I am unsure where the wheels fell off the bus this year, and I can’t pinpoint the moment—maybe I was trying to do too much, or maybe the students are still recovering from 2020, perhaps? (And also, as an aside, I went to look up prior posts about this, and WordPress has done this weird thing with some of my links. I shall deal with this later.) Some students went to my prinicipal and complained about a few things, one of them being I gave them “too many essays” to write. Now, some of these “essays” were focused on parts of an essay, trying new things, and quick writes. I told them time and again this is what they need to know how to do now and for the rest of their academic careers.
They took it personally.
One of the grand and perpetual expectations of we ELA teachers is we teach how to write essays, and there is no shortage of advice, materials, books, PD, from the creative to the formulaic, we have mentor texts, learning targets, dissection of the whole and constructing the deconstructed.
So what’s my plan for this year? Again, try to organize it in a way that students get it. I am focused on the success of a few students sprinkled throughout the day, from GenEd to Honors, who used the graphic organizers and materials I provided and pushed through them to truly get how they help and scaffold essay writing.
But moreoever, I am exhausted by the individuality of teaching: the whole-class instruction does not seem to be working, and there is no one cause or factor. Setting up partner groups immediately for workshop might be one fix to this– more on this later. (Thinking Dr. Catlin Tucker’s work on stations…). I have had great success with the Puget Sound Writing Project/National Writing Project’s workshop model for years, but this year…oof. Maybe it was all that time isolated from other humans?
The plan: this post is somewhat of a placeholder for my thoughts and a launch pad: next I’ll organize the calendar of what happens when, and why, for students. Stay tuned.
Some other posts about essay writing:
