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Have Your Students Create Their Own Essay Prompts

October 16, 2017 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

Sometimes the best lessons come not from great planning and preparation, but out of desperation and necessity. I had my students create their own essays prompts, and it definitely came from a spot where I felt like my back was up against the wall. However it was one of those fortunate events that created an engaging learning opportunity in my classroom.

The Background

I wanted my students to write an essay once they finished Wuthering Heights. However, I didn’t have any good prompts – I have only taught it for a couple of years, and both of those years I just used some prompts from Q3 on the AP Lit test and did a timed writing instead. However, last year I definitely didn’t assign enough essays, so I went in search of some suitable prompts with no luck. I thought about using some from my Center For Learning book, but those didn’t really grab me and I didn’t think the students would be all that inspired either.

I began to wonder if my students could create their own prompts based on what they wanted to write about. It sounded like a great idea, and given the caliber of the students I had this year I thought they could pull it off. The worst thing that could happen would be that I didn’t get any usable prompts and we had just wasted a class period. It seemed worth the risk.

How I Set It Up

The plan was that each class would create a set of questions that the class could choose from. They worked in groups or individually to come up with questions. I knew that I needed to give them parameters to work from, so I pulled some of the reading and writing standards from the state and told them that their essay needed to allow them to demonstrate the ability to perform those skills (W.11-12 to be exact.)

I also provided this link to model what good prompts looked like and a link to Bloom’s Taxonomy to give them some ideas of words they could use in their prompt to encourage higher level thinking. As it turns out, they didn’t need to use either; they assured me that they had written on several essay prompts before and knew what they looked like.

It took them about fifteen minutes of class time to write their prompts. We had already spent time developing discussion questions so they were prepared for this similar task. I created a Google Form for them to submit their questions. Once they were collected, I transferred them all to a shared Google Doc for them to see. They were allowed to use their own question or use another group’s. About half of them chose a question they had no part in creating.

Here’s a sampling of their questions:

There seems to be a lot of similarities between the characters of the first generation and the second. Compare and contrast the development of these two groups of characters.

Analyze the development of Heathcliff’s character throughout the course of the novel. Would he be considered a hero or a villain?

Throughout the novel, Catherine experiences multiple obstacles in her life. Describe these obstacles and evaluate how they are significant in regards to her relationships with others.

But I Don’t Teach Seniors. What Can I Do?

Other classes could certainly do it too, but they might need more support.

I would definitely give them some sample essay prompts that they can use as models. I might also give them some topics to write about, such as conflict, character motivation, and so forth. They might also do well with sentence stems like “List three ways that … ” Definitely have them in groups, and provide plenty of support as they write their questions.

Pros of Student Created Essay Prompts

Students are able to write about what they want to write about instead of writing about something that didn’t interest them or they didn’t completely understand.
You’ll have a nice variety of papers, so if you have to grade 60 of them like I do, you won’t get bored.
It adds a layer of design thinking to the process. Students want to do well on the paper, so they are motivated to design a good question.

Cons of Student Created Essay Prompts

Because I don’t have a preconceived notion of what they will be writing about like I might with a prompt I designed, I can’t lead the whole class in some strategies for approaching their topic.
While it’s nice to have variety, sometimes it takes less time to grade a bunch of essays that are all about the same thing. I have to reset my brain each time I have a new essay.
It doesn’t solve the common problems my students face: a lack of organization, poor quoting, etc.

However, it’s a strategy I’m going to use again. I was really pleased with the prompts that the students developed and while their papers weren’t any better than they would have been, they were more engaged in the process.

David Rickert is a high school English teacher in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. He has been teaching for over 20 years and has taught virtually every grade and every subject. David is passionate about developing lessons that make difficult language arts subjects fun and engaging. He is also an author on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Find Yourself Fridays: Character Education in the Classroom

October 1, 2017 By David Rickert 1 Comment

This year I’ve incorporated what I call Find Yourself Fridays. I’m giving my students something inspirational to read or watch. Sometimes it’s something quick, sometimes it takes up a good chunk of the period. But that’s ok. I have to remember I’m hear not just to teach students about literature but also to help them become better people.

