Upcoming writing assignments

Fall Break!

We're gearing up for the second half of this course during which we'll be doing a lot of writing, much of it in class, some of it in places outside class you find most productive for your writing process. We all have different things that create optimum writing atmospheres--some like background music, some compose on the computer, some need total silence. As we write in class, keep thinking about your own personal process of writing and how that metaknowledge might translate into your teaching. How can we provide our students with different opportunities to write? 

As a quick reminder, this is your "writing intensive course" for our program, as designated by the General Education Council (GEC) at USM. Along with the blogs you've been writing, we have three more writing assignments due:

1. Narrative lesson plan (due Nov 10)–Once you've returned from the field, we'll spend some Writing Workshop time writing a lesson plan in narrative form. You can use any lesson you designed and/or taught in the field or while tutoring, but we'll have hindsight experience and can tweak decisions; meanwhile, the narrative form allows us to paint a vivid picture of what's happening in the classroom while your lesson is occurring. We'll start this assignment when you return from the field. 
2. Collection of writing artifacts (due Nov 29)–To be better teachers of writing, we must engage in the writing process ourselves, experience the joys and frustrations of the writing process. Through a very simple method–The Writing Workshop (mini-lesson, time to write, time to share)–we'll write, talking about writing, and talk about the teaching of writing. Due Nov. 29, you need to turn in four writing artifacts from our writing workshops together and/or from your writing outside class. You've already got some poetry you can include. You can submit this digitally (i.e., through blog posts, through a Prezi, any other form that fits your creativity) or as a hard copy paper document. This collection is worth 20 points and is evaluated solely using the checklist in our syllabus.
3. Multigenre project or Service-Learning project (due Dec 8)
• MG project–Choose a topic that's just for you and begin weaving together writing artifacts into an engaging multigenre piece. Consider time during our writing workshops to work on your multigenre piece; in other words, the sooner you decide on a topic, the sooner you can gather information to write about that topic. 
• SL project–Write a rich description of your experience at Hawkins or at Burger. What did you learn while tutoring about teaching, about learning, about yourself, youth, school culture, etc. This piece is open to the meaning-making that occurred for you while involved in the Service-Learning as volunteers at these schools. 
• Note–Dec 5 we'll have a "Walking Gallery" to share our work with each other. Prior to this sharing, make sure you've used the turnitin.com requirement to double-check for any unintended plagiarism.  This assignment is worth 25 points and we'll use the rubric from the syllabus.

For me, this is an exciting component of CIR411, the opportunity to write creatively, to receive professor and peer feedback, and to think about what these experiences mean for designing writing experiences in our future classrooms.

Happy Writing! And if you ever want an individual conference outside of class, email me for an appointment or find me during office hours.
Dr B