8 4 Faces of The Essay Lessons

Lesson Plan
Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay
Lessons 1-3: Introducing the Understanding Essays Work

Materials
Transparency and student copies of: Understanding Essays: A Protocol for Working with Text handout (see end of lesson) Writing notebooks, chart paper, markers
Standard
Compare and contrast a variety of texts with similar themes and ideas.
Intended Learning
Students review what an essay is so they can actively participate in this unit of study.
Big Idea
Read, discuss, and describe essays to articulate the diversity of their arguments, characteristics, similarities, and differences
Focus Lesson
Note: The Understanding Essays work of the next several lessons is an essential part of this units work, supported largely by the Understanding Essays protocol located at the end of this lesson. Additional support: 1. 2. 3. 4. Rereading is a fundamental way good readers deal with challenging texts. Getting smarter is a social process, a by-product of shared experiences, discussion, and reflection. Discussion is an essential part of rigorous and effective intellectual work. For discussions to work well, participants must stay anchored to the texts under consideration and have the opportunity to try out ideas in a community-oriented setting that demands rigor and good thinking.
Notes
50/5 Advance Organizers: Getting the Mind in Gear for Instruction 50/6 Preview/Review: Building Vocabulary and Concepts to Support Understanding
The Understanding Essays protocol is a general template designed for work with essays of all shapes and kinds. The order of the work on the protocolconsidering the essays arguments before considering what is compelling about the essayis intentional. An essays arguments must be studied first. If not, we run the risk of glossing over, or missing altogether, the heart of texts under consideration. There is an alternative to using the Understanding Essays protocol in this work. If you are interested, generate essay-specific slides or steps that honor the essential features and progression of the Understanding Essays protocol. These essay-specific tools would replace the more general protocol. Crafting text-specific questions may help you better support students work. The rationale for providing a general template instead of essay-specific protocols is that this unit is simple: A general template does a better job of making explicit the basic and essential moves of working with challenging
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texts. If you can work effectively with the template, then you are well equipped to generate text-specific tools that may better support students work with any number of difficult texts.
Connection
Introduce students to what an essay is. Throughout the unit, a small collection of essays and a large portion of the work will be devoted to reading and rereading essays using a few questions to guide reading and ensuing discussions. Have students do a five-minute quickwrite about their experiences in writing essays. What do they think the components of an essay are?
Direct Instruction
Take a minute to describe the following problem to the class: The word essay is used in many different ways to describe many different texts. A logical by-product of this is significant confusion: generally, people have a hard time understanding what essays are, what they can do, and why people write and read them. Explain to the class that the point of this unit is to help students think more intelligently about essays, eliminate some of the confusion about what they really are, and work more confidently with them. Take a moment to sketch out the work ahead: During the unit, students will have a chance to read and think carefully about a small collection of model essays. During the unit, students will have an opportunity to write essays of their own. At the end of the unit, students will take a look at what essay means in high-stakes school settings.
The goal of this portion of the unit is to help students acquire confidence and insight they need to do well in on-demand writing situations. Explain to the class that the first part of the units work will focus on a set of five short essays (essays are listed in the Unit at a Glance; also, see Reading Lessons 13 for copy-ready texts). The next few writing and reading lessons will be devoted to reading and understanding the content of these essays. Place a transparency copy of the Understanding Essays protocol on the overhead. Distribute paper copies to each student, then review the protocol with the class.
Active Engagement during Direct Instruction

In triads, have students discuss what an essay is and their experiences in reading or writing essays.
Link to Work Period

None.
Work Period
Note: The first three writing and reading lessons of this unit have been set aside for the completion of the Understanding Essays work. However, the pace of this work obviously depends upon a number of variables, and therefore, the reason lesson instructions are particularly brief. If you are interested in additional support, consult other Studio Course Investigations and/or Units of Study facilitating the following aspects of Understanding Essays work:
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Setting up and supporting small group work Conducting whole-group conversations Quickwriting
Have students share in groups their quickwrites about what they think an essay is.
Sharing/Closure
Ask: What is something new you learned today?
Opportunities for Assessment

Ask: Based on todays conversation, what are your ideas about why it is important to study essays?
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Understanding Essays: A Protocol for Working with Texts

Essays Contain Arguments
Arguments can be understood as the heart of what an essay is about. Its important to note that arguments are not always thesis driven. Authors do not have to announce they are making arguments for arguments to be present in an essay. Stories carry arguments as easily as op-ed pieces do. Texts sometimes leave us changedwith a new perspective. When this is the case, we can say that we have been moved by an essays arguments.
Essays are Compelling

To say that an essay is moving is to say that the arguments are compelling. Compelling simply means that an argument is interesting or thought-provoking. You may not agree with the argument, but a compelling argument is one that grabs your attentionthat challenges you to think about events, objects, people, ideas, or cultural phenomena in new and more complex ways.
The First Reading: Looking for Arguments

During the first reading of each essay, work hard to answer the following two questions: What is/are the argument(s) in this essay? What passages or moments in this essay support your thinking? Be sure to refer to and mark these places.
The First Quickwrite

Write down what you think the main argument in the essay is. Review any passages or moments you marked and describe how these support the argument.
Small Group Discussions

After youve completed your readings and quickwrites, meet in small groups to share your thinking. During these conversations, be sure to illustrate your claims, questions, and ideas by referring to specific places in the essay. At the end of the conversation, each group should prepare a set of notes that summarize the big topics, ideas, or questions discussed.
The Second Reading: Are the Arguments Compelling?

Use the following questions to guide this second reading of the text: Are the arguments in this essay compelling? If they are, why? If they arent, why not?
Be sure to identify specific passages to support your answer.
The Second Quickwrite

After this reading, take time to answer the question, Are the arguments compelling? Be sure to refer to specific passages in the text to support your response.
The Second Small Group Discussion

This is an opportunity to share the results of your second reading and quickwriting. Once again, during these conversations, be sure to illustrate your claims, questions, and ideas by referring to specific places in the essay. At the end of the conversation, each group prepares a set of notes that summarize the big topics, ideas, or questions discussed.
Whole-Class Wrap-Up
We will wrap up our work with each essay by reconvening as a whole group to discuss our readings of the essay. The results of these discussions will be captured on charts specific to each essay. Ask any remaining questions you have about the Understanding Essays protocol. Remember, we will complete the Understanding Essays work for each of the five essays.
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Lesson Plan
Lessons 12: Understanding the Essay

Materials

Standard
Compare and contrast a variety of texts with similar themes and ideas.
Academic Workout: Teachers Guide, pages 146147 Academic Workout: Student Practice, pages 7879 Academic Workout: Assessment, page 81
Transparency and student copies of: Understanding Essays: A Protocol for Working with Text handout (see Writing Lessons 13) The Circuit by Francisco Jimnez Living Like Weasels by Annie Dillard or My Cuban Body by Carolina Hospital The Basketball Kidnappings by William Upski Wimsatt Hip-Hop as a Double Edged Sword by William Upski Wimsatt Theres No Place Like It: The Very Humble Cave by Elisabeth Rosenthal * see end of lesson Writing notebooks, chart paper, overheads, and markers
Big Idea
Read, discuss, and describe essays to articulate the diversity of their arguments, characteristics, similarities, and differences
Intended Learning
Students review essays according to a protocol so they can actively participate in the unit of study.
Focus Lesson
Note: You might not have the time to read all essays listed above during these lessons. This work will continue through Lesson 4 where you may continue reading them or essays students will bring to class.
Notes
Connection
Reading Lessons 12 and Writing Lessons 13 should be devoted to continuing and completing the Understanding Essays work with each of the five essays using the protocol provided in the handout (see Writing Lessons 13).
You should model an essay analysis using the protocol and then have students work on their own, in pairs, or in groups using the protocol/your version of the protocol. 50/4 Interactive Read-Aloud: Reading Designed to Support Understanding 50/39 Guided Reading: Providing Individual Support Within a Group Setting You may have to spend time teaching students about authors presence and first, second, or third person perspective before, or during, these introductory lessons.
Direct Instruction
Use the Understanding Essays protocol to read the essays for the next three lessons. The First Reading: Looking for Arguments During the first reading of each essay, have students work diligently to answer the following two questions: What is/are the argument(s) in this essay? What passages in this essay can you refer to so you can support your thinking? Be sure to mark those passages. The Second Reading: Are the Arguments Compelling? Use the following questions to guide your reading of the text: Are the arguments in this essay compelling? If they are, why? If they arent, why?
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Be sure to identify specific passages to support your answers. You might want to consider making an activity sheet with those two reading segments to create a ritual on how students should analyze essays. You might also want to consider putting students into groups and have them analyze one essay a day so at least they will have an opportunity o analyze two or three essays during Reading Lessons 13. consider using Academic Workout: Teachers Guide, pages 146147. Academic Workout: Student Practice will be given as homework.
If students need additional help understanding what an essay is,

50/4 Read the essays as a whole group using expression, different voices for different characters, and gestures. Check for listeners active participation and understanding through prediction and essay discussion.

Have students discuss the work ahead for the next three lessons: How will they keep track of their work? Where will they store it? What do they think their expectations will be?
Link to Work Period

Remind students that as they read independently, they should practice reading strategies discussed during prior units of study.
Work Period
Shared Reading
For the next three lessons, students will discuss essays using the protocol provided in the Second Small Group Discussion segment: The Second Small Group Discussion This is an opportunity to share the results of your second reading and quickwriting. Once again, during these conversations, be sure to illustrate your claims, questions, and ideas by referring to specific places in the essay. At the end of the conversation, each group prepares a set of notes that summarize the big topics, ideas, or questions discussed.
Independent Reading
Have students use this time to continue reading essays or their books.
Sharing/Closure
Whole-class wrap-up: Wrap up student work on each essay by reconvening as a whole group to discuss essay readings. Capture results of these discussions on charts specific to each essay. Answer any questions students have about the Understanding Essays protocol. Reiterate that the class will complete the Understanding Essays work for each of the five essays. Homework Opportunity: pages 7879.
Academic Workout: Student Practice Book,