Below is the list of what I did for Find Yourself Fridays in the order in which I did them. If you have anything to add let me know! I’m always looking for ideas for this.

Find Yourself Fridays

1. Growth Mindset vs. Fixed Mindset

We are big on this in the district, and this was the best video I’ve found that explains it.

2. Six Lessons From the Sea: This brief article is from a surfer who applies lessons he’s learned while surfing to our lives. Who doesn’t love a good extended metaphor? Preview the content first – I used it with seniors and it was fine, but you might have to edit one part.

3. Tim Urban: Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator

This is a fifteen minute TED talk on procrastinating. Kids loved it.

4. Why You Should Make Your Bed Every Morning

I followed this one up with a bed making challenge – students had to make their bed for a week straight. The class that made the bed most consistently got donuts.

5. Four Places to Stop Looking For Happiness

I’ve used this for the past few years and I’ve always felt that someone in one of my classes needed to hear it on that day.

6. 5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Stress About College Admissions

We are in the midst of the whole college process and they needed this one.

7. Where the Hell Is Matt?

There’s a series of videos, but this is the one I like best. This guy travels around the world dancing with people.

8. TED Talk: Everyday Leadership

A short TED Talk about the small things we do that can make large differences in people’s lives.

9. The Many, Many Problems With Follow Your Passion

In this article the author says people should consider what they can become good at, not what their passions are.

10. People Can’t Stop Talking About How Sarah Silverman Handled An Internet Troll

Really cool story. Some language may not be appropriate, but you can block that out.

11. Life is a Game. This is Your Strategy Guide.

A Cool extended analogy about how you can treat your life like a video game you can win.

12. The Physics of Productivity

Another cool analogy that uses the principles of physics to the task of getting things done.

13. 30 Practical Things Students Need To Know Before Going to College

Covers practical skills like doing laundry and not academic matters.

14. How Addicted to Your Smartphone Are You?

The kids enjoyed this quiz. It turns out a lot of them are addicted. Go figure.

15. If You’re Not Spending 5 Hours Per Week Learning, You’re Being Irresponsible.

Why all the great leaders spend a great part of their time reading. I may kick off the year with this.

16. Mighty Sweet Art

Natalie Sideserf was a fine arts major at the Ohio State University who turned her passion into a successful business creating unbelievable looking cakes. It’s a great example of how a passion can take you places you never expected to go, especially when you ignore the naysayers.

17. What Straight A Students Get Wrong

If you teach honors kids (especially in high school) this will definitely ruffle a few feathers.

18. The Easiest Way to Start a New Habit.

Perfect for the New Year!

19. Bill Long’s Season on the Brink

Bill Long was the starting quarterback for Ohio State and saved his team’s season. However, he lost his starting position the following year. A great article about dealing with disappointment and setbacks.

20. Stop Trying To Be Perfect

A great video about why trying to be perfect is a foolish task.

Looking for more Language Arts assignments? Check out the posts below.

The Hat Project: A Great Project for the End of a Short Story Unit

Alternatives to the Essay: Infographics

Impostor Poems

Learning Stations in the Secondary ELA Classroom

What Should Students Know How to Do in Language Arts?

August 2, 2017 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

I know Othello really well. I have taught it for the past fifteen years and can recite entire passages from memory. I have read extensively about it – everything from scholarly articles to blog posts – and have seen at least three different movie versions of it and a stage production. I love the play and I know my enthusiasm for it carries over into the classroom.

However, knowledge about Othello is not a particularly useful skill unless you are teaching it. No one will endorse you for “Othello knowledge” on LinkedIn. And I’m fairly certain there aren’t any six figure jobs out there that will take advantage of my passion and enthusiasm for this play.

However, in the past I have taught my English classes as if knowing works of literature is the main goal. We read Othello, discussed it, and took a final test to see if you remembered what happened. If we wrote a paper, I could claim we were working on writing skills, but in the end it was still mainly a test of how well the students read, or if they read at all.

Moving from “What should my students know?” to “What should my students be able to do?”

