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Preparing Lesson Plans

How to Present an In Class Writing Exercise

 The effectiveness of in class writing exercises depends as much on execution of the exercise in class as it does on the design and preparation of the exercise beforehand.  Below are the steps I have found most effective for presenting an in class exercise.  These can, of course, be tweaked depending on your teaching goals, but this structure is generally most effective.

Step #1: Introduce the topic – Initiate the exercise by telling the class what you intend to work on.  This can be as simple as stating, “I want to work on openers today,” but is best stated in terms of a teaching goal: “I want to develop a set of strategies for writing effective opening sentences in your essays.”  Introducing exercises in this way also serves to clarify that the class is moving on to a new topic.

Step #2: Motivate the exercise – There are two primary motivations for writing exercises: a) because students often struggle with a particular writing element and b) because the writing element is important for crafting an effective essay.  The former typically needs to be explained to students by the instructor.  I typically explain how students have struggled with the subject of the lesson in the past, either on previous essays or in previous courses, and always make sure to give specific examples of weaknesses and the response comments I typically write in the margins.  The latter should be approached as a topic of class discussion during which you encourage your students to consider for themselves why the subject of your lesson is important for academic writing.

Step #3: Explain the process of the exercise – You may choose to explain the exercise all at once or one step at a time.  I have found that explaining the entire exercise at the outset reduces students’ confusion.  When explaining the exercise, be sure to state how much time you expect students to spend on each part and to give them warnings about how much time they have left.

Step #4: Complete the exercise – As students carry out the exercise, be sure to glance at their work to be sure they are following your guidelines and generally proceeding as planned.

Step #5: Discuss the exercise – Never end an exercise without at least some discussion.  One of the best strategies for generating discussion is to have students share some or all of what they have written.  If students are modeling elements of the academic essay—thesis, motive, stitching, &c.—you might ask the other students to comment on the effectiveness of a few students’ work.

Step #6: Link the exercise to the upcoming assignment – This works best if articulated by the students.  Ask the discussion question, “What ideas did you generate in this exercise that will be useful for your upcoming essay?”  This not only maximizes the usefulness of the exercise for the students, but can give you, the instructor, some feedback on what students are taking away from your exercise.

Preparing your lesson plans according to this structure has the additional benefit of ensuring that your in class exercises are effective from a teaching standpoint.  If you can not motivate the exercise or explain how it is relevant to the upcoming essay, you should probably choose something else for your students to work on in class.

Tips for Designing Your Own in Class Exercises

Tip #1 – The most effective exercises are not simply culled from a handbook (like this one) but are tailored to the specific writing needs of your students.  Different classes of students will have vastly different writing needs.  In this way, this handbook should serve as a rough guide to the most common writing needs of UWS students.  You will likely want to tweak exercises in this handbook in a way that addresses particular weaknesses in your students’ writing.

Tip #2 – Use students’ own writing as much as possible.  The most effective way to collect sample theses, motives, &c. for use in class is to ask your students to e-mail you these items.  You will then be able to choose the ones that best illustrate the points you want to make for use in class.  Another way to do this is to have students find examples in their peers’ papers.  They can either bring these examples to class or e-mail them to you.  Finally, after grading a batch of essays, flip back through them and copy examples of writing elements that you commented on regularly.  Look both at celebratory comments and corrective ones, as it is typically best to collect examples of both weak and strong writing (e.g. a set of strong motives and a set of weak ones).  I have tried to include the use of students’ own writing in as many exercises in this handbook as possible.

Tip #3 - Plan the exercises in your next unit before you have passed back the essays for the previous unit.  Though this essentially doubles your work load by combining grading with course preparation, it will save you time in the long run.  More importantly, it will help you fulfill the objectives of tips 1 and 2.  While you are grading, the weaknesses in your students writing will be freshest in your mind and, as a result, it will be easier to tailor exercises to those specific needs.  In addition, you will have the most useful materials for creating such exercises in the form of your students’ own writing.  While your students’ essays are still in your possession, you can stockpile examples of strong theses/weak theses, strong motives/weak motives, strong analysis/weak analysis, &c. in order to create exercises in which students revise weaker examples according to the models the stronger examples provide.

Tip #4 – Plan your lessons a few at a time (instead of one at a time).  Similar to tip #3, planning several lessons at once allows you to develop interlocking exercises.  For example, you can encourage students to develop theses during one class and then work on ways to motivate them in the following class.  You could even brainstorm the set of claims you would need to prove those theses during an evidence/structure exercise in the class after that.

Tip #5 – Make your exercises both individual and collaborative.  In class writing, small group work, and class discussion are the three primary learning arrangements of a writing seminar.  Try to design your in class exercises to include as many of these groupings as possible.  This will make your exercises feel more dynamic and keep students more focused, since they are not forced to concentrate on a single task for a long period of time.  The typical format is to start with an in class writing assignment, then have students break into groups to synthesize their written responses, and then to discuss the groups’ findings as a class.  However, it is possible to alter this basic structure in a variety of creative ways.