Unit One: Personal/Non-fiction Narrative
Writing
(Objectives)
Generate, experience, and describe four different modes of writing: free-writing, directed free writing, extended writing from a prompt, and metacognitive writing.
Learn and demonstrate three ways of responding to peers’ texts: pointing, bracketing, and asking specific questions about meaning and intent.
Generate three rough drafts from shorter pieces of writing:
Incorporate feedback and questions from peers’ response into your drafts in some way—be able to identify in
a metacognitive piece how these have been incorporated.
Use at least 3 revision strategies from Ideas for Revision to extend shorter beginnings into longer drafts. Be able to
discuss what strategies you used and how they helped/did not help with your revision.
Develop an initial description of what constitutes a “good” rough draft by looking at your experiences writing your own and reading those of your peers. Respond to at least three other classmates’ descriptions using pointing, bracketing, and questions.
Choose two of your three drafts to develop into longer personal/non-fiction narratives:
Write a metacognitive piece that explains your choices and describes how you plan to begin you revisions.
Choose two revision strategies from Ideas for Revision or develop your own revision strategy each draft. Be able to
discuss which strategies you used and how they helped/did not help your revisions; or, identify the strategy you
developed and describe how you used it/them in your revisions.
Evaluate: in a metacognitive piece of writing, discuss why each narrative is important to you; why it might be important
to readers; what you think you learned from the experience at the time and/or now as you look back on it and write
about it.
Learn and demonstrate longer, written response to two peers’ texts using sayback, center of gravity, summarizing, and responding to the writer’s questions about his/her own draft.
Reading and Writing to Learn
(Objectives)
Describe the differences between observation and inference in the visual domain and in verbal/textual domain.
For each assigned essay, write a response piece which includes: a brief description of what the narrative essay reminds you of or makes you think of in terms of your own experiences; a brief description of what happens in the essay (who, what, where, how, when); an explanation of why you think the writer is writing the essay—in other words, why is this an important story for the writer to tell. One question you would like to ask the writer if you could.
Formative Assessments for Unit One
Writing
(Objectives)
Generate, experience, and describe four different modes of writing: free-writing, directed free writing, extended writing from a prompt, and metacognitive writing.
Learn and demonstrate three ways of responding to peers’ texts: pointing, bracketing, and asking specific questions about meaning and intent.
Generate three rough drafts from shorter pieces of writing:
Incorporate feedback and questions from peers’ response into your drafts in some way—be able to identify in
a metacognitive piece how these have been incorporated.
Use at least 3 revision strategies from Ideas for Revision to extend shorter beginnings into longer drafts. Be able to
discuss what strategies you used and how they helped/did not help with your revision.
Develop an initial description of what constitutes a “good” rough draft by looking at your experiences writing your own and reading those of your peers. Respond to at least three other classmates’ descriptions using pointing, bracketing, and questions.
Choose two of your three drafts to develop into longer personal/non-fiction narratives:
Write a metacognitive piece that explains your choices and describes how you plan to begin you revisions.
Choose two revision strategies from Ideas for Revision or develop your own revision strategy each draft. Be able to
discuss which strategies you used and how they helped/did not help your revisions; or, identify the strategy you
developed and describe how you used it/them in your revisions.
Evaluate: in a metacognitive piece of writing, discuss why each narrative is important to you; why it might be important
to readers; what you think you learned from the experience at the time and/or now as you look back on it and write
about it.
Learn and demonstrate longer, written response to two peers’ texts using sayback, center of gravity, summarizing, and responding to the writer’s questions about his/her own draft.
Reading and Writing to Learn
(Objectives)
Describe the differences between observation and inference in the visual domain and in verbal/textual domain.
For each assigned essay, write a response piece which includes: a brief description of what the narrative essay reminds you of or makes you think of in terms of your own experiences; a brief description of what happens in the essay (who, what, where, how, when); an explanation of why you think the writer is writing the essay—in other words, why is this an important story for the writer to tell. One question you would like to ask the writer if you could.
Formative Assessments for Unit One
- Metacognitive writing (self report): describing the student’s process of free writing and directed free writing, focusing on the differences between these two and describing what is challenging or easy for them.
- Peer responses on first longer piece of generated text: story of a writing experience.
- Instructor feedback on quality of responses given to peers (pointing, bracketing, and especially questions) and on the quality of the writing.
- Rough Draft: this formative assessment has three parts: 1) the student’s written assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of their draft after having read their peers responses, including their plans for possible revisions and any questions they have about the draft; 2) the instructor’s response to the quality of the rough draft and to any questions concerns of the student; 3) instructor feedback on the length & quality of response the student has given to other students’ drafts.