Ask: Does the set-up for this lesson work for you? Academic Workout: Assessment Book, page 81.
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The Circuit
by Francisco Jimnez It was that time of year again. Ito, the strawberry sharecropper, did not smile. It was natural. The peak of the strawberry season was over and the last few days the workers, most of them braceros, were not picking as many boxes as they had during the months of June and July. As the last days of August disappeared, so did the number of braceros. Sunday, only onethe best pickercame to work. I liked him. Sometimes we talked during our half hour lunch break. That is how I found out he was from Jalisco, the same state in Mexico my family was from. That Sunday was the last time I saw him. When the sun had tired and sunk behind the mountains, Ito signaled us that it was time to go home. Ya esora, he yelled in his broken Spanish. Those were the words I waited for twelve hours a day, every day, seven days a week, week after week. And the thought of not hearing them again saddened me. As we drove home Pap did not say a word. With both hands on the wheel, he stared at the dirt road. My older brother, Roberto, was also silent. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Once in a while he cleared from his throat the dust that blew in from outside. Yes, it was that time of year. When I opened the front door to the shack, I stopped. Everything we owned was neatly packed in cardboard boxes. Suddenly I felt even more the weight of hours, days, weeks, and months of work. I sat down on a box. The thought of having to move to Fresno and knowing what was in store for me there brought tears to my eyes. That night I could not sleep. I lay in bed thinking about how much I hated this move. A little before five oclock in the morning, Pap woke everyone up. A few minutes later, the yelling and screaming of my little brothers and sister, for whom the move was a great adventure, broke the silence of dawn. Shortly, the barking of the dogs accompanied them. While we packed the breakfast dishes, Pap went outside to start the Carcachita. That was the name Pap gave his old black Plymouth. He bought it in a used-car lot in Santa Rosa. Pap was very proud of his little jalopy. He had a right to be proud of it. He spent a lot of time looking at other cars before buying this one. When he finally chose the Carcachita, he checked it thoroughly before driving it out of the car lot. He examined every inch of the car. He listened to the motor, tilting his head from side to side like a parrot, trying to detect any noises that spelled car trouble. After being satisfied with the looks and sounds of the car, Pap then insisted on knowing who the original owner was. He never did find out from the car salesman, but he bought the car anyway. Pap figured the original owner must have been an important man because behind the rear seat of the car he found a blue necktie. Pap parked the car out in front and left the motor running. Listo, he yelled. Without saying a word Roberto and I began to carry the boxes out to the car. Roberto carried the two big boxes and I carried the two smaller ones. Pap then threw the mattress on top of the car roof and tied it with ropes to the front and rear bumpers. Everything was packed except Mams pot. It was an old large galvanized pot she had picked up at an army surplus store in Santa Maria. The pot had many dents and nicks, and the more dents and nicks it acquired the more Mam liked it. Mi olla, she used to say proudly. I held the front door open as Mam carefully carried out her pot by both handles, making sure not to spill the cooked beans. When she got to the car, Pap reached out to help her with it. Roberto opened the rear car door and Pap gently placed it on the floor behind the front seat. All of us then climbed in. Pap sighed, wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, and said wearily, Es todo. As we drove away, I felt a lump in my throat. I turned around and looked at our little shack for the last time. At sunset we drove into a labor camp near Fresno. Since Pap did not speak English, Mam asked the camp foreman if he needed any more workers. We dont need no more, said the foreman, scratching his head. Check with Sullivan down the road. Cant miss him. He lives in a big white house with a fence around it. When we got there, Mam walked up to the house. She went through a white gate, past a row of rose bushes, up the stairs to the house. She rang the doorbell. The porch light went on and a tall husky man came out. They exchanged a few words. After the man went in, Mam clasped her hands and hurried back to the car. We have work! Mr. Sullivan said we can stay there the whole season, she said, gasping and pointing to an old garage near the stables. The garage was worn out by the years. It had no windows. The walls, eaten by termites, strained to support the roof full of holes. The dirt floor, populated by earth worms, looked like a gray road map. That night, by the light of a kerosene lamp, we unpacked and cleaned our new home. Roberto swept away the loose dirt, leaving the hard ground. Pap plugged the holes in the walls with old newspapers and tin can tops. Mam fed my little brothers and sister. Pap and Roberto then brought in the mattress and placed it on the far corner of the garage. Mam, you and the little ones sleep on the mattress. Roberto, Panchito, and I will sleep outside under the trees, Pap said. Early the next morning Mr. Sullivan showed us where his crop was, and after breakfast, Pap, Roberto, and I headed for the vineyard to pick.
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Around nine oclock the temperature had risen to almost one hundred degrees. I was completely soaked in sweat and my mouth felt as if I had been chewing on a handkerchief. I walked over to the end of the row, picked up the jug of water we had brought, and began drinking. Dont drink too much; youll get sick, Roberto shouted. No sooner had he said that than I felt sick to my stomach. I dropped to my knees and let the jug roll off my hands. I remained motionless with my eyes glued on the hot sandy ground. All I could hear was the drone of insects. Slowly I began to recover. I poured water over my face and neck and watched the dirty water run down my arms to the ground. I still felt dizzy when we took a break to eat lunch. It was past two oclock and we sat underneath a large walnut tree that was on the side of the road. While we ate, Pap jotted down the number of boxes we had picked. Roberto drew designs on the ground with a stick. Suddenly I noticed Paps face turn pale as he looked down the road. Here comes the school bus, he whispered loudly in alarm. Instinctively, Roberto and I ran and hid in the vineyards. We did not want to get in trouble for not going to school. The neatly dressed boys about my age got off. They carried books under their arms. After they crossed the street, the bus drove away. Roberto and I came out from hiding and joined Pap. Tienen que tener cuidado, he warned us. After lunch we went back to work. The sun kept beating down. The buzzing insects, the wet sweat, and the hot dry dust made the afternoon seem to last forever. Finally the mountains around the valley reached out and swallowed the sun. Within an hour it was too dark to continue picking. The vines blanketed the grapes, making it difficult to see the bunches. Vmonos, said Pap, signaling to us that it was time to quit work. Pap then took out a pencil and began to figure out how much we had earned our first day. He wrote down numbers, crossed some out, wrote down some more. Quince, he murmured. When we arrived home, we took a cold shower underneath a water hose. We then sat down to eat dinner around some wooden crates that served as a table. Mam had cooked a special meal for us. We had rice and tortillas with carne con chile, my favorite dish. The next morning I could hardly move. My body ached all over. I felt little control over my arms and legs. This feeling went on every morning for days until my muscles finally got used to the work. It was Monday, the first week of November. The grape season was over and I could now go to school. I woke up early that morning and lay in bed, looking at the stars and savoring the thought of not going to work and of starting sixth grade for the first time that year. Since I could not sleep, I decided to get up and join Pap and Roberto at breakfast. I sat at the table across from Roberto, but I kept my head down. I did not want to look up and face him. I knew he was sad. He was not going to school today. He was not going tomorrow, or next week, or next month. He would not go until the cotton season was over, and that was sometime in February. I rubbed my hands together and watched the dry, acid stained skin fall to the floor in little rolls. When Pap and Roberto left for work, I felt relief. I walked to the top of a small grade next to the shack and watched the Carcachita disappear in the distance in a cloud of dust. Two hours later, around eight oclock, I stood by the side of the road waiting for school bus number twenty. When it arrived I climbed in. Everyone was busy either talking or yelling. I sat in an empty seat in the back. When the bus stopped in front of the school, I felt very nervous. I looked out the bus window and saw boys and girls carrying books under their arms. I put my hands in my pant pockets and walked to the principals office. When I entered I heard a womans voice say: May I help you? I was startled. I had not heard English for months. For a few seconds I remained speechless. I looked at the lady who waited for an answer. My first instinct was to answer her in Spanish, but I held back. Finally, after struggling for English words, I managed to tell her that I wanted to enroll in the sixth grade. After answering many questions, I was led to the classroom. Mr. Lema, the sixth grade teacher, greeted me and assigned me a desk. He then introduced me to the class. I was so nervous and scared at that moment when everyones eyes were on me that I wished I were with Pap and Roberto picking cotton. After taking roll, Mr. Lema gave the class the assignment for the first hour. The first thing we have to do this morning is finish reading the story we began yesterday, he said enthusiastically. He walked up to me, handed me an English book, and asked me to read. We are on page 125, he said politely. When I heard this, I felt my blood rush to my head; I felt dizzy. Would you like to read? he asked hesitantly. I opened the book to page 125. My mouth was dry. My eyes began to water. I could not begin. You can read later, Mr. Lema said understandingly. During recess I went to the rest room and opened my English book to page 125. I began to read in a low voice, pretending I was in class. There were many words I did not know. I closed the book and headed back to the classroom. Mr. Lema was sitting at this desk correcting papers. When I entered he looked up at me and smiled. I felt better. I walked up to him and asked if he could help me with the new words. Gladly, he said. The rest of the month I spend my lunch hours working on English with Mr. Lema, my best friend at school. One Friday during lunch hour Mr. Lema asked me to take a walk with him to the music room. Do you like music? he asked me as we entered the building. Yes, I like corridos, I answered. He then picked up a trumpet, blew on it, and handed it to me. The sound gave me goose bumps. I knew that sound. I had heard it in many corridos. How would you like to learn how to play it? he asked. He must have read my face because before I could answer, he added: Ill teach you how to play it during our lunch hours. That day I could hardly wait to tell Pap and Mam the great news. As I got off the bus, my little brothers and sister ran up to meet me. They were yelling and screaming. I thought they were happy to see me, but when I opened the door to our shack, I saw Courtesy University of New Mexico Press. that everything we owned was neatly packed in cardboard boxes.
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Theres No Place like It: The Very Humble Cave

by Elisabeth Rosenthal Liwang, ChinaTwo years ago, Ma Xiuhuas family finally gave up on the parched fields of their poor mountain village and moved to this town to try their hand at buying and selling vegetables. Tired of fighting years of drought, they said goodbye to the small mud-brick househome to Ms. Ma, her husband, their two children and her inlaws and set out to find an in-town apartment to rent. But with a combined income of $13 a month, the family could not afford the new the new apartment blocks that line the road in this sleepy rural township in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region of northwest China, a sign of the even Chinas most impoverished regions. So they pay $4 a month instead for a more modest dwelling a little down the road: one room, no view, poor light, no ventilation. It is, in fact, a cave. In our village there was no water and nothing to eatwe had to go down the mountain, said Ms. Ma, a shy 22-year-old, wearing the white cap of the Muslim Hui minority. This is what we could afford. We are very poor. Even as urban Chinese aspire to high-rise condos with dishwashers and microwaves, cave-dwelling remains common in many rural areas of northwest China, where the yellow loess soil is well suited to digging caves. Though hardly the abode of choice, cavedwelling is a Chinese tradition dating back to the Neolithic Age, said Prof. Shou Xing of Beijing Universitys Sociology and Anthropology Research Institute. And even in modern times, caves have had their moments of glory: during the 1934- 35 Long March, Mao Zedong and his fellow Communists hid in caves to avoid detection by Nationalists troops. And so it is with a touch of pride that Ma Kuanca, Ms. Mas gray-bearded father-in-law, explains that the Mas rental cave dates back to at least revolutionary daysalthough he concedes that there is no evidence that Mao or anyone else famous ever slept there. But for the Ma family, the bottom line is that a cave is the best they can do, and they have tried to make this irregular15-by-30foot hole dug into a mountainside a comfortable home, papering the curving earthen walls with old newspapers, hanging framed family photos and buying a second-hand television set for the young people to pass long winter nights. Their landlord has rigged up electricity and a light bulb and affixed to the opening in the mountainside a sturdy front door of wood. The front part of the cave has a small cooking stove, the television and a small table. The back, set off by a cabinet and hanging quilt, contains a bed where the extended family sleeps. There is no toilet or running water, and the Mas, like the two other families living in this row of caves, just beside a major provincial highway, fetch water from a collecting pool, a quarter of a mile away. Although there are no exact statistics about how many Chinese people live in caves, many villages in northwest Chinas poorer areas still have at least some residents who are cave-dwellers, although few are renters. In general, as these cave-dwellers prosper a bit, they tend to move, or build houses. In farming areas, the abandoned cave often serves as a barn for the animals. We didnt have money; it was cheap, said Li Xia, the matriarch of a family in the tiny mountain village of Kaicheng, standing in front of the cave that she and her husband dug by hand decades ago. It is a small dank structure with a wood and paper door. For many years, subsistence farming provided the only livelihood for families like the Lis, and the dusty brown soil of southern Ningxia was rarely up to that task. But ever since the Chinese government started allowing people to move around the country in search of transient work two decades ago, a bit more cash has started to flow into this still desperately poor region. Two sons of Ms. Li now work as coal miners in distant provinces and bring money home. And about five years ago the family built the two-room house just across a patch of dirt from the cave, where Ms. Li lives with her daughters-in-law and grandchildren. When we got money to build a house, we did its more sanitary, she said. But among scholars and older rural Chinese, there remains a certain nostalgia, even fondness, for the caves. Though stuffy and damp, they provide good protection, a cocoon against the extreme temperatures of this remote region. People moving out of caves is inevitable in the urbanization process, said Professor Shou. But that doesnt mean that caves are backward. Also, they are a kind of folk culture and have great historical value. In fact, in this desolate area, were wood and other construction materials are scarce, it is often debatable whether the new houses are more than an aesthetic improvement over the primitive caves they replace. Most houses are tenuous one- or two-room structures, made of packed earth with mud and thatch roofs, supported by a few wooden beams. Along the dirt road that wraps around the hillside in Kaicheng, Ma Beili recently abandoned just such a house to return to his former cave when rain soaked a support beam of the roof and rot set in. Awizened 50-year-old farmer with an old straw hat and broad grin, Mr. Ma (a common surname among the Hui Muslims) now pesters visitors to check out his home: a tiny hole in the hillside with a blanket for a door. Inside it is not much: farm tools, some bags of grain, and a hard narrow platform made of dried mud that is Mr. Mas bed. Several chickens, a mule and a large ox crowd a tiny dirt front yard. Cool in the summer, warm in the winter, said Mr. Ma, pointing to the cave. Even when the house was still in good repair, in the winter I would come to sleep here.
Copyright 1999 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.
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Living Like Weasels

