ENGL682: SEMINAR IN TEACHING ENGLISH I
ARTC VERSION
OPTION B
Joan DelFattore
831-2987 (office)
737-7124 (home and fax)
jdel@udel.edu
www.english.udel.edu/jdel
Description
This class encourages students in the Alternative Routes to Certification
(ARTC) program to refine their skills in teaching writing to secondary-school
classes. In particular, it reflects the need to help secondary-school
students acquire the writing skills assessed by the Delaware State Testing
Program (DSTP), such as critical thinking, creative expression, effective
presentation of arguments, good organization, and accurate mechanics.
To further these goals, students will read Nancie Atwell’s highly acclaimed
book, In the Middle: New Understandings About Writing, Reading, and Learning,
2d edition (Boynton/Cook, 1998). Atwell, an inservice secondary-school
teacher, has developed an approach to teaching writing that includes, among
other things, suggestions for in-class writing workshops, revision and rewriting,
the use of minilessons, and formative and summative evaluation of student
work (including self- and peer evaluation as well as evaluation by the teacher).
Following online class discussions of the book and online research to find
additional teaching aids, participants will design a unit of instruction that
applies the material learned in the first half of the course to teaching the
five-paragraph essay or the research paper. Instructions for this project
appear below, but in general terms, participants will first assess their
secondary-school students to determine what they most need to learn in order
to improve their writing, and then write a detailed plan for helping those
specific students to meet those specific goals and objectives. Participants
will, among other things, keep a journal during the unit, reflecting on how
the instruction is progressing and how it has to be constantly adjusted to
maximize the probability that the greatest number of students will improve
the targeted skills to the greatest possible extent. At the end, participants
will present samples of their students’ work before and after the unit as
evidence of what their students have learned. They will also reflect
on the experience, with particular emphasis on identifying things they would
do the same or differently next time.
Objectives
* Participants will develop lesson plans based on research-based approaches.
Emphasis will be placed on serving secondary school students who come from
varied backgrounds, live in a pluralistic culture, and exhibit different learning
styles. These lesson plans, which will be keyed to the Delaware State
Content Standards and the Delaware Professional Teaching Standards, will
include the following elements: long-term goals and specific behavioral
objectives designed for diverse learners; motivational activities aimed at
stimulating pupil interest and emphasizing the relevance of the lesson to
the pupils’ own lives; varied instructional strategies focusing on student-centered
approaches to whole-class, small-group, and individual learning; skills-based
as well as content-based learning; the use of technology, non-print media,
and community resources; and multiple types of assessments.
* Participants will develop lessons and units that will help secondary-school
students to:
apply their real-life experiences to oral and written composition; develop
listening skills;
speak and write for a variety of audiences and purposes; use the writing
process,
including prewriting, writing, revising, editing and evaluating; participate
in cooperative
and collaborative learning environments; experience a variety of individual,
small-group,
and whole-class approaches to instruction geared toward diverse cultures
and learning
styles; apply knowledge of grammar and usage to oral and written composition;
write
accurately, colorfully, and expressively in response to DSTP-style prompts.
* Participants will develop plans for using a variety of descriptive,
diagnostic, formative,
and summative evaluation strategies, such as portfolios, contracts, self-evaluation,
AV
presentations, observations, and tests. They will also develop appropriate
evaluation instruments and evaluate the effectiveness of particular assessment
strategies in different kinds of situations and with diverse learners.
On lesson plans written after discussing this material, participants will
state explicitly how their proposed assessment procedures relate to the lesson’s
objectives, motivational activities, class activities, assignments, and target
state standards.
* As the culminating activity of the course, participants will develop,
teach, and assess a coherent plan for teaching a writing unit incorporating
all the elements and standards defined above.
* In addition to reading research-based printed materials,
participants will access
appropriate Internet sites (e.g., teacher-posted suggestions for teaching
various kinds of
writing, chat rooms and online discussion groups for teachers, and homepages
of textbook publishers and professional organizations).
Texts
Nancie Atwell, In the Middle: New Understandings About Writing,
Reading, and Learning, 2d
edition (Boynton/Cook, 1998).
Delaware English Language Arts Content Standards
http://www.doe.state.de.us/Standards/English/ELA_toc.html;
print the following
sections: Definition; Standards One through Four, Grades 6-8 and 9-10.
