MET Project: Significance of one Occurence

The video I watched, ELA form One video 11562, focused on writing.  Currently, my students have a “Creative Writing” course to prepare them for FCAT writing. In this class, they are taught formulaic writing and rarely get through the full writing process. They write an essay, turn it in, and receive teacher feedback. Rarely do they go back and revise their work. Additionally, they jumped right in to the writing process, being expected to know how to write essays with very little explicit teaching. Consequently, our students are struggling with learning how to write. The video I watched was insightful because it presented a component missing from my students’ writing instruction, explicit instruction in analyzing the components of an essay.

In this video, all students have same essay and the teacher gives them key components of an essay they are focusing on. Students must find the hook, thesis, anecdotes, examples, transitions. Students must use highlighters to color code each component of the essay, for example all transitions in the essay must be highlighted in the same color. Once students have completed this activity they review it with the instructor, and analyze the accuracy of their highlighting and effectiveness of the author’s use of each component. For example, the teacher discusses with the students’ how well the writer infused a hook in the introduction. The teacher then gives the students pointers for writing their own hooks. They do this for the entire essay.

I think my students will benefit from doing this activity with different levels of text, a poorly written text, a mediocre, and an exemplar text. I think my students would understand what components they needed to include in their essay if they had ample practice in finding these components in other student’s work. Once students were accustomed to doing this accurately, then they would be adequately prepared to peer- edit.  Learning how to peer edit would facilitate the infusion of the writing process in class, ensuring students always received adequate feedback on all pieces of writing. Once students receive adequate feedback they would be able to revise and publish their drafts. This process would help them get closer to becoming proficient writers.