As I plan for the upcoming school year, I’m beginning to think less about what my students should know and what I want them to be able to do. Making this shift puts the focus on skills that can transfer beyond the classroom and into any situation that students might find themselves in. As John Spencer and A.J. Juliani write in their excellent book “Empower”: “Our job is not to prepare students for something; our job is to help prepare students for anything.” When I think about what I would like my students to be able to do when they leave the classroom, I’m already beginning to move beyond teaching content into teaching skills that can have broad applications.

So here’s what this might look like. Last year I had two classes in which whole class discussions just did not work. I would craft a bunch of thought provoking questions for us to discuss, but no matter I did they were reluctant to talk. It was frustrating for me because I felt like these students should take ownership of their education, especially since there were AP seniors. Clearly I was doing all the work coming up with questions and it wasn’t paying off. I had an idea of what should be happening, but it wasn’t taking place.

Here’s My Plan.

This year one of my goals for all of my classes is that they should leave my classroom with the habit of always coming to class with something to contribute. This is a valuable skill that will help them tremendously in their college classes. Not only is there a tremendous amount of learning that takes place in actively contributing to the classroom environment, but it’s a valuable workplace skill to always be thinking about solutions to problems or positive contributions to projects.

In order to make this shift in my classroom, I may have to be willing to embrace some potential productive discomfort in my classroom for a few weeks while I establish the norm that I’m not going to be the one that leads the classroom discussion – they are the ones that will have to generate those ideas. And they have to be prepared to do this every day. It’s entirely possible that I’ll spend a couple of awkward classes transferring the ownership of the discussion to them. But overall the goal is a good one, and one that makes content not the end result but uses it instead to reach a higher goal.

But What About Content?

Of course, this can also work with content as well. My students have an awful time with theme, and I’ve really been focused on how I can get students to understand this elusive concept. In the past I’ve simply wanted students to “understand theme” but that hasn’t helped me much. And in most cases they can’t figure out a theme on their own; I have to tell them.

This year I’ve decided that when they leave my classroom my students should be able to identify the theme of anything that they read, whether it be for school or pleasure. Moving from knowledge to skill helps me frame it better: what do I need to do to get them there?

I’m not completely sure what this will look like yet. But for starters, the first thing that my students will do in the online discussions is research common themes in literature and discuss works that they read (or movies or television shows they’ve watched) in which the theme is present. This will give us a good foundation to work from – we’re already building an understanding of theme that will help us as we tackle the complex works we generate in class. And they are the ones creating the content.

So Isn’t There Any Literature They Should Know?

Perhaps there are some things that we read that we truly want our kids to know. I haven’t taught To Kill A Mockingbird in years, but I’m guessing that’s a book that many of us believe our students should know. I have taught “I Have A Dream” on and off and feel like that great speech should be something our students know about.

But even then we can seize opportunities to teach students some skills. This past year the freshmen teachers had our students design a toast using the effective speech writing skills that we learned from MLK. It’s reasonable to assume that everyone will make a toast at some point in their lives, and everyone would like to give a good one. We felt like our students should be able to write and deliver a toast before they left English 9, and it added an extra skill that we didn’t have in place before. Instead of just studying the speech, students were creating a speech.

But ultimately we are missing the boat if we aren’t use our content to teach kids valuable skills that will prepare them for anything.

Rethinking Annotation So Students Will Find it Meaningful

July 7, 2017 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

Most of my students don’t like to annotate, and it’s because teachers have made it that way. We’ve used annotation to turn reading into work – and unpleasant work at that. We all agree that annotation is a valuable skill, but too many of our students tell me that annotation makes them like reading less. And I’m concerned that for my students, it’s the reason why they stop reading for pleasure. If something we do is killing students’ love of reading, we should reexamine it.

Let me tell you how I taught annotation when I first started teaching it as a skill. I can’t believe I did it this way. In order to get full credit, students had to:

Have some sort of comment and highlight on every page.
Have a summary of the action on that page at the top.
Have a chapter summary at the end of each chapter.
Have a detailed character list at the beginning.
Have a list of themes at the end.

All of these of course are worthy endeavors, but took up way too much time. And students found themselves focusing too much on what they had to do while they were reading and not enough time on reading itself.

Let’s be clear: we want our students to be active readers, and annotation certainly helps with that. But our goals should be that it should be something that students don’t mind doing, a natural extension of reading something that you are going to discuss or write about. For too many students, annotation is something that they do for teachers and not for themselves.