by Annie Dillard A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label. And once, says Ernest Thompson Setononce, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones? I have been reading about weasels because I saw one last week. I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance. Twenty minutes from my house, through the woods by the quarry and across the highway, is Hollins Pond, a remarkable piece of shallowness, where I like to go at sunset and sit on a tree trunk. Hollins Pond is also called Murrays Pond; it covers two acres of bottomland near Tinker Creek with six inches of water and six thousand lily pads. In winter, brown-and-white steers stand in the middle of it, merely dampening their hooves; from the distant shore they look like miracle itself, complete with miracles nonchalance. Now, in summer, the steers are gone. The water lilies have blossomed and spread to a green horizontal plane that is terra firma to plodding blackbirds, and tremulous ceiling to black leeches, crayfish, and carp. This is, mind you, suburbia. It is a five-minute walk in three directions to rows of houses, though none is visible here. Theres a 55-mph highway at one end of the pond, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other. Under every bush is a muskrat hole or a beer can. The far end is an alternating series of fields and woods, fields and woods, threaded everywhere with motorcycle tracksin whose bare clay wild turtles lay eggs. So, I had crossed the highway, stepped over two low barbed-wire fences, and traced the motorcycle path in all gratitude through the wild rose and poison ivy of the ponds shoreline up into high grassy fields. Then I cut down through the woods to the mossy fallen tree where I sit. This tree is excellent. It makes a dry, upholstered bench at the upper, marshy end of the pond, a plush jetty raised from the thorny shore between a shallow blue body of water and a deep blue body of sky. The sun had just set. I was relaxed on the tree trunk, ensconced in the lap of lichen, watching the lily pads at my feet tremble and part dreamily over the thrusting path of a carp. A yellow bird appeared to my right and flew behind me. It caught my eye; I swiveled aroundand the next instant, inexplicably, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me. Weasel! Id never seen one wild before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, softfurred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizards; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was just a dot of chin, maybe two brown hairs worth, and then the pure white fur began that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I didnt see, any more than you see a window. The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key. Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we dont. We keep our skulls. So. He disappeared. This was only last week, and already I dont remember what shattered the enchantment. I think I blinked, I think I retrieved my brain from the weasels brain, and tried to memorize what I was seeing, and the weasel felt the yank of separation, the careening splash-down into real life and the urgent current of instinct. He vanished under the wild rose. I waited motionless, my mind suddenly full of data and my spirit with pleadings, but he didnt return. Please do not tell me about approach-avoidance conflicts. I tell you Ive been in that weasels brain for sixty seconds, and he was in mine. Brains are private places, muttering through unique and secret tapes-but the weasel and I both plugged into another tape simultaneously, for a sweet and shocking time. Can I help it if it was a blank? What goes on in his brain the rest of the time? What does a weasel think about? He wont say. His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose leaf, and blown. I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I dont think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particularshall I suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands?but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical sense and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in
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choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasels: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will. I missed my chance. I should have gone for the throat. I should have lunged for that streak of white under the weasels chin and held on, held on through mud and into the wild rose, held on for a dearer life. We could live under the wild rose wild as weasels, mute and uncomprehending. I could very calmly go wild. I could live two days in the den, curled, leaning on mouse fur, sniffing bird bones, blinking, licking, breathing musk, my hair tangled in the roots of grasses. Down is a good place to go, where the mind is single. Down is out, out of your ever-loving mind and back to your careless senses. I remember muteness as a prolonged and giddy fast, where every moment is a feast of utterance received. Time and events are merely poured, unremarked, and ingested directly, like blood pulsed into my gut through a jugular vein. Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow? We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedienceeven of silenceby choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesnt attack anything; a weasel lives as hes meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity. I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where youre going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.
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My Cuban Body
by Carolina Hospital Hot pants is what we called the very tight shorts we used to wear in the 70s. One hot Friday night when I was fifteen years old, I sneaked out of the house wearing a shiny blue plastic raincoat over my hot pants and my spandex tube top. It was Mamis idea to put on the raincoat over the hot pants. She wanted to avoid Papis anger when he saw my clothes, or lack of them. My petite older sister (by two years), two inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter, dressed the same way. So what was the problem? The problem was that I was younger but I had developed sooner. Plus, the fashion in the 70s only helped to attract attention to my early development. It was impossible to hide curves and protrusions within miniscule pieces of cloth or skintight polyester blouses and pants. In Papis eyes, I was flaunting my womanhood, yet I didnt have the maturity to deal with its consequences. His instincts were right, but his volatile approach was not. That night I eagerly went to my classmates party. My sister and I walked into the screened patio in the back of the house where the stereo had been set up. I removed the raincoat. Immediately, all eyes were on me. I felt self-conscious, yet as I danced slowly with different boysfor us, success was measured in slow danceI discovered the power of flesh. I felt exhilarated by my ability to attract the opposite sex. However, I also felt the fear of unleashing a power I had little control over. In addition, my fathers anger and my mothers collusion sent me mixed messages. Was there something wrong with my emerging womanhood? Instead of enjoying my new curves, I began to feel shame and embarrassment. I also had to deal with the fact that I was different from most of my petite blond classmates. Being rounder, shorter, and hairier than they was a great source of anguish. My solution was to diet, straighten my hair, and wear platform shoes, the highest I could tolerate. But the damage was done. I grew up unhappy with my physical appearance, always self-conscious of my looks. Mother didnt help. It wasnt that she disliked my looks. The opposite: she constantly noticed and complimented the very things I wanted to forget. For instance, she always told me I was lucky to have thighs and calves that were beautifully endowed, not thin and scrawny like hers. She believed I had inherited their thickness from my father's Cataln side. That was the last thing I wanted to hear, that I looked like my short, overweight, bear-like hairy father (by Anglo standards) with whom I did not get along during my teen years. Ironically, my mother also suffered growing up because of her physical appearance. She was often called a tomboy and was fed thick mango and papaya shakes in the hopes that she would put more fat on her bones. You see, for the Havana of the 1930s and 40s, she was too thin and too tall at five feet seven. Plus she lacked the thick, long, wavy hair I so detested in myself. That is why as she watched me diet, exercise, and straighten my hair, day in and day out, she would say, perplexed, how growing up, she would have given anything to have had the physical traits I so rejected in myself. I didnt understand or care. I wasnt living in Havana. I was living in the land of Twiggy. Back then no one talked about being anorexic, but that is exactly what Twiggy looked likea beautiful anorexic gazelle with long, blond, perfectly straight hair that probably weighed more than she did. Soon all the models became Twiggy look-alikes, and she became the standard for us to aim for, an impossible goal for a Cubanita with already emerging curves and protrusionsbut what did I know? I wish I had known that beauty comes in all sizes and shapes and that the media promotes artificial standards of beauty. It would have helped me to understand that peoples perceptions of beauty are shaped by the culture and the times they belong to. For instance, what was undesirable in the Havana of my mothers youth was longed for in mine. I have tried to explain these things to my own daughter, now a teenager. Just the other day, she pointed out to me how Marilyn Monroe weighed 160 pounds when she was Americas most admired sex symbol. Of course, that was before the age of Twiggy. But perhaps her awareness, especially growing up in a city like Miami, full of cultural diversity, will help her and her peers become more tolerant of themselves and their appearances. Perhaps being different will be easier for them than it was for me. One rainy afternoon, I sat in the back of Sister Helens class, sleepily listening to her read classic love poems. I soon grew tired of hearing about angelic ladies with alabaster skin, hazel eyes, and golden hair. Suddenly, a sonnet by Shakespeare shook me from my stupor. My Mistress Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks, And in some perfumes is there more delight
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Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound. I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare. That afternoon, Shakespeares verse filled me with hope. I felt redeemed. Perhaps out there existed a young Shakespeare who would find beauty in my own brown wires and raspy voice, who didnt mind my heavy treads and olive flesh. Shakespeares words taught me an unforgettable lesson about the force of words while validating my own reality. That sonnet planted a seed. Yet, it took many more years, marriage, and motherhood for me to finally be pleased with my Cuban body. It shouldnt have to take that long.
Carolina Hospital
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HipHop as a Double-Edged Sword

by William Upski Wimsatt From the beginning, hip-hops unstated goals were not that different from the stated goals of many community-based youth organizations. Hip-hop grew out of the South Bronx gang culture of the early 70sthe astounding evolution in less than a decade of DJing, break-dancing, rap and graffitias a reaction and an antidote to the drugs, violence and cynicism of the post-Black Power era. Graffiti caught on in Philadelphia in 1968 and in Harlem in 1970. DJs began throwing outdoor park jams in the South Bronx a few years later. Rap evolved from MCsthe hostsof the park jams. Break-dancing came from the dancers who would dance on the breaks of the songs. Afrika Bambaataa, himself a DJ and a leader of a gang called the Savage Skulls, brought the four elements together as hip-hop under a new organization, The Universal Zulu Nation, whose motto was Peace, Unity, Love and Having Fun. The Zulu Nation was supported by a community center in the Bronx River Projects until the mayor decided to shut them down. Hip-hop gained a worldwide following in the 80s and rap reached maturity with lyricists like Rakim, MC Lyte, KRS-ONE, De La Soul, Latifah and Public Enemy who made it cool to be righteous, use big words, study history, and become politically and spiritually attuned. Throughout the 80s, to varying degrees in different locales, hip-hop served as a bridge from crime, drugs and madness to work, creativity and citizenship. Hip-hop got kids out of their neighborhoods, introduced them to different cultures, provided an arena to learn at their own pace, set their own goals and succeed on their own terms. In many circles, it is almost clich to say, Hip-hop saved my life. In its informal, impossible-to-document way, hip-hop culture probably did as much to keep young urban males off of drugs, out of fights, and constructively engaged during the 1980s as all the at-risk youth programs combined. But hip-hop has always been a double-edged sword, reflecting the best and especially lately, the worst of urban America, with the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. When rappers first proclaimed themselves great, that was a huge dissenting opinion in a society which said they were irrelevant, the scum of the Earth, explains Jay George, an Oakland-based rapper who co-directs Rising Youth for Social Equity (RYSE), a youth empowerment agency. But we have failed to become a complete, viable counterculture. When it comes to our treatment of women, were still on the same page as the U.S. culture. It mirrors the ruling class. Rappers want to drive around in a Lexus dressed like a banker. Rappers feel most of the negative attention they receive is unfounded. When I mention hip-hop to older people, theres a visible knee-jerk reaction in their face, says Rha Goddess, a lyricist who grew up on hip-hop and returned to it after a successful run in corporate America and a string of non-profits. What intimidates people is the boldness, the honesty of it. There are some very nasty and ugly truths about this society and people are not trying to hear it. Sure theres some hip-hop that glamorizes the gangster lifestyle, but theres a lot of hip-hop that if we read between the lines, we should learn that theres a lot of rage among people who are poor and marginalized. Hip-hop is the wake-up call. As the hip-hop generation matures, many recording artists and industry executiveslike their grassroots counterpartsare beginning to realize they have responsibilities to their fan base. When Dr. King led the Montgomery bus boycott, he was 26 years old, younger than Puffy and RZA, says Bill Stephney, C.E.O. of StepSun Records. Stephney is also engineer of the Ready to Live Foundationa reference to Biggie Smalls first album Ready to Diewhich is raising money to fund hip-hop-based grassroots organizations. Puffy and RZA are putting together economic concerns that are being studied as revolutionary at the highest levels of business schools such as Wharton and Harvard. People are starting to realize that its not about How can we save the kids in the projects? but how can they save us. We have some of the finest minds for entrepreneurshipthe Bill Gateses and Oprah Winfreysliving in those buildings, if they only had the resources. Were always talking about protecting the poorwell thats dismissive. If they can create a $5 billion industry from nothing, what else can they create?
From NO MORE PRISONS by William Upski Wimsatt 1999 by William Upski Wimsatt. Used by permission of Soft Skull Press, Inc.
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The Basketball Kidnappings: How the Good People of Hyde Park are Sucking the Life out of Urban Childhood
by William Upski Wimsatt Hyde Park basketball courts had remained stubbornly black as areas around them whitened and upscaleThe courts were under suspicion and the older players knew it. But discretion was of no avail. The courts were being swept away. The first to go was the most perfect court known to man. It was situated among the trees just off Lake Shore Drive, its eastern basket facing the lake. Gliding to that basket, with lake and sky beyond gave you the illusion of flight. The second court to disappear was less beautiful but much loved by its playersShortly before the annual tournament, the backboards were taken down and carted away under cover of darkness.
Brent Staples, Parallel Time
That was in the 1970s. There are now no public basketball hoops in Hyde Park. Last summer, I was walking down and alley off 55th Street. A white father and two boys were playing basketball inside a gated yard. In a parking lot across the alley sat six black boys of comparable age, noticeably sullen. I went over to the black boys. Why dont you play. They wont let us. Did you ask? Yeah. They said no. Will you ask for us? Will I ask for you? OhIm white too. Excuse me. I was wondering if theres any chance we could pl No. Sorry. This is our yard. This is private property, the father said. I walked back over to the black boys and shrugged. This is private property, one of them repeated. Dang, said the youngest. If I had a court, Id let them play. I wouldnt, said another. Cause they dont let us play. We should build our own hoop so when they come, we can say no, you cant play. They sometimes used a hoop they made by nailing a milk crate to an electric pole in the alley. Theres too much glass in the alley, one said. I looked at the alley. It was covered with glass; the pavement was more pock than pave. And the building manager takes their hoop down. The boys have tried nailing their milk crates up in two other alleys but each time the hoops were mysteriously torn down the same night. Whats your name, the oldest of the boys said to me, scowling. He shook my hand and introduced himself as Shawn, surprising me with friendliness. People are going to get ruthless around here in the summer if theres no hoops, he said. Black kids have nothing to do in this neighborhood. Thats how they get into trouble. The only other courts are at the neighborhood club and you have to pay to become a member. Then at 47th and 43rd.All the other ones have been torn down. They tried to say it was gang activityBasketball is what keeps people out of troubleI know, I used to be in all kinds of trouble. Chimed in the youngest, They need to put up a whole bunch of courts and spread them around so everyone wont be crowded onto one court. The only place on my block kids could play basketball was outside Alex OHaras building because his parent owned the apartment. Ms. OHara had to fight the neighbors just to keep her kids milk crate up. (When she told me the names of the neighbors, they were two Hyde Park liberal families whose own kids used to play in the alley with me.) Every day in the summer, twenty kids were out there playing. Ms. OHara supplied popsicles and took them in if they needed a place to stay. Now even the OHaras milk crate is gone. Its very sad, said a woman who has lived on the block for 35 years. All the kids used to play in the alley. Now theyre all upstairs with computers. The kids lives today are all programmed. You look at the alley today, theres not a kid playing. Whats the most fun you guys have on the block? I asked a racially mixed group of four boys whose parents have just purchased them a portable basketball hoop. Three summers ago, we had so much fun. We used to play kickball in the alley every night, and basketball and baseball.
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Its as if the only way to have fun is to play sports. When I was a kid growing up, way back in the 80s, sports werent the only thing for kids in Hyde Park to do. On my block, we had: Trees to climb and rooftops on which to build clubhouses. Basements to break into and hallways to steal light bulbs from. Snowballs to throw at passing cars and at each other. Cars to skitch in the wintertime and delivery trucks to ride. Gangways, alleys, and yards to play all-block tag in. Garbage chutes to slide down. Mulberry trees and grape vines to eat off. Tourists at the Museum of Science and Industry to mess with. Drunks to play tricks on. Other kids to meet and play with just walking around. Other neighborhoods to walk toto see what would happen. Water to squirt, mud to make mud castles, warm tar to have tar fights. Pedestrians to sell lemonade to. Junk and garbage to build things out of. Bugs, alley cats, squirrels, and birds to play with. Lobbies to read peoples magazines in. Sports fell near the bottom of the list. Who needed toys? We had imaginations. We had a neighborhood. The tar pit was replaced by a parking lot. Mulberry trees and vines got cut. Our rooftop clubhouses got barb-wired. Abandoned garages were razed, gangways sealed, fences erected, and buzzer systems switched to outer doors of lobbies. The museum charges admission now, and the block next to ours is gated off. The block next to ours is a gated community! You have to have a special key card just to walk down what used to be a public sidewalk. I used to play in their park. Now, I have to go all the way around the block and hop a fence. The call it urban renewal. I call it nailing shut the window of communication between urban kids and adults, rich and poor, whites and blacks. The city that created people like me doesnt exist anymore. Fifty years ago in my neighborhood, before there was air conditioning, families used to sleep outside in the park on summer nights. Twenty-five years ago, my parents met while watching the African drummers at the park by the lake. Now its illegal to play instruments there because of complaints from residents living in the high-rises more than a block away. If the people who make the rules in Hyde Park had had their way a few years earlier, my parents never would have met and I never would have been born. No wonder I grew up feeling like the people who called the shots in my neighborhood didnt care about me. They dont. And they definitely didnt care abut the black kids. No wonder we wanted to write graffiti and break windows. Its bad enough theyre building more tollways and gated communities in the cornfields, sucking away resources, jobs and transit from existing communities including present-day suburbs. But even in the city, suburb-inspired zoning has made it illegal to build alleys and mixed-use buildings with apartments located above storefronts. Why do you think theres a shortage of moderately priced housing? It all used to be in alleys and above storefronts! Thats part of why we have a housing crisis in this country! And when did restaurants, movies, sports and cultural events become the essence of urban social life? Ten years from now, demographics predict therell be more middle-agers and teenagers in the population which means my block is going to be even more alientated. Its gonna take a couple more Kathy OHaras to keep my block from getting a lot worse. I have something for you to do this summer. Get to know the kids on your block. Invite them into your house before they invite themselves in. Find out what they need before they take it from you. In Hyde Park, to begin with, kids need basketball courts.
From NO MORE PRISONS by William Upski Wimsatt 1999 by William Upski Wimsatt. Used y permission of Soft Skull Press, Inc.
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Lesson 3: Completing the Essay Work

Materials
Transparency and student copies of: Understanding Essays: A Protocol for Working with Text (see Writing Lessons 13) The Circuit by Francisco Jimnez* Living Like Weasels by Annie Dillard* or My Cuban Body by Carolina Hospital* The Basketball Kidnappings by William Upski Wimsatt* Hip-Hop as a Double Edged Sword by William Upski Wimsatt* Theres No Place Like It: The Very Humble Cave by Elisabeth Rosenthal* * see Reading Lessons 12 Essay Summary chart (see end of lesson) Writing notebooks, chart paper, overheads, and markers
Standard
Summarize, synthesize, and evaluate information from a variety of text and genres.
Big Idea
Read, respond to, discuss, and study essays that represent points of view from places, people, and events that are familiar and unfamiliar as they are presented in high-stakes school contexts and in relation to other essays.
Intended Learning
Students will complete analyzing the essays to draw conclusions.
Focus Lesson
Connection
Students have so far been exploring essays through a protocol. Today they will finalize and draw conclusion on that work.
Notes
50/10 Skills Grouping: Planning for More Individualized Instruction 50/4 Interactive Read-Aloud: Reading Designed to Support Understanding 50/39 Guided Reading: Providing Individual Support Within a Group Setting
Direct Instruction
Ask students whether they have any questions or issues related to their work on reading essays, then have them discuss how theyre doing.
Link to Work Period

Have students quickly fill out the Essay Summary chart (see end of lesson) to summarize a piece from an essay they enjoyed reading.
Work Period
Shared Reading
Groups use this time to complete their essay reading work. Confer with groups about their work.
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Independent Reading
Have students use this time to continue reading essays or their books.
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class and explain to students they will have an opportunity to extend their Understanding Essays work to a few more essays during the next few reading lessons. Explain that each student will be expected to locate and bring to class three copies of one essay. During Reading Lessons 58, students will apply the Understanding Essays protocol to these essays as well. At the end of that work, groups will be required to make brief presentations about their work to the rest of the class. Review expectations for students presentations during the next reading lessons. Presentations should be simple and straight forward: Each group should present work from an essay they studied during the Reading Essays work. If necessary, essay should be read aloud to the class. Using the board or a transparency, students post and present concise responses to each of the three following questions: What are the arguments in this essay? Are the arguments compelling? Why or why not? How does the author make himself or herself present? Each groups presentation should conclude with a whole-class discussion about the text presented, focusing on the three questions above.

Second quickwrite: After this reading, take time for student responses to the question: Are the arguments compelling? Be sure to refer to specific passages in the text to support your responses.
Essay Summary
Quote and page no.: Why I chose this piece from the essay titled:
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Lesson 4: Introducing the Essay Continuum Task

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Four: Introducing the Essay Continuum Task Transparency and student copies of The Essay: Ideas to Consider (see end of lesson) Transparency and student copies of: Understanding Essay: A Protocol for Working with Text (see Writing Lessons 1-3) Essay Continuum: Characteristics of an Authors Presence chart (see Direct Instruction) Writing notebooks, chart paper, markers
Standards
Compare and contrast a variety of texts with similar themes and ideas. Analyze the texts main idea and use relevant details to support the analysis.
Big Ideas
Read, discuss, and describe essays to articulate the diversity of their arguments, characteristics, similarities, and differences. Generate a continuum to facilitate thinking and discussion around the qualities of, and relationships among, a collection of essays.
Intended Learning
Students notice and articulate relationships among essays.
Focus Lesson
Note: The essay continuum task introduced in this lesson is a process designed to help students notice and articulate relationships among essays. During this lesson, the class will begin creating a representation of the relationships among model essays. One way to manage this work is to use a piece of chart paper and several large sticky notes. Each essay can be represented by a sticky note. The personal/transpersonal continuum on the Essay Continuum: Characteristics of an Authors Presence chart (see below) can be drawn on the chart. You or a student can place and move the sticky notes on the continuum to reflect the work as it unfolds during the class. When the continuum work is brought to a close at the end of Writing Lesson 6, save each classs continuum so it can be used during the third part of this unit.
Notes
50/5 Advance Organizers: Getting the Mind in Gear for Instruction 50/15 Partner Work: Practicing Verbal Interaction
Connection
Have a brief summary about students prior work. Have students do a 510 minute quickwrite: Write down what you think the main argument in the essay is. Review any passages or moments you marked and describe how they support the argument.
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Direct Instruction
Remind students that the point of most of their work in this unit is to help them make sense of the huge variety of essays and help them become better readers and writers of individual essays. Place a transparency copy of The Essay: Ideas to Consider (see end of lesson) on the overhead and review it with the class. To ensure that students better comprehend the gist of the Ideas sheet, take a minute to recreate the Essay Continuum on the board or a piece of chart paper.
Essay Continuum: Characteristics of an Authors Presence
Personal
Transpersonal
Tell students that during the next few writing lessons they will take on the challenge of arranging the five model essays on this person/transpersonal continuum. Remind the class that there is no definitive spectrumthe value of the work is in the work itself: the conversations, arguments made and considered, and careful readings.
Consider starting a vocabulary journal. Vocabulary words: essay, characteristics, authors presence, spectrum Give students a few minutes to create a Venn-Diagram to model the process of noting similarities and differences among essays.
Similarities
Differences
Link to Work Period

Have one or two students explain the required work for the Work Period.
Work Period
Review again the notion of characteristics of authors presence (presented in The Essay: Ideas to Consider), then set the class to work on noticing similarities and differences among essays by asking them to consider the
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characteristics of the authors presence in each essay. There are a number of ways to conduct this work. For example, you might decide to begin by assigning essays to small groups of students where their work might proceed much like the Understanding Essays work did: a movement from independent thinking to small group sharing and negotiation, wrapping up in whole group discussion. Keep in mind that students cannot do this work by working with essays in isolation from other essays. For this reason, students should always be pushed to think about an essay under consideration in relation to other essays. Be sure to remind students again and again that the point of this work is the construction of the continuum: How do these essays compare to one another when considered through the lens of characteristics of authors presence?
Sharing/Closure
Use this time to debrief the essay continuum work; remind students that this work is challenging and that there is no definitiv right or wrong answer. Instead, it requires students to offer up and consider arguments about an essays position relative to other essays. This requires students to reference specific essays and specific parts of them, use critical terms introduced in the unit (e.g., characteristics of authors presence), and invent terms and metaphors that allow them to convey what they see an author doing in an essay. This is difficult work. To do it well requires time, patience, focus, and stamina.

Exiting ticket: Why are we working on a continuum? How is that going to help us with our work?
The Essay: Ideas to Consider

The term essay is used to describe a huge variety of texts. Essays come in many different forms and are used to accomplish a variety of purposes. One way to make sense of the variety of texts called essays is to sort them according to how the author appears in the text. A phrase used to describe how the author appears or shows up in an essay is: characteristics of authors presence. The author is always present in an essay. In some essays, the author may seem more present (e.g., when the author frequently uses the pronoun I or tells personal stories); in other essays, the author may seem less present (e.g., when an author never refers to herself in the essay). Remember, an essay that seems more personal doesnt have a higher degree of authors presence; the author is simply present in different ways. The characteristics of authors presence are different. Heres a way to sort out essays you read: Arrange them on a spectrum according to how they seem: at one end is the word personal. At the other end is the word transpersonal, a word James Moffett uses to describe essays that seem less personal. Arrange the essays on that spectrum, placing essays relative to each other and to the personal/transpersonal terms. To better comprehend the gist of the concepts presented and exercise suggested, take a minute to recreate the personal/ transpersonal spectrum on the board or a piece of chart paper.
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Lesson 4: Introducing the Reading Essays Task

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Four: Introducing the Reading Essays Task Transparency and student copies of: Understanding Essays: A Protocol for Working with Text (see Writing Lessons 13) The Essay: Ideas to Consider (see Writing Lesson 4) The Circuit by Francisco Jimnez* Living Like Weasels by Annie Dillard* or My Cuban Body by Carolina Hospital The Basketball Kidnappings by William Upski Wimsatt* Hip-Hop as a Double Edged Sword by William Upski Wimsatt* Theres No Place Like It: The Very Humble Cave by Elisabeth Rosenthal* * see Reading Lessons 12 Problems During Reading Small Group Time chart (see end of lesson) Writing notebooks, chart paper, overheads, and markers
Standard
Big Idea
Intended Learning
Students test learning of the Understanding Essays work so they can continue to experience reading and thinking about essays.
Focus Lesson
Connection
Read-aloud two quickwrites and have a brief discussion about their content.
Notes
50/10 Skills Grouping: Planning for More Individualized Instruction
Direct Instruction
Collaborate with the class to review the results of the Understanding Essays work. During this conversation, focus on the following things: Clarifying any confusion about arguments and/or the question of whether or not an essay is compelling. The Understanding Essays protocol itself, including the roles of rereading, quickwriting, and discussion of the work.
Explain that during this, students will begin work on a small group Reading Essays task. The purpose of this task is to give students additional experience reading and thinking about essays. It is also an opportunity for students to work together to further test the learning of their Understanding Essays work: Do these questions work? Does the quickwriting and discussion help you read and think better?
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Lesson Plan
Take time to place students in small groups of three. Arrange groups so each one has at least one member who brought an essay to class. (In cases where groups do not have an essay to work with, or where students need more time to prepare materials for other members of the group, consider asking students to work with either Annie Dillards Living Like Weasels or Carolina Hospitals My Cuban Bodywhichever of the two the class did not study in previous lessons.) Take time to walk through the Understanding Essays protocol with the class. Be sure to address any questions students have about conducting this work in small groups. Two items especially worth noting: Explain that small group presentations during Reading Lessons 78 will take the place of the protocols Whole-Class Wrap-Up. Strongly recommend that students read their groups essay for homework or have them read the essay during independent reading time.
For this to happen requires some additional planning and foresight, but it will ensure that groups have enough time to discuss and reread texts during class time. You are strongly encourage to require groups to write up results of their work. The simplest way to do this is to tie work to specific sections of the Understanding Essays protocol and adding a characteristics of authors presence question. Ask each student to devote a notebook page to each essay to answer the following questions: 1. 2. 3. What are the arguments in this essay? Are the arguments compelling? Why or why not? Where does this essay fit on the classs Essay Continuum: Characteristics of Authors Presence?
Remind students that their answers to these questions should be anchored in the essays they studied.
Link to Work Period

In groups, have students prepare an agenda for todays work.
Work Period
Shared Reading
If necessary, give groups a few minutes to plan how they will spend the Work Period. Consider taking a minute to ask groups to volunteer their agendas. Have groups use this time to begin the Reading Essays work. Use this time to confer with groups about their work.
Independent Reading
Students use this time to continue reading essays or their books.
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class and take time to debrief the Reading Essays work of the lesson: What was challenging? What went well? What will you do to prepare for the next reading lesson work? How will the group use that lessons Work Period time?
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Lesson Plan
Consider creating a chart titled, Problems During Small Group Reading Time (see below). Divide it into two columnsProblems and Solutions. Ask volunteers to offer short descriptions of problems that arose during this time. After you have Problems listed, ask the class to help you brainstorm Solution ideas for problem items.