Recommended Internet Sites
“The Five-Paragraph Essay,” http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Atrium/1437/
“Outline of the Five Paragraph Essay,” http://www.gc.maricopa.edu/English/essay/
“Research Papers Handbook,” http://www.research-papers-handbook.com/
“The Writing Process,” http://www.csuohio.edu/writingcenter/writproc.html
“Writing a Research Paper,”
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/workshops/hypertext/ResearchW/index.html
Requirements
1. Attend three class meetings: one at the beginning of the
semester, one at midterm to share plans for the final projects, and one at
the end of the semester to engage in peer editing of final projects.
Dates for the second two meetings will be determined by mutual consent at
the first one. Reducing the class meetings to only three is intended
to accommodate the participants’ other obligations, but precisely because
there are so few meetings, attendance is absolutely mandatory. Please
do not call to say that you have to attend some other event at that time;
you must be present except in cases of serious illness or a death in the
family.
2. E-mail addresses will be shared at the first meeting, and you are
expected to check your e-mail regularly. Announcements and other class
materials will be sent by e-mail, as will some class assignments.
2. Read the assigned chapters of Nancie Atwell’s In the Middle within
the dates specified in the schedule below.
3. E-mail your responses to prompts about the Atwell reading on the
due dates listed in the schedule. Your response should be sent not only
to the instructor but also to the other participants in ENGL682 Option B.
You are responsible for reading the other participants’ responses and for
engaging in an online discussion.
4. Complete the final project.
5. After the peer editing of the final projects, revise and e-mail
or hand in the revised version by the due date, which will be determined at
the final class meeting.
Grading
Attendance at all three class meetings; timely, complete,
and high-quality responses to the short writing assignments; and timely and
effective participation in the required online discussions will count for
40% of the course grade. The final project will count for 60% of the
course grade.
Schedule
September 8-20: Read Chapters 1, 3, 4, and 5, which lay out her basic
approach to teaching writing. As you do the readings, try out the techniques
in your classes, and begin developing ideas for your final project (see the
Proposal for Final Project form at the end of this syllabus). The proposal
is not due until October 28, and you should finish all the readings before
finalizing it, but it’s something to keep in mind.
September 21: Last day to e-mail a response to the prompt: How
might you adapt Atwell’s approach to the realities of your own classroom?
What elements of it would be most useful to you in meeting the needs of your
students? Feel free either to respond in terms of all your classes or
to focus on just one class. Reminder: All e-mail responses should
be sent to all participants in this online seminar; see the list of e-mail
addresses provided at the first class meeting.
September 22-29: Read Chapter 6, which deals with the use of minilessons
to teach content, skills, or the “conventions” of writing -- e.g., punctuation,
spelling, usage. After reading the chapter, plan a minilesson for at
least one of your classes and deliver it in accord with the principles described
in Chapter 6.
September 30: Last day to e-mail a response to the prompt: Describe
the minilesson you gave. Why did you choose this particular subject
for this particular class? What were the students supposed to get out
of it? How did it work? What would you do the same or differently
another time?
October 1-16: Read Chapters 7, 8, 9, which deal with the use of writing
workshops. After reading the chapters, pick out two or three techniques
that you think would be useful in responding to your own students’ writing.
Then try them out with one of your classes. You may decide to try in-class
conferencing, or you may decide to focus on improving the effectiveness of
your written comments on student papers. Even if you decide against
using in-class, face-to-face conferences at this time, don’t ignore the possibilities
for adapting those conferencing questions and techniques for use in your written
responses to student writing.
October 17: Last day to e-mail a response to the prompt: Describe
the evaluation technique you used. Why did you choose this particular
approach for this particular class? What were the students supposed
to get out of it? How did it work? What would you do the same
or differently another time?
October 18-31: Read Chapters 10, 11, and 14, which offer specific
suggestions for teaching different types of expository writing.
November 1: Last day to e-mail a response to the prompt: How,
specifically, might the ideas presented in these chapters help your students
to acquire the skills that are assessed on the DSTP?
November 2-12: Fill out the Proposal for Final Project form.
Make enough copies for all participants. Feel free to draw on the Recommended
Internet Sites listed above or to use other online resources that you find
helpful. Remember that a crucial element of the project proposal is
to define the goals the students are to meet, and in order to define those
goals, you will have to use some kind of diagnostic tool before you write
the proposal. For more detail, see the Proposal for Final Project form.