So how can we change what annotation looks like in our classroom to make it more mindful and meaningful?

Don’t have students annotate all the time.

Give them a few chapters that they can read for enjoyment. Really zero in on those passages where a close read will give students the most bang for their buck and have them annotate those.

Don’t treat annotation as a way to force students to read.

It might work. But we might be sacrificing the love of reading in the process. We want annotation to help students understand something better, and not use it as a method to outwit those who otherwise would choose not to read.

Give students something to look for.

Rather than giving vague goals like “put a comment on every page,” or “underline important stuff,” give students a clear task. Perhaps you want them to examine direct and indirect characterization. Maybe the author’s use of tone. The first chapter is a great place to annotate with this simple question: what will this book be about? And if you already know because the back cover gave too much away, how are those ideas set up in the beginning? Students can also have a choice of one of a few things to look for that might interest them.

Put away the highlighters.

I got this suggestion from Jori Krulder at aplithelp. She suggests putting away the highlighters – at least at first – because it’s too easy to just highlight without thinking about the text. She emphasizes that annotation is the stuff you write in the margins and not the stuff you highlight or underline. Simply underlining or highlighting does not promote you to think about what you’re reading.

Use the annotations in class.

I’m basically done with coming up with questions for class discussions this year because I want the students to take ownership of their learning. This year I’m really going to focus on having students come to class with something interesting to say. Annotation can be a tool they can use to be prepared to start talking about what we’re reading.

Make it Fun!

Annotation can be at least moderately fun if you have the students create their own secret codes for their annotations or allow them to draw instead of write. Occasionally give them something fun to do, like count the number of times the author uses the word “supposedly.” All of these suggestions come from this post at We Are Teachers, and they have a cool infographic you can download too.

Try it in Pairs.

This suggestion comes from April Smith. She has her students annotate a passage in pairs and discuss what they found. Not only does this help those who struggle with the task, but it allows for a richer understanding of the passage as student share ideas.

Strike a balance.

A good thing to contemplate as you assign annotating is: how much time should students spend annotating versus reading? This will vary from teacher to teacher and task to task, but I suggest that the majority of time should be spend reading. I think a goal of 80% reading to 20% reading is realistic and won’t overwhelm the students.

Teaching Poetic Devices Using Impostor Poems

January 31, 2017 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

Sometimes when I teach poetry I get caught up in getting my students to understand what a poem means and neglect how poetic devices help create that meaning. Diction, syntax, rhyme – all of these are tools poets use in their writing. But how can we get students to understand how they work?

One way is with impostor poems. We had just finished an Emily Dickinson unit and before we started working on our essay I wanted the students to understand her poetry at a deeper level. So I had them working together in pairs to write an impostor poem. The challenge was: can you write a stanza of poetry that will fool others into thinking its a poem by Dickinson? The point of the activity was that they would have to be sensitive to the tools that Dickinson uses to create her poetry beyond just imagery and subject matter.

The activity

They were required to do one of two things:

write their own stanza and put it in a “line up” with two other Dickinson stanzas from two other poems, or
take an existing Dickinson poem, swap out one of the stanzas with one of their own, and see if anyone could figure out which one was the fake one.
This group fooled pretty much everyone. Can you pick out the impostor?

Afterwards I printed the poems off, posted them around the room, and the students walked around with their iPads using a Google Form I created to vote on which stanza was the impostor. The group with the fewest people picking correctly won (in this case, they won a Toblerone.)

The results

The students were better at it than I thought, and some of them were indeed quite difficult to figure out. Dickinson’s poetry was a natural fit for this activity because her poems tend to follow a set rhyme scheme and meter. The stanzas are also short which made the task more manageable. They quickly figured out that if their poem didn’t have a fairly strict form, it was easy to spot as the impostor. And they were also good at looking up archaic uses of words that seemed like something Dickinson would use.

Give it a try!

If you’d like to try this with Dickinson – or another poet for that matter, you can download a free copy of the lesson plan I used. You’ll also be added to my email list and receive occasional emails about other lessons.

Learning should be fun! Check out my Teachers Pay Teachers store for fun resources like the ones you see below.