Second quickwrite: After this reading, take time to answer the question: Are the arguments compelling? Be sure to refer to specific passages in the text to support your response.
Problems During Reading Small Group Time

Problems Solutions
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 5: Faces of Authors Presence

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Five: Faces of Authors Presence Transparency copies of essays Signs of Authors Presence chart (see end of lesson) Essay Continuum: Characteristics of an Authors Presence chart (begun in Writing Lesson 4) Writing notebooks, chart paper, and markers
Standards
Summarize, synthesize, and evaluate information from a variety of text and genres. Identify an authors point of view and purpose. Analyze text to make predictions and draw conclusions.
Intended Learning
Students provide evidence of the authors presence in an essay.
Big Ideas
Read, discuss, and describe essays to articulate the diversity of their arguments, characteristics, similarities, and differences. Consider the shapes essays take and the choices essayists make about sources, arrangement, examples, and point of view.
Focus Lesson
Connection
Have a brief summary about students work during prior lessons. Have students do a 510 minute quickwrite: Write down what you think the main argument in the essay is. Review any passages or moments you marked and describe how they support the essays argument.
Notes
50/5 Advance Organizers: Getting the Mind in Gear for Instruction. 50/15 Partner Work: Practicing Verbal Interaction
Direct Instruction
Review the notion of authors presence with the class; that the author is always present, but present in different waysthrough argument or position and personal stories told and in the way text is selected and arranged. The author is always there, selecting one argument or position over another, arranging text one way rather than another, and taking a particular perspective over another. Using transparency copies of the essays, work with the class to underline, circle, or otherwise identify exact words, lines, and/or sections in each essay that signal the presence of the author. For example, you might circle the word I or underline a phrase such as Twenty minutes from my house You might underline a paragraph that contains many details describing a place, or that the author chose these particular details and left
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Lesson Plan
others out as another example of authors presence. Add excerpts or summaries of these examples to the Signs of Authors Presence (see end of lesson). Place the examples in the Signs of Authors Presence column. Collaborate with the class to come up with descriptors of the ways authors reveal (or conceal) themselves in essays. Be slow to give away items that students might otherwise discover in Work Period discussions.
You might want to start a vocabulary journal to help your second language learners. Vocabulary words: argument, position, perspective Give students a few minutes to create the Signs of Authors Presence chart then model the process of filling it out.
Link to Work Period

In small groups, have students review their agendas for todays work.
Work Period
Devote this lessons Work Period and Closing Meeting to the classs construction of the Essay Continuum begun during Writing Lesson 4. Keep in mind that, in this work, the means (the process of negotiating the continuum) is perhaps even more important than the end (the completed continuum). In other words, students individual and corporate thinking and discussion is critical.
Sharing/Closure
Use this time to debrief students continuum work.

Exiting ticket: What have you found difficult about this activity?
Signs of Authors Presence

Signs of Authors Presence Descriptors
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 5: Reading Essays Work

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Five: Reading Essays Task Transparency and student copies of: Understanding Essays: A Protocol for Working with Text (see Writing Lessons 13)) The Essay: Ideas to Consider (see Writing Lesson 4) The Circuit by Francisco Jimnez* Living Like Weasels by Annie Dillard* or My Cuban Body by Carolina Hospital The Basketball Kidnappings by William Upski Wimsatt* Hip-Hop as a Double Edged Sword by William Upski Wimsatt* Theres No Place Like It: The Very Humble Cave by Elisabeth Rosenthal* * see Reading Lessons 12 Problems During Reading Small Group Time chart (see Reading Lesson 4) Writing notebooks, chart paper, overheads, and markers
Standard
Big Idea
Intended Learning
Students continue to test their learning during Understanding Essays work so they can continue to experience reading and thinking about essays.
Focus Lesson
Connection
Read-aloud two quick writes and have a brief discussion about their content.
Notes
50/10 Skills Grouping: Planning for More Individualized Instruction 50/15 Partner Work: Practicing Verbal Interaction
Direct Instruction
Review the goals of reading essays. Revisit the idea of an agenda with the class by pointing out that it is simply a work plan that keeps people on task and ensures they accomplish work they set out to do. Ask groups to share any concerns or frustrations they are having about how to use the upcoming Work Period time. Address these issues and answer any additional questions students have about their work for reading essays.
50/23 Explain the reading activity, model what students will do, and provide some guided practice before asking students to work independently.
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Lesson Plan
Link to Work Period

Have students form groups and prepare an agenda for todays work.
Work Period
Shared Reading
Have groups use this time to finish reading assigned essays. Use this time to confer with groups about their work.
Independent Reading
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class and take time to debrief this lessons Reading Essays work: What was challenging? What went well? What will you do to prepare for the next reading lesson work? How will the group use that lessons Work Period time? Add to the chart, Problems During Reading Small Group Time (see Reading Lesson 4). Ask volunteers to offer short descriptions of problems that arose during this time. After you added to the Problems list, ask the class to help you brainstorm solution ideas for each problem item.

Second quickwrite: After this reading, take time to answer the question: Are the arguments compelling? Be sure to refer to specific passages in the text to support your responses.
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 6: Faces of Authors PresenceArgument as Presence

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Six: Faces of Authors PresenceArgument as Presence Student copies of model essays Signs of Authors Presence chart (see Writing Lesson 5) Writing notebooks, chart paper, and markers
Standards
Summarize, synthesize, and evaluate information from a variety of text and genres. Identify an authors point of view and purpose Analyze text to make predictions and draw conclusions.
Intended Learning
Students consider additional ways authors reveal themselves in essays.
Big Ideas
Read, discuss, and describe essays to articulate the diversity of their arguments, characteristics, similarities, and differences. Consider the shapes essays take and the choices essayists make about sources, arrangement, examples, and point of view.
Focus Lesson
Note: This lesson is important for it is another opportunity for students to get comfortable with the notion of authors presence. This Focus Lesson is designed to help you help students consider additional ways authors reveal themselves in essays. Of course, in all of this work, your critical role is to facilitate discoverya process that requires, undoubtedly, no small amount of patience and flexibility.
Notes
50/5 Advance Organizers: Getting the Mind in Gear for Instruction 50/15 Partner Work: Practicing Verbal Interaction
Connection
Briefly summarize students work during prior lessons. Have students do a 510 minute quickwrite: Write down what you think the main argument in the essay is. Review any passages or moments you marked and describe how they support the argument.
Direct Instruction
Once again, remind students the author is always present in a text, but in different waysthrough argument, position held, and personal stories told and in the way text is selected and arranged. The author is always there, selecting one argument or position over another, arranging text one way rather than another, and taking a particular perspective over another.
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Lesson Plan
Review the Signs of Authors Presence chart (begun in Writing Lesson 5); ask students to pay careful attention to evident types of authors presence they focused on up to this point. Note: During this conversation, be sure to note ways authors reveal themselves in texts that students are less inclined to recognize. This will help you determine a direction for this lessons conversation. For example, if students focus on anecdotes and the authors use of I, then you will know they need some help seeing and talking about other authors presence items such as selection of essays details and statements of position. Tell students that the purpose of this Focus Lesson time is to help them become better at seeing other examples of authors presence. Review signs or characteristics of authors presence theyve identified, then suggest there are other ways in which writers reveal themselves. Reread model essays to notice these other characteristics of authors presence. For example, you might take another look at Wimsatts The Basketball Kidnappings. If the class points to stories and scenes Wimsatt tells as evidence of his presence, you might ask how else Wimsatt reveals himself in the essay. Answers include the questions he asks, the positions he states, the claims he makes, the examples he uses to support those claims and positions, and the details he reveals. At the end of the Focus Lesson, take time to add new descriptors and examples to the Signs of Authors Presence chart.
Vocabulary word: evidence Continue to model how to fill out the Signs of Authors Presence chart (begun in Writing Lesson 5).
Link to Work Period

In small groups, have students review their agendas for todays work.
Work Period
Devote the Work Period and Closing Meeting to the classs construction of the Essay continuum begun during Writing Lesson 4. Keep in mind that, in this work, the means (the process of negotiating the continuum) is perhaps even more important than the end (the completed continuum). In other words, students individual and corporate thinking and discussion is critical.
Sharing/Closure
Use this time to debrief students continuum work.

Exiting ticket: What have you found difficult about this activity?
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 6: Completing the Reading Essays Work

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Six: Completing the Reading Essays Task Transparency and student copies of: Understanding Essays: A Protocol for Working with Text (see Writing Lessons 13) The Essay: Ideas to Consider (see Writing Lesson 4) The Circuit by Francisco Jimnez* Living Like Weasels by Annie Dillard* or My Cuban Body by Carolina Hospital The Basketball Kidnappings by William Upski Wimsatt* Hip-Hop as a Double Edged Sword by William Upski Wimsatt* Theres No Place Like It: The Very Humble Cave by Elisabeth Rosenthal* * see Reading Lessons 12 Essay Continuum: Characteristics of Authors Presence (begun in Writing Lesson 4) Writing notebooks, chart paper, overheads, and markers
Standard
Summarize, synthesize, and evaluate information from a variety of texts and genres.
Big Idea
Intended Learning
Students complete the Reading Essays work and prepare for presentations.
Focus Lesson
Connection
Read-aloud two quickwrites and have a brief discussion about their content.
Notes
50/10 Skills Grouping: Planning for More Individualized Instruction 50/15 Partner Work: Practicing Verbal Interaction
Direct Instruction
Use this time to address any questions or issues related to the Reading Essays work.
Link to Work Period

Have students form groups and prepare an agenda for todays work.
Work Period
Shared Reading
Groups should use this time to complete the Reading Essays work. Use this time to confer with groups about their work.
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Lesson Plan
Independent Reading
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class and take time to review expectations for presentations students will make during Reading Lessons 78. Presentations should be simple and straightforward: Each group should present work from one essay they studied during the Reading Essays work. The essay should be read-aloud to the class by you or a student. Using the board or a transparency, students write and present concise responses to each of the three following questions: 1. What are the arguments in this essay? 2. Are the arguments compelling? Why or why not? 3. Where does this essay fit on the classs Essay Continuum: Characteristics of Authors Presence? Have each group conclude the presentation with a whole-class discussion about the presented text. Use three questions stated above to provide a focus for the exchange.

Second quickwrite: After this reading, take time to answer the question: Are the arguments compelling? Be sure to refer to specific passages in the text to support your response.
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 7: Introducing the Essay Writing Project and Noticing Sources

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Seven: Introducing the Essay Writing Project/Noticing Sources Student copies of model essays The Essay Writing Project assignment (see end of lesson) Colorado Department of Education (CDE) 4-Point Writing Rubric (go to www.cde.state.co.us; beginning with the Standards/Assessments link, click through to CSAP Scoring Information by way of the Unit of Student Assessment page) Writing notebooks, chart paper, and markers
Standards
Plan, draft, revise, and edit for a legible final copy. Develop ideas and content with significant details, examples, and/or reasons to address a prompt.
Big Ideas
Summarize the big topics, ideas, or questions discussed in essays. Generate write-like essays.
Intended Learning
Students get an explanation of The Essay Writing Project.
Focus Lesson
Note: You might want to include the CDE 4-Point Writing Rubric early on so students know their grading expectations. Academic Workout offers various lessons on grammar, usage, mechanics, and spelling that you might want to incorporate as mini-lessons during students editing processes.
Notes
50/38 Interactive writing: Developing Writing Skills Through Active Scaffolding 50/42 Attribute Charting: Organizing Information to Support Understanding
Connection
Briefly summarize students prior work. Have students do a 510 minute quickwrite: We will be working on writing two essays in the upcoming lessons. How do you approach a writing project?
Direct Instruction
Take a few minutes to review the work of the unit thus far by pointing out that students are now well-acquainted with a group of essays, able to identify and discuss ideas in those essays, and have worked to create a representation of how essays are related to the authors presence. Suggest that students work has prepared them to venture into the world of essay writing. Take a few minutes to share the The Essay Writing Project assignment (see end of lesson), then take time to answer any questions students have about it. Be sure to remind students that drafts, notes, quickwrites, or ideas for their essays may already exist in their writing notebooks and/or folders. The independent writing project work will likely be a seedbed of ideas for some students. Take additional time to clarify reasons for writing two essays about the same topic. Ask students to think with you about what this side-by-side work might help them come to better understand.
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Lesson Plan
Note: During the writing lessons ahead, be sure to raise this question with students again and again. The point of the task of writing two essays on the same topic is to help students reflect on various faces of essay writing: How different essays have different characteristics and to do similar work in very different ways.
Create a chart where students contribute ideas and format suggestions for the writing project.

In triads, have a brief discussion: What are some things you must do to be successful in completing the essay-writing project?
Link to Work Period

Briefly write your thinking about things you must do to be successful in the project ahead.
Work Period
Explain to students that to develop information for their essays, they must do certain things, as authors do and as seen through previously studied essays (names for the items listed below are adapted from James Moffetts list of the three main things that reporters and researchers do in his essay Bridges: From Personal Writing to the Formal Essay): Look back (remember) Look (observe) Ask (interview) Look it up (read secondary texts) Place this list on the board or on a piece of chart paper and ask students to copy it into their notebooks. Review items and apply the terms to a rereading of one of the model essays. Add the results of this rereading to the Understanding Essays chart (for that particular essay) under a new subheading titled, Sources of Information. Be sure items that end up on this chart are sufficiently specific. In other words, avoid placing the look/ask terms on the chart. Instead, work with the class to generate items that describe the actual kinds of work they will be doing as they prepare their own essays. Also, the seamlessness of a finished text will inevitably require that students do a fair amount of inferring to complete this work. After the rereading and charting, take a minute to answer any questions students have about the work. Have students form small groups and assign an essay to each one. Instruct groups to complete the Sources of Information work for their assigned essay. Groups should be prepared to report out their findings during the Closing Meeting of the next Writing Lesson. Give groups any remaining Work Period time to begin the task.
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class and use this time to debrief the Sources of Information work completed thus far. Use this time to clarify the task and to do any additional troubleshooting.

Exiting ticket: Create a to-do list of steps you need to take to complete this task.
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Lesson Plan
The Essay Writing Project

An important part in this unit is the idea of writing like, which mean students study texts then try writing similar texts themselves. The task: 1. 2. Over the next few lessons, each student identifies a topic (idea, event, cultural phenomena, or experience) he or she wants to think and write about. Each student writes and turns in two final draft essays about their subject. Each of the two essays should be like one of the model essays the class studied. For example, Gabby decides to write an essay similar to Francisco Jimnezs. The Circuit, about an experience she had raising animals on an urban farm. For her other essay, she works with the same topicraising animals on an urban farmbut that essay is written more like Elisabeth Rosenthals piece on caves in China. 3. 4. Students edit their essays using correct grammar, mechanics, and spelling. Students complete and attach a commentary to each of their finished essays.
Focus Lessons in the lessons ahead are designed to help students experience or try out the kinds of thinking and research they noticed in model essays. Additional work with these essays is intended to help students see more clearly the characteristics and sources authors featured in those essays. Some pair work-time will be provided to revise essay drafts.
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Lesson Plan
Lessons 78: Reading Essays Presentations

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Seven: Reading Essays Presentations Essay Continuum: Characteristics of Authors Presence (begun in Writing Lesson 4) Students materials for presentations Writing notebooks, chart paper, transparencies, and markers
Standard
Big Idea
Read, respond to, discuss, and study essays that represent points of view from familiar and unfamiliar places, people, and events as they are presented in high-stakes school contexts and in relation to other essays.
Intended Learning
Students present their Reading Essays work.
Focus Lesson, Work Period, Closing

Note: You might use a simple rubric so peers can grade each presentation. Use the Focus Lesson, Work Period, and Closing of these two lessons for the Reading Essays presentations. Each group should present work from one essay they studied during the Reading Essays work. You or a student should read aloud the essay to the class. Using the board or a transparency, students post and present concise responses to each of the three following questions. 1. 2. 3. What are the arguments in this essay? Are the arguments compelling? Why or why not? Where does this essay fit on the classs Essay Continuum: Characteristics of Authors Presence?
Notes
50/9 Creating a Framework for Language Success 50/33 Scripting: Practicing Verbal Interactions Students can use PowerPoint to create presentations.
Have each group conclude presentations with a whole-class discussion about the presented text. Use the three questions stated above to provide a focus for the exchange.
Pair students and encourage them to practice using scripts for their presentations.
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 8: Completing the Source of Information Task

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Eight: Completing the Source of Information Task Student copies of model essays Writing notebooks, chart paper, transparencies, and markers
Standards
Intended Learning
Students review the kind of work that a writer puts into crafting an essay.
Big Ideas
Focus Lesson
Connection
Briefly summarize students prior work. Have students do a 510 minute quickwrite on a topic based on needs students demonstrated as you reviewed their work.
Notes
50/38 Interactive writing: Developing Writing Skills Through Active Scaffolding 50/42 Attribute Charting: Organizing Information to Support Understanding
Direct Instruction
Use this Focus Lesson time to review or clarify aspects of the Source of Information task. Remind students that the point of this work is to help them see more clearly the kind of work that a writer puts into crafting an essay.

In triads, have students discuss aspect of the Source of Information task.
Link to Work Period

None.
Work Period
Have students work in small groups to complete the Source of Information assignment. Consider having groups create a chart or overhead transparency to use as they present results of this work during the Closing Meeting. Confer with groups about their work during this time. Be sure to reserve enough time for reporting out during the Closing Meeting.
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Lesson Plan
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class and ask groups to share or post results of their work. During these presentations, ask students to use a transparency copy of the essay to illustrate their findings. Negotiate the results of this work with the whole class then add and complete a Sources of Information section to the Understanding Essays charts.

Exiting ticket: Based on what you have learned so far, what is one thing you still have questions about and what is one key understanding?
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 9: Recording Sensations, Memories, and Reflections

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Nine: Recording Sensations, Memories, and Reflections Blank transparencies Writing to Record chart (see end of lesson) Quickwrites chart (see end of lesson) Writing notebooks, chart paper, and markers
Standards
Plan, draft, revise, and edit for a legible final copy. Use vivid and precise language appropriate to audience and purpose. Develop ideas and content with significant details, examples, and/or reasons to address a prompt.
Intended Learning
Students explore relationships and contrasts between reporting and recording.
Big Ideas
Focus Lesson
Note: This is the first of three writing exercises designed to help students develop ideas, dispositions, and/or skills they might apply to their essay writing work. In his book, Teaching the Universe of Discourse, James Moffett suggests that a sensations-memory-reflections sequence is an important progression for students to experience, a path to which they should be apprenticed. Indeed, reporting this sequence has a prominent role in essay writing. But for students to report this sequence, they must first learn to tune into it and record it. The purpose of this lesson is to help students experience and understand what it means to record. The exercise described in this Focus Lesson is adapted from a section of James Moffetts Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Moffett points out that the differences between recording and reporting are not merely differences in tensethey are fundamentally two different kinds of work, requiring different dispositions in a writer and different points of view. Consider Moffetts comparison between recording and reporting in the paragraphs below (In this passage Moffett describes reporting as a kind of narrative that accounts for what happened): Although grammar tells us that the difference between what is happening and what happened is a time difference, much more than time is involved. Tense is a relation of speaker to events: if the events are unrolling before his eyesongoingthey are being coded for the first time by someone who is attending them (or assisting at them, as the French say) and who is therefore in the same plane of reality as the actors. This is his point of view. His coding of events is a first-order abstraction.
Notes
50/38 Interactive writing: Developing Writing Skills Through Active Scaffolding 50/42 Attribute Charting: Organizing Information to Support Understanding 50/2 Visual Scaffolding: Providing Language Support Through Visual Images
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Lesson Plan
As a report of what happened, narrative is a second order abstraction. Compare the sensory stream of someone watching a football game with the Sunday newspaper account of the same game. Narrative is a further abstraction of some observers prior abstraction.
(Universe of Discourse, 62)
Based on Moffetts excerpt, a report might be understood as a selection of data recorded while an individual attended to a sensation, a memory, an event, or a stream of thoughts. This lesson is designed to help students begin to experiment with recording to see what kinds of thinking and insight it produces so eventually they can think about how reports on these thoughts and insights find their way into essays. Writing Lessons 1112 further explore the relationships and contrasts between reportings and recordings.
Connection
Direct Instruction
Create a Writing to Record chart (see end of lesson) on the board or overhead. Explain that you will walk students through a writing exercise designed to help them experience the kinds of thinking and writing in which essayists engage. This exercise may also help some students generate ideas or dispositions that prove to be critical pieces in their essay writing work. Take a few minutes to show students what writing to record sounds like by explaining that when writers record information, they are doing, what James Moffett calls, what is happening work. Illustrate this on an overhead so students can distinguish recording from reporting, which Moffett describes as what happened work. Recording sensations and surroundings examples: Recording what is happening: I am sitting on a hard, gray chair. My back is pinching against the rails, my stomach is rumbling, and my bladder feels like it is about to overflow. Reporting what happened: I sat in a hard, gray chair. My back was pinched against the rails, my stomach rumbled, I had to go to the bathroom really bad. Recording what is happening as you are remembering: I am remembering the gray floor and the dingy white walls of my first grade classroom. Mrs. Hopkins is at the front of the room, sitting at her desk. Reporting what happened: The floor tile was gray. The walls were a dingy white. Mrs. Hopkins slouched at her desk at the front of the room. Recording what is happening as you are reflecting: I am wondering about the other kids. Were they scared too? Reporting what happened when you reflected: I often wonder about the other kids. Sometimes I think about Johnny. Was he scared too?
Recording memories examples:
Recording reflections examples:
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Lesson Plan
Offer a filmic image to the class: Recording is like taping an event, a moment, a sensation, a memory, or a thought. Moffett aligns recording with drama. Reporting summarizes, elaborates, and gets everything down. It is the difference between the sensory stream of someone watching a football game and the Sunday newspaper account of the same game.
(Moffett, Universe of Discourse, 62)
You might want to bring an audio recording and a short news clip that illustrate this difference.

In triads, have students discuss the difference between recording and reporting.
Work Period
Ask students to turn to the next blank page in their writing notebooks. Explain that you will walk them through a writing exercise that has four steps. For it to work, students must be willing to be quiet and thoughtful for a few minutes. Walk students through the exercise: 1. Ask students to focus inward and pay close attention to their bodies. Ask them to notice the sensations they are feelingwhat itches, aches, moves, or feels tenseand notice what emotions or feelings these sensations produce. Ask them to compose a brief but detailed quickwrite to record what they are noticing. 2. Ask students to notice their physical surroundingswhere they are, what sounds they hear, what smells they smell, what they see and feel, and, once again, to notice what emotions or feelings the noticing of these surroundings produce. Ask them to compose a brief but detailed quickwrite to record what they are noticing. 3. Ask students to review their quickwriting and pay careful attention to the sensations and memories these recordings evoke. Then ask students to, as Moffett says, begin writing down [the] trains of memories those sensations evoke. 4. After students have written for a few minutes, ask them to reread their quickwrites to notice the following: Did they write as a person in the present, recording memories as they unfolded (e.g., I am remembering I am six years old. I am sitting in my room)? Did they write as a person reporting memories (Once, when I was six)?
Create an overhead with the steps listed above for your visual and second language learners (see the Quickwrites chart at the end of the lesson).
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class and conduct a whole-group discussion about the Work Period exercise. Use the following prompts to guide the discussion and capture the results on a transparency or piece of chart paper: Describe how slowing down to notice your bodily sensations led you to connect with memories. What is the difference between recording writing and reporting writing? (If necessary, illustrate this distinction by showing your own writing or by directing the class to passages in model essays.) What are the benefits of writing to record to a writer interested in writing essays?
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Lesson Plan

Exiting ticket: Based on what have learned so far, what did you noticed about the difference between reporting and recording?
Exercise: Writing to Record

First, record: Internal sensations Physical self and surroundings
Then, record: Memories these sensations and observations evoke
Last, record: Reflections or thoughts about the memories
Quickwrites
1. Think about some sensations you are feeling or have feltwhat itches, aches, moves, or feels tenseand notice what emotions or feelings these sensations produce. Compose a brief but detailed quickwrite to record what you are noticing. Notice your physical surroundingswhere are you, what sounds do you hear, what smells do you smell, what do you see and feel, what emotions or feelings the noticing of these surroundings produce. Compose a brief but detailed quickwrite to record what you are noticing. Review your quickwrites and pay careful attention to sensations and memories these recordings evoke. Begin writing down the trains of memories those sensations produce. Reread or share your quickwrites. As your peers share, we will note similarities in all the writings. What were some of the similarities?
2. 3.
4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 9: Getting Ideas for Essays

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Nine: Getting Ideas for Essays Transparency and student copies of: Understanding Essays: A Protocol for Working with Text (see Writing Lessons 13) Colorado Department of Education (CDE) 4-Point Writing Rubric (go to www.cde.state.co.us; beginning with the Standards/Assessments link, click through to CSAP Scoring Information by way of the Unit of Student Assessment page) Writing notebooks, chart paper, overheads, and markers
Standards
Summarize, synthesize, and evaluate information from a variety of text and genres. Locate and recall information in different text structures. Plan, draft, revise, and edit for a legible final copy.
Big Ideas
Read, respond to, discuss, and study essays that represent points of view from places, people, and events that are familiar and unfamiliar as they are presented in high-stakes school contexts and in relation to other essays. Generate write-like essays.
Intended Learning
Students generate essay ideas.
Focus Lesson
Note: You might want to review the CDE 4-Point Rubric and discuss expectations for students final essay drafts.
Notes
50/44 Learning Strategy Instruction: Acquiring Self-Help Skills 50/18 Cooperative Learning: Group Interactions to Accomplish Goals
Connection
Review what students have studied so far about essays. Discuss misconceptions students might still have.
Direct Instruction
Write Getting Ideas for Essays on the board. Review the Essay Writing Project sheet (see Writing Lesson 7). Tell students that during this Focus Lesson you will work with them to brainstorm a list of things they can do and places they can go to get ideas for writing their essays. Convene a discussion for brainstorming essay ideas. Be sure the following items are identified during the conversation: Essays students may have already begun drafting. Writing notebook entries as a source of ideas. Events or topics students return to again and again. Issues or topics from other units the class has dealt with in some detail.
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Wrap up the lesson by asking students to help you come up with a list of potential essay topics. Review some list items as you think aloud for students so they can better imagine what these essay topics look like. Example: Hmmm. Censorship. OK, I could write an essay like Hospitals that mixes a lot of stories with reflection. I could focus on that time when I was in Xs class and he said I wasnt allowed to read that book. I could also write an essay on censorship thats similar to Hip-Hop as a Double-edged Sword. In that one I can mix interviews and secondary source research to make a strong argument against censorship. Before moving to the Work Period, have students briefly discuss in small groups some ideas they might have for essay topics.
Link to Work Period
Work Period
Shared Reading
Ask students to turn to the next blank page in their notebooks and title it Ideas for Essays. Tell students they can use this lessons Work Period time to generate ideas for their essay writing projects. Confer with students about their ideas.
Independent Reading
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class and ask volunteers to share essay topic ideas they are considering. Use this time to expose students to additional think alouds that will help them envision more specifically the shape essays might take. During these think alouds, be sure to stress the importance of writing in a similar style to those in the model essays.

Exiting ticket: What are some steps you need to consider before, during, and after writing?
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 10: Reporting Sensations, Memories, and Reflections

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Ten: Reporting Sensations, Memories, and Reflections Blank transparencies Writing notebooks, chart paper, and markers
Standards
Plan, draft, revise, and edit for a legible final copy. Use vivid and precise language appropriate to audience and purpose Develop ideas and content with significant details, examples, and/or reasons to address a prompt.
Intended Learning
Students explore and understand the difference between the first order abstraction (recording) and higher level abstraction (reporting).
Big Ideas
Focus Lesson
Note: The purpose of this lesson is to demonstrate and help students see the difference between the first-order abstraction that is recording and the higher-level abstraction that is reporting. During this demonstration, be sure to show students the raw materials you are working from. Keep in mind that the goal of this work is three-fold: 1. 2. 3. To help students do the exercise. To help students clearly distinguish between recording what is happening and reporting what happened. To prepare students to recognize how essayists use these cameras in their writing.
Notes
Connection
Direct Instruction
Use this Focus Lesson to demonstrate the exercise set out below. This lessons Work Period should be devoted to walking students through the exercise.
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Lesson Plan
The reporting recordings exercise: Over the next several minutes you will draft two scenes. The recordings made during the previous Writing lesson will serve as the raw material for these scenes. For each scene, you must imagine using two cameras: 1. With the first camera, film the following scene: You in the classroom during the previous writing lesson. What is the setting? The classroom. Who is the main character in this scene? You. What is the main action of this scene? The actions of your body and mind as you worked to record what you were sensing, remembering, and thinking (reflecting) about your remembering. Your goal: Craft a brief scene that helps a reader visualize what you were doing, feeling, remembering, and thinking during that Writing Lesson. With the second camera, you will film another scene. For this part of the exercise, write as if you were filming one of the events you remembered during the recording work. Where the memory took place is the setting. The people in your memory who are the characters. Build this scene so a reader can visualize the memory scene you are describing.
2.
Create an overhead with the steps listed above for your visual and second language learners.

In triads, allow students to have a brief discussion after each step in the lesson.
Work Period
Use this time to lead students through the reporting recordings exercise.
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class and ask two or three volunteers to share their two scenes. Use these demonstrations to reiterate the different points of view and subjects of the scenes. Launch a discussion regarding the differences in the kinds of thinking and work required by the writing to record and reporting recordings exercises. Collaborate with the class to generate a list of these differences, being sure to capture statements regarding the relationship between the two kinds of work (e.g., When Im recording, Im just trying to notice everything, to get everything down. When Im reporting, Im more careful. I pay attention to what details I want to use and the point of view I want to use.

Exiting ticket: What are the differences in the kinds of thinking and work required by the writing to record and reporting recordings exercises.
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 10: The Short-Assignments List

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Ten: Short Assignments Lists: A Review Transparency and student copies of: Understanding Essays: A Protocol for Working with Text (see Writing Lessons 13) Short Assignments for My Essay (created during class) Writing notebooks, chart paper, overheads, and markers
Standards
Summarize, synthesize, and evaluate information from a variety of text and genres. Locate and recall information in different text structures. Plan, draft, revise, and edit for a legible final copy. Summarize and organize information about a topic in a variety of ways from a variety of references, technical sources, and media.
Intended Learning
Students review and practice the concept of creating and using short assignments.
Big Ideas
Focus Lesson
Note: A survey of the most recent guides on magazine writing reveals consensus on the following point: writers do a lot things before they begin drafting. For example: Dawn Sova begins her book, How to Write Articles for Magazines and Newspapers (1998), with the following: Writing articles for newspapers and magazines requires that you take careful steps in developing ideas, planning the article, collecting information, and focusing on the subject. You should do all of these steps before you write the first draft of the lead. (1) In The Magazine Article: How to Think It, Plan It, Write It by Peter Jacobi, the chapter The Writing Begins is preceded by chapters titled Where Ideas Come From, Matter and Manner Count, But First Think Focus, Information Gathering, and Structure, the Blueprint of an Article. In the chapter on structure, Jacobi writes: Structuring means
Notes
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Lesson Plan
packing properly and heading the article in the right direction. So think structure before you write (77). In the introduction to his book, Writing for Journalists, Wynford Hicks writes: Making a plan before you start to write is an excellent idea, even if you keep it in your head. And the longer and more complex the piece, the more there is to be gained from setting the plan down on paperor on the keyboard. Of course you may well revise the plan as you go, particularly if you start writing before your research is completed. But that is not a reason for doing without a plan. (5)
If the above sampling is at all representative of sentiments shared by members of the magazine writing community, then it behooves us to take notice. During the next few lessons, students will develop a work plana task that builds on current resources, including project descriptions, touchstone text notes, and class charts. The plan will have structure and a list of information to be gathered. It is this list of short assignments that will enable a student to draft a piece of writing. In her book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott has a chapter titled Short Assignments. Lamott explains that when she gets stressed out, anxious, depressed during work on a particular project, I go back to trying to breathe, slowly and calmly, and I finally notice the one-inch picture frame that I put on my desk to remind me of short assignments (17). This one-inch picture frame helps her remember that all she has to write is as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame All I am going to do right now, for example, is write that one paragraph that sets the story in my hometown, in the late fifties, when the trains were still running (18). Elsewhere, she tells the story of a time when her brother, then ten years old, was trying to write a report on birds that hed had three months to write, which was due the next day. He was paralyzed by the task until his father sat down beside him, put his arm around [his] shoulder, and said, Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird (19). Most of our students dont think in such terms. They have distorted or wrongheaded ideas about what writers do and how writers workwhat writing work looks like. Its our job to challenge these misguided notions. At the heart of this task lies the idea of short assignments.
Connection
Review students work around essays thus far. Discuss some misconceptions that students might still have.
Direct Instruction
Briefly explain that a writer frequently does many things before he or she sits down to begin writing a particular piece. Work with the class to list some of these things on the board. Introduce Lamotts notion of short assignments. Invite the class to help you generate a list of general short assignments that might be appropriate for the essay writing ahead. Share a scenario like the following one: Ive got an idea for an essay. Ive decided on a topic and I know I want it to be similar to (name of the model essay). The piece is due in X days. I need to come up with a list of short assignments that, when completed, will result in a solid draft. What should those assignments be? Create a chart or overhead transparency titled, Short Assignments for My Essay. Invite students to help you think about your essay. What short assignments belong on your list?
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Lesson Plan
Be sure items on your list are specific enough so students can complete and cross them out. General items are the enemy of effective work plans.
Link to Work Period

Before moving to the Work Period, have students briefly discuss in small groups some essay ideas they might have.
Work Period
Shared Reading
Ask students to turn to the next blank page in their writing notebooks and title it Short Assignments for My __(tentative title)__ Essay. Using your list of short assignments as a guide, have each student create a list of his or her own. Use this time to confer with individuals and small groups, helping students generate their lists of short assignments.
Independent Reading
Students can use this time to continue reading essays or their books.
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class and ask volunteers to share items on their short assignments lists. Add these items to the chart you began during the Focus Lesson. Encourage students to add new items to their lists as well.

Exiting ticket: Summarize todays lesson.
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 11: Focusing on Reflection

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Eleven: Focusing on Reflection Transparency copies of selections from model essays in which authors reflect Blank transparencies Writing notebooks, chart paper, markers
Standards
Intended Learning
Students identify words or phrases that signal reflection. Students generate a list of reasons why an author reflects.
Big Ideas
Focus Lesson
Connection
Notes
Direct Instruction
Gather transparencies of selections from model essays in which authors are reflecting. Review several of these texts. After studying each one, ask the class to help you do two things: 1. 2. Identify words or phrases that signal reflection: How do they know this is reflection? What does reflective thinking sound like? Generate a list of reasons authors reflect. For example, students might describe a paragraph in Living Like Weasels that begins, I would like to learn, or remember, how to live, as an example of a reflection in which the author expresses or reports intent or desire. Part of the paragraph in Dillards essay that begins with the line, I missed my chance, might be described as an example of a reflection in which the author expresses or reports remorse.
Work hard with the class to build these liststhey will bring clarity to what reflective thinking looks and sounds like.

In triads, allow students to have a brief discussion after each step in the lesson.
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Lesson Plan
Work Period
Ask students to turn to the second camera scene generated during Writing Lesson 10. Tell students they will have 710 minutes to add a reflection to that scene. Briefly model this by showing students how they might lift a word or phrase from the sounds like list to jumpstart their writing, and how they might use an item from the reasons list to clarify the purpose of the reflections they are writing.
Sharing/Closure
Ask volunteers to share their second camera passages and reflections with the class. Remind everyone that these are drafts and that the point of the sharing is to see how students made use of the sounds like and reasons lists to draft reflections. After each sharing, work with students to describe their reflective work on the passages.

Exiting ticket: Describe what a reflection scene is.
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 11: Generating Project Descriptions

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Eleven: Generating Project Descriptions Essay Writing Project Description graphic organizer (see end of lesson) Writing notebooks, chart paper, overheads, and markers
Standards
Summarize, synthesize, and evaluate information from a variety of text and genres. Locate and recall information in different text structures. Plan, draft, revise, and edit for a legible final copy. Develop ideas and content with significant details, examples, and/or reasons to address a prompt.
Intended Learning
Students compose essay project descriptions.
Big Ideas
Read, respond to, discuss, and study essays that represent points of view from places, people, and events that are familiar and unfamiliar as they are presented in high-stakes school contexts and in relation to other essays. Generate write-like essays. Summarize the big topics, ideas, or questions discussed in essays.
Focus Lesson
Connection
Review the prior lessons key points and an exiting ticket.
Notes
Direct Instruction
Review the Essay Writing Project Description graphic organizer (see end of lesson). Explain that during this Focus Lesson you will demonstrate how to generate a solid project description for each of the two essays. (Consider requiring students to clear their project descriptions with you before they get too far into their essay writing work.) Remind the class that a project description is a tool for focusing where writers identify topics and sketch out directions and rough plans for the work ahead. Remind students that project descriptions can be adjusted or
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Lesson Plan
revised as work with a piece progresses; that their purpose is not to constrict the work, but to ensure that it begins well. Take time to show students how to compose a good essay project description. Your example should contain the following content: A clearly stated topic. A concise statement describing the work you hope to do (i.e., the arguments you plan to make) in the essay. A like statement tied to one of the model essays studied in the unit (e.g., Its going to be like Rosenthals essay on caves in China with a lot of reporting about other peoplean informative piece where the characteristic of authors presence is very low.). A list of 810 short assignments, including specific research tasks and homework to-do items (e.g., Write questions for interview with X.). You might scaffold the Direct Instruction activity with the Essay Writing Project: Description graphic organizer(see end of lesson).
Negotiate a project description deadline.
Link to Work Period

Before moving to the Work Period, have students briefly discuss in small groups some ideas they might have from their work during the Focus Lesson.
Work Period
Shared Reading
Students use this time to think about essay ideas, compose short assignments lists, and/or compose project descriptions. Confer with students about this work.
Independent Reading
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class. Take a few minutes to sketch out the upcoming writing work: Focus Lessons will address essay research, writing needs, and class interests; Work Periods will be driven by each students short assignments lists and essay writing. Describe the on-demand essays in academic contexts study that begins during the next reading lesson.

Exiting ticket: Summarize todays lesson.
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Lesson Plan
Essay Writing Project Description

Due Date Topic (cleared by the teacher)
What is the argument?
Model essay you will use:
810 short assignments you will complete to finish the essay:
To-Do List
Homework Items
Questions for the Interview
Topics to Research
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 12: Recognizing Reportage in Model Essays

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Twelve: Recognizing Reportage in the Model Essays Transparency and student copies of model essays Blank transparencies Writing notebooks, chart paper, notebook paper, and markers
Standards
Intended Learning
Students notice the role that recording and reporting have in model essays.
Big Ideas
Focus Lesson
Connection
Notes
Direct Instruction
Take a minute to review the discoveries about recording and reporting made during the two previous writing lessons. Tell students that during this Focus Lesson you will work with them to review model essays to notice the role that recording and reporting have in those texts: Do these kinds of thinking show up in the essays? What do these kinds of thinking look like when they show up in essays? Select an essay, place a transparency copy of it on the overhead, and read it aloud to the class. Tell students they should be looking for places where they see the author recording or reporting. Students might notice sections where the author reports internal sensations and/or physical surroundings. In Annie Dillards Living Like Weasels they might identify phrases such as startled me, I was relaxed, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me, and I was stunned into stillness as examples of reporting. They might notice passages where a writer reports on a memory, as in Wimsatts Basketball Kidnappings: When I was a kid growing up, way back in the 80s They might also point out passages where a writer reports a reflection on an experience, as in Carolina Hospitals My Cuban Body: Yet, it took many more years, marriage and motherhood for me to finally be pleased with my Cuban body. It shouldnt have to take that long.
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Lesson Plan
Launch a discussion about whether or not students see evidence of what appears to be raw recording in the essay. Work with the class to craft a hypothesis about how recording work shows up in an essay: Do authors always convert recordings into reports? Students should test this hypothesis during the Work Period.
Work Period
Have students form small groups of three. Assign an essay to each group. Instruct groups to repeat the whole-group work completed during the Focus Lesson. Insist that groups record the results of their studies on paper, a transparency, or a chart. Confer with groups about this work.
Sharing/Closure
Ask groups to consider the classs hypothesis about how recordings appear in essays. Groups should take a minute to discuss whether the work they did during the Work Period confirmed, extended, or challenged the hypothesis. Reconvene the class to discuss their findings. Ask groups to read passages where they found authors reporting or recording. When students share examples of authors reporting memories, ask the class to notice whether examples were instances of the author using the first or second camera (see Writing Lesson 10). Work with the class to arrive at an understanding of the use of these two cameras in the model essays.

Exiting ticket: How will reporting and recording help you in your essay writing?
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Lesson Plan
Lessons 1213: Introducing and Completing the On-Demand Essay Study Task
Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Twelve: Introducing the On-Demand Essay Study Task One set (3 or 4) meets standards and exceeds standards essays One set (2 or 3) lower scoring essay samples Prompts and rubrics for scoring students essays Essay Continuum: Characteristics of Authors Presence (begun in Writing Lesson 4) CDE kid-friendly rubric for scoring essays (go to www.cde.state.co.us; beginning with the Standards/Assessments link, click through to CSAP Scoring Information by way of the Unit of Student Assessment page) Writing notebooks, chart paper, overheads, and markers
Standards
Big Ideas
Read, respond to, discuss, and study essays that represent points of view from places, people, and events that are familiar and unfamiliar as they are presented in high-stakes school contexts and in relation to other essays. Consider the shapes essays take and the choices essayists make about sources, arrangement, examples, and point of view.
Intended Learning
Students apply the Understanding Essays protocol to the set of model, ondemand essays.
Focus Lesson
Note: Make two sets of essays. One set (a collection of 3 or 4 essays) should contain meets standards or exceed standards student essays. A second set (a collection of 2 or 3 essays) should contain lower scoring samples. Along with these two sets, have ready copies of a few prompts and rubrics for scoring students essays. These materialsstudents essays and the prompts and rubricsare the raw materials required for the work ahead. The work of this study moves through a straightforward and, by now, familiar progression where students: 1. 2. 3. Use the Understanding Essays protocol to study the meets standards and exceeds standards essays. Negotiate proper placement for each of these essays on the Essay Continuum: Characteristics of Authors Presence. Revisit the meets standards and exceeds standards essays to notice sources and examples authors used; instances of reporting, remembering, and reflecting; and any other distinguishing features.
Notes
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4.
Analyze the prompt(s) and rubric(s) then use the rubric(s) as a lens for rereading high scoring samples and considering the set of lower-scoring samples. Do an on-demand essay task where they once again work to write-like one of the model (meets or exceeds) essays. These on-demand essays will be scored using the rubric(s) previously analyzed.
5.
Connection
Direct Instruction
Take a few minutes to introduce this part of the unit where you point out that the aim of this study is to provide students with the opportunity to contrast their experiences reading and writing essays similar to those of Jimnez, Dillard, Hospital, Wimsatt, and Rosenthal with their work of reading and writing other on-demand essays. Use the remainder of this Focus Lesson to apply the Understanding Essays protocol to one of the high-scoring samples. Conduct this work as a wholegroup activity.
Link to Work Period

Work Period
Shared Reading
Have students form small groups. Explain to them that the remainder of this and the next lesson will be devoted to applying the Understanding Essays protocol to the set of model, on-demand essays. Give students the rest of the Work Period to do this work. Confer with groups about this work.
Independent Reading
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class and begin a discussion about their discoveries so far. Distribute paper copies of the meets and exceeds on-demand sample essays to each student. Students should read these and complete the First Reading and First Quickwrite sections of the Understanding Essays protocol for each essay.

Exiting ticket: What is something important you noticed from the model, ondemand essays. What makes a good or bad essay?
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Lesson Plan
Lessons 1317: Focus Lesson on Research and Writing

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Thirteen-Seventeen: Focus Lesson on Research and Writing "Academic Workout: Teachers Guide, pages 220267 Writing notebook, chart paper, notebook paper and markers
Standards
Plan, draft, revise, and edit for a legible final copy. Organize writing so it has an inviting introduction, a logical progression of ideas, and a purposeful conclusion. Write in a format and voice appropriate to purpose and audience Develop ideas and content with significant details, examples, and/or reasons to address a prompt.
Intended Learning
Students acquire skills for essay writing.
Big Ideas
Focus Lesson
Connection
Notes
Direct Instruction
Use this Focus Lesson to deliver timely instruction carefully tied to essay writing challenges with which students are grappling. A whole section on Research Skills is available in " Academic Workout: Teachers Guide. pages 250267. You might also want to review Grammar Usage and Punctuation, Mechanics, and Spelling lessons in Academic Workout: Teachers Guide, pages 220240.
Work Period
Give students time to complete tasks listed on their short assignments lists. Confer with students about their work.
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Lesson Plan
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class and ask volunteers to describe what they completed during the Work Period. As students share short assignments items they are working on or have completed, write them on the board. Encourage students to note these items and revise or amplify their own lists in light of ideas encountered during the Closing Meeting. Reiterate impending deadlines.

Exiting ticket: Base it on todays lesson or the Academic Workout: Assessment Book.
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 14: Locating On-Demand Essay Models on the Continuum

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Fourteen: Locating the On-Demand Models on the Continuum Essay Continuum: Characteristics of Authors Presence (begun in Writing Lesson 4) Meets and exceeds standards essays (used during Reading Lessons 1213) Writing notebooks, chart paper, overheads, and markers
Standards
Intended Learning
Students understand features of essays that get high scores.
Big Ideas
Focus Lesson
Connection
Notes
Direct Instruction
Remind the class that the point of this study is to help students come to better understand the essays under consideration. Also remind the class that the term essay is applied to a wide variety of texts; high scores are given only to on-demand essays that possess certain features. The point of this lessons work is to identify these features. The application of the Understanding Essays protocol was the first step toward learning these features. Review the Essay Continuum: Characteristics of Authors Presence, the meanings of key terms, and the rationales for where on the continuum each model essay falls. Explain that during this lessons Work Period, students will negotiate placements of each of the meets and exceeds on-demand essays on this continuum as well. This workwith text-based conversations, arguments, disagreements, and negotiations it requireswill bring additional insights to the on-demand essay study.
50/2 Visual Scaffolding: Providing Language Support Through Visual Images 50/41 Cloze: Using Context to Create Meaning
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Lesson Plan
Note: During the next reading lesson, students will take time to notice sources and examples used in on-demand essays. Discussion about these items will undoubtedly be a feature of this lessons work as well and should be encouragedit will help ensure that students are prepared for the work ahead.
Link to Work Period

Work Period
Shared Reading
Devote this Work Period to the work of placing each of the on-demand meets and exceeds essay models on the Essay Continuum: Characteristics of Authors Presence.
Independent Reading
Sharing/Closure
Review Work Period results with the class. Ask students to step back and think about what they learned from that work.

Exiting ticket: What are the characteristics of high-scoring on-demand essays?
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 15: Noticing Sources and Examples

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Fifteen: Noticing Sources and Examples Sources of information for model essay charts (see Writing Lessons 78) Characteristics of High-Scoring, On-Demand Essays chart (created during class) Writing notebook, chart paper, overheads, and markers
Standards
Summarize, synthesize, and evaluate information from a variety of text and genres. Locate and recall information in different text structures. Plan, draft, revise, and edit for a legible final copy. Give credit for others ideas, images, or information in an appropriate form.
Intended Learning
Students collaborate to generate a specific list of sources an author uses.
Big Ideas
Focus Lesson
Connection
Notes
50/44 Learning Strategy Instruction: Acquiring Self-Help Skills 50/18 Cooperative Learning: Group Interactions to Accomplish Goals 50/40 Peer Tutoring: Students Supporting Student Learning
Direct Instruction
Review Moffetts notions looking back/looking/asking/looking up introduced earlier in the unit (see Writing Lesson 7). Remind the class that when an author writes an essay, she or he engages in research that results in illustrations, examples, and details that become a part of the essay. This research can largely be sorted into four categories: looking back, looking, asking, and looking up. Take a minute to review the Sources of Information sections of the model essay charts generated during Writing Lessons 78. Take a few minutes to reread one of the model on-demand essays with the class. During this work, the class should collaborate to generate a specific list of sources the author used in that text. Implicit in this work are the following questions; take a moment to write these on the board:
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Lesson Plan
To what extent should an author seem present in this kind of an essay? What kinds of examples or illustrations should someone who wants to score high use?
Link to Work Period

Work Period
Shared Reading
Reassemble small groups; have each one review sources used in an essay. Have students jot down their discoveries on the next blank page of their notebooks. Be sure to reserve at least 15 minutes for this lessons Closing Meeting work.
Independent Reading
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class and ask volunteers to share their discoveries about sources. Review the questions on the board: To what extent should an author seem present in this kind of an essay? What kinds of examples or illustrations should someone who wants to score high use? Create a Characteristics of High-Scoring, On-Demand Essays chart. Ask students to offer answers to the questions on the board. Work with the class to summarize these answers and write them on the chart. Expand the conversation so students discuss other characteristics of highscoring essays and reflect on earlier experiences from the on-demand essay study. Work with the class to add additional items to the Characteristics of High-Scoring, On-Demand Essays chart. Tell students they will have an opportunity to test their lists during the next reading lesson.

Exiting ticket: To what extent should an author seem present in this kind of an essay?
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 16: Testing Characteristics of High-Scoring, On-Demand Essays

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Sixteen: Testing Characteristics of High-Scoring, On-Demand Essays Transparency copy of a low-scoring, on-demand essay Characteristics of High Scoring, On-Demand Essays chart (created during Reading Lesson 15) Low-scoring, on-demand essay models Writing notebooks, chart paper, overheads, and markers
Standards
Summarize, synthesize, and evaluate information from a variety of text and genres. Analyze text to make predictions and draw conclusions Give credit for others ideas, images, or information in an appropriate form.
Intended Learning
Students decide whether or not an on-demand essay model receives a high or low score and why.
Big Ideas
Read, respond to, discuss, and study essays that represent points of view from places, people, and events that are familiar and unfamiliar as they are presented in high-stakes school contexts and in relation to other essays. Compare the diverse voices of our national experience as they read.
Focus Lesson
Connection
Notes
50/44 Learning Strategy Instruction: Acquiring Self-Help Skills 50/2 Visual Scaffolding: Providing Language Support Through Visual Images 50/14 Manipulative Strategies: Using Objects to Connect Concepts
Direct Instruction
Place a transparency copy of a low-scoring, on-demand essay on the overhead. Review the Characteristics of High-Scoring, On-Demand Essays chart (created during Reading Lesson 15). Tell students you will read the essay aloud. They should determine whether or not it should receive a high score. Tell students they should use the Characteristics chart to defend their assessments. Read the essay aloud then convene a discussion with the class about the score it should receive. As always, assertions should always be anchored in texts, in this case, on-demand essay models and the Characteristics chart.
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You might want to use different vis--vis colors for various steps given during Direct Instruction.
Link to Work Period

Work Period
Shared Reading
Have students work in small groups with another low-scoring model. Each group should prepare an evaluation of the model using the Characteristics of High-Scoring, On-Demand Essays chart as a guide.
Independent Reading
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class and ask volunteers to share their groups evaluations. Tell the class that during the next reading lesson they will have an opportunity to test their discoveries about high- and low-scoring essays against the scoring rubric used to rate each model studied.

Exiting ticket: Based on todays work, what makes a good and bad essay?
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 17: Studying Rubrics

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Seventeen: Studying Rubrics Characteristics of High Scoring On-Demand Essays chart (created during Reading Lesson 15) Transparency copy of CDE rubric used to score essays Transparency and student copies of an on-demand essay prompt Writing notebooks, chart paper, overheads, and markers
Standards
Summarize, synthesize, and evaluate information from a variety of text and genres. Infer using information from a variety of text and genres Locate and recall information in different text structures.
Intended Learning
Students understand and review how a proficient writer uses knowledge of rubrics and benchmark papers to shape a piece of on-demand writing.
Big Ideas
Focus Lesson
Connection
Notes
50/44 Learning Strategy Instruction: Acquiring Self-Help Skills 50/8 Academic Language Scaffolding: Supporting Students Use of Language in Academic Setting
Direct Instruction
Position the Characteristics of High-Scoring On-Demand Essays chart in a place where students can see and refer to it. Place on the overhead a transparency copy of the rubric used to score essays the class considered during the on-demand essay study. Take time to collaborate with the class to study this rubric by crossreferencing the rubrics categories and items to the Characteristics chart. Be sure to anchor this work in the model, on-demand essays. Ask volunteers to point to sections of text that exemplify rubric categories. Update the Characteristics chart as needed. Wrap up the Focus Lesson by asking the class to help you reflect on what they have learned about on-demand essays. Use the following questions to drive this discussion: How are the on-demand models similar to the essays you studied at the beginning of the unit? How would the essays by Wimsatt, Jimnez, Dillard, Hospital, and Rosenthal have been scored?
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Lesson Plan
Use the second question to lead the class to consider the following ideas: Writing deemed good is writing matched to expectations of a particular writing situation. Someone who seeks to write something considered good in a particular situation need to take time to study expectations that shape that situation. You can write something that really is goodor that would be considered good in a different contextbut that writing could be rejected if it doesnt match up with the demands and expectations of that particular situation.
Link to Work Period

Work Period
Shared Reading
Place a transparency copy of an on-demand essay prompt on the overhead. Tell students that during this Work Period, you will collaborