, but make it clear to everyone that you want to chat with EVERY STUDENT, EVERY DAY. If you start to do so, you’ll push some of those quiet kids to ask some questions that will invariably reveal comprehension gaps that other students are struggling with as well, and you’ll be able to correct them if you engage with the question and really help the kid work through it. This can be a tough process at first, but if you commit to it and are determined, every day, to be nearly RELIGIOUS about getting every kid to speak, you’ll find you have a MUCH better handle on how comfortable your kids are with the material, how well they understand and apply skills, and what help they need to be successful producing end products. You'll also find those students beginning to build the skills they need to advocate for themselves, and hopefully breaking down their own idea of what "discussion" means and getting a much more realistic, positive, and college-level idea of what it SHOULD be.
Some helpful tricks for facilitating discussion that I use: write what students say on the board. If forces others to keep up with the discussion, which means they'll be better prepared and less scared when you call on them. It also gives whoever's talking a sense of being recognized; this makes it crucial to use their words as much as possible, doing the minimal necessary to correct the grammar (I'll usually ask "May I change it to X?" or "Would it be cool if I wrote it X?" if there's something I MUST do to make it work). Another good trick is to have students call each other after speaking, with the understanding that it has to be somebody who hasn't spoken. Finally, it never hurts to emphasize taking notes from lecture - have students repeat important observations so they can be written down, and remind students constantly that they need to listen in and write down anything important they hear.
Annotation can give you insight into both behavioral and academic issues. By actively including students in the process of grading their work, you hold them accountable for their own success – grading begins to become the process of evaluating their OWN investment and success, NOT just an opportunity to be judged. Also, you can learn a LOT about a student’s understanding from even a cursory look through their annotation. Were they actively looking for appeals and identifying them correctly? Are they only identifying ethos, but missing pathos and logos appeals? Are they using text features like the header and title to improve understanding, or are they missing the messages they send? Do they have a sense for bias and tone, or are they mostly summarizing information? Do their questions extend beyond the text and indicate a real engagement with ideas, or are they mostly asking questions that indicate struggling with materials (vocabulary, meaning, even “non-questions” – those that indicate laziness or a lack of interest)? How much time are they spending on their annotation – are they truly pushing themselves to understand every sentence and every word, or are they moving their eyes across the page and scribbling something down so they can be “finished” (what we call, in my class, “shoveling”)? Are they failing to justify or explain their answers to analysis questions, indicating they need to be taught better how to support analysis (what we call “middle school answers” in my class – “this is pathos because it shows feeling,” etc.).
This may seem like a lot, but with practice, you pick these things up quickly from even a short flip through a student’s work. If you’re not only flipping through, but actively engaging them in an honest assessment of their work, you’re guaranteed to spot at least one issue; by the end of checking everyone’s work, you’ll have a sense of the top problem the class needs to have addressed. You mentioned noticing this within a short period of time; after a few periods of grading, you felt the process got MUCH quicker and that you were more accurate in your own assessment of student work. If you want to be structured, you can create a check-list, identify different issues for different students, create work groups, and attempt to differentiate based on the skill needs of each. Personally, I choose to work at the class level because the skills I teach are high-level enough – and require enough practice – that I believe EVERY student can benefit by going over them again.
Writing, finally, gives the ultimate insight into each student’s needs. Learning to grade quickly and accurately according to a rubric is step 1; without that skill, you’ll be lucky to grade a single essay per semester. Once you’ve got a sense for how your rubric works and what you’re looking for, analyzing student writing will become your best friend as an instructor – especially if your rubric is well-designed to target the sort of issues kids run into and need the MOST work on. Working with the Achievement First rubric, which, in its entirety, I find incredibly baroque and over-burdened with useless and potentially meaningless categories of assessment that often overlap and even have identical descriptions for different scores, has, in the end, honed my sense of what my students need to focus on. By trimming the rubric down to a few key skills (Thesis, Assertions, Evidence Choice, Justification, and Structure), I can quickly check averages in my gradebook to see what students need to work on.
Furthermore, I can give students targeted and USEFUL comments without spending 15 minutes on each essay (which, even with my relatively small overall student load of about 120 students, is a nearly impossible 1800 minutes – 30 hours!) – comments like “you need defensible assertions” or “you didn’t offer enough justification of your evidence – explain WHY your quote supports your assertion.” Finally, training students to understand the rubric ultimately gives THEM the ability to grade and understand how to correct their own work, as you saw in their recent work correcting each others’ evidence errors on the Semester 1 final essay. Knowing both the meaning and the application of terms like Thesis, Assertions, Justification, Evidence Choice and Structure enabled them to give real and even insightful advice to other students.
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