Mid-November: Two-hour class meeting at a time and date to be determined
by mutual consent at the first class meeting. Proposals will be reviewed
and approved (probably with suggested revisions) at that meeting.
Mid-November – Mid-January: Carry out your proposed project.
Communicate with the instructor and the other participants as you feel the
need to do so. Fill out the Project Report and prepare the required
attachments.
Mid-January: Two-hour meeting at a time and date to be determined
by mutual consent at the first class meeting. Project Reports and the
attachments will be peer-edited and given a preliminary review by the instructor.
Early February: Revised Project Reports will be e-mailed (or, if attachments
are involved, snail-mailed or delivered) to the instructor by a date to be
determined by mutual consent at the mid-December meeting.
PROPOSAL FOR FINAL PROJECT
This project gives you an opportunity to apply the class readings to your
real-life teaching. You may use Atwell’s general workshop approach,
or you may focus on more specific material, such as her ideas for teaching
students to write memoirs. Feel free to blend material from different
chapters into a writing project that would best fit your students’ needs,
your preferred teaching style, and any requirements or constraints under which
you operate. The parameters are: (1) the project must reflect
what you have learned through the class readings, the group e-mail discussions,
and your practice in using specific Atwell techniques in your classes; (2)
the project must demonstrably respond to the needs of the particular students
for whom it is intended; (3) the project must demonstrably improve the students’
skills in an area relevant to their performance on the DSTP; (4) the teacher
must keep the records and sample student work required for the Project Report.
The length of the project is up to you, but it should be in the range of
one to two weeks of full-time instruction. If it would better suit your
schedule to have the students work on this project for part of each class
meeting over a longer period of time, or to work on it only two or three
days each week, you are welcome to stretch the project over a longer period
(e.g., a month to six weeks) even though the students will actually be working
on it for the equivalent of five to seven full class days. You are
also welcome to carve out a portion of a larger effort to use as your class
project. As an example, if you are teaching the research paper, which
would take more than the time allotted for this project, you could identify
part of it -- e.g., peer editing of first drafts, followed by revision --
as the subject of your project. You would then have to identify specific
goals based on the needs of those particular students and apply Atwell’s
techniques to helping them meet those goals. More simply, you might
set about helping your students to improve specific skills relevant to writing
the five-paragraph essay, or you might focus on specific mechanical problems,
such as an inability to use commas appropriately.
Please fill out this form for the class to which you will teach the project
you are designing. Even if you plan to do the same thing with more than
one class, select one of them for purposes of this class project.
General Information:
Name:
Secondary school:
Class year and level:
Number of class periods per week:
Length of each class period:
Class Description:
Number of students in the class:
Are there either mainstreamed special education students or gifted students
in the class? Explain.
Describe the class in terms of student diversity, such as gender, race,
background, academic motivation, divergent learning styles, and anything
else that should be considered in determining appropriate instruction.
Does your school or school district have any policies or requirements that
influence this proposal? It’s understood that everyone wants to enhance
student performance on the DSTP, but are you working under any more specific
constraints? As an example, some schools require English teachers to
engage in vocabulary drill every Friday, or they set requirements for the
amount of writing students must do. Does anything like that apply to
you? If so, how have you factored it into your proposal?
Is there another instructor, such as a TAM instructor, in the room?
If so, what will be his/her role in this project?
Rationale for the Project:
In a paragraph or two, provide an abstract or brief description of your
proposed project.
What are the goals of the project? That is, when students have finished
with it, what will they know, or what will they be able to do, that they do
not know or cannot do now? Please be specific. For instance, “Students
will improve their organization” would be too general, whereas “Students
will be able to formulate clear thesis statements that are relevant to the
assigned topic and sufficiently narrow to be covered in five paragraphs” would
be excellent.
What diagnostic tool did you use to determine these goals? For instance,
did you have your students respond to a mock DSTP prompt and use the results
to determine where they most need improvement? Or did they complete
a worksheet or a diagnostic test of some kind? Or are you responding
to chronic problems you have identified in multiple sets of homework and in-class
writing? If so, it is important to save (or photocopy) at least one
set of papers to document your reasons for deciding what to focus on.
This diagnostic assessment is a crucial element of this project; you must
present student work done before, during, and after the project to document
improvement in the relevant skills. Please take the students’ names
off all work and replace them with Student 1, Student 2, and so forth.
Use the same numerical designation on all samples of a given student’s work.
You may conceal the student’s name either by covering it with black magic
marker, cutting it off, or putting an index card over it when you make the
photocopy.
What state content standards will the project fulfill? Please do not
simply list them by number; write them out. The list will probably be
quite long, since it should include all the standards that will be met anywhere
in this project, even if it is in only one lesson.
Now choose the four standards that are most central to the project:
the ones that will appear in almost every lesson. Explain in a few sentences
per standard exactly how the students will fulfill each of these standards.
Specifically how will this project help to prepare students for the DSTP?
How is this project based on the approaches to teaching writing covered
in the course readings and in the material taken from the Internet?
Be specific.
Project Description:
What relevant instruction will this class have had before this project begins?
For instance, are you doing remedial or advanced work after the students have
already been taught the five-paragraph essay, the memoir, or the research
paper, or are you introducing it for the first time?
How long will this project take?
Will the project be the only thing students will do during that period,
or will they work part-time on the writing project and do other things (such
as reading literature) in between? It is not necessary to identify exactly
what else the class will be working on; the purpose of this question is simply
to clarify the amount of class time you are allotting to this project.
Do you have a significant problem with absenteeism? If so, how do
you propose to plan for that in your project?
PROJECT REPORT
1. Attach a copy of your proposal.
2. In what ways, if any, did you find it necessary to adjust the proposal
as you went along? If you perceive a need for major changes after you
start the project, please consult with the instructor at that time.
3. Insert a separate sheet for each lesson answering the following
questions:
a. How long did the class spend on the writing
project today?
b. What were the goals and objectives for today’s
lesson?
c. What state standards did it meet?
d. What did the students do?
e. What homework assignment (if any) were they
given?
f. To what extent did they meet today’s goals and
objectives? How do you know?
g. In a few sentences, reflect on this lesson --
for instance, did the students seem to enjoy
it? Do you feel upbeat or downbeat about it? Did anything particularly
notable
happen? What do you feel that you learned from teaching this lesson?
4. Attach student work showing their mastery of the targeted skill(s)
before, during, and after the project. Please take the students’ names
off all work and replace them with Student 1, Student 2, and so forth.
Use the same numerical designation for a given student in identifying all
samples of his/her work.
5. At the end of the project, write a report assessing how well the
students achieved the goals of the project. Where students were successful,
to what do you attribute that success? Was there any targeted skill
in which the majority of the class, or at least a significant number of students,
failed to improve? What is your assessment of that situation:
for instance, do you think in hindsight that the goal itself was inappropriate?
Was there something about the approach that failed to engage the students?
Did external factors -- e.g., snow days or other repeated interruptions --
play a role? Feel free to express any thoughts, feelings, or ideas that
represent your reaction to this experiment or your plans for the future.
Be sure to indicate what you intend to do next to move this class forward
from the point they have reached as a result of the project.
CRITERIA
FOR GRADING FINAL PROJECTS
* The final project includes all the elements listed
in the instructions above.
* Class activities and assignments relate to the students’
interests and experiences.
* Class activities and assignments take diverse learners
and varied learning styles into
account.
* The project includes a variety of teacher-centered
and student-centered activities.
* Class discussions are not limited to recitations of
factual material or to question-and-
answer interactions between teacher and students.
* The evaluations use a variety of methods to assess
whether students have met the goals
and objectives.
* Except for small adjustments, the final project
carries out the proposal.
* The students improved significantly in the targeted
skill, or the teacher offers a well-
thought-out explanation for the difficulty and a workable plan for trying
another
means of achieving the desired result. Wishing that the students could
be
different is understandable but futile; the point is to figure out how to
engage the
students we have.
NOTE: I am a former secondary-school teacher and continue to spend
enough time around Delaware schools to understand what you are up against.
In no way are you expected to take students who can barely write and, in a
week or two, turn them into little Ernest Hemingways. All you are asked
to do is to identify one or more areas of weakness and, using the material
from the first half of the course, figure out an approach that offers a reasonable
chance of helping those particular students to improve their mastery of those
particular skills, even if their performance is not yet perfect. Of
course the best outcome would be that most if not all the students do in fact
show a significant improvement, but even if that does not take place, this
project can still be very beneficial if it leads to new insights and ideas
for your future teaching. It is also important to note that you can’t
work on everything at once. All that is being measured, by you or by
me, is the students’ improvement in the target areas. The rest of their
writing problems can and should be addressed at another time. If you
try to do too much at once, the law of diminishing returns is likely to become
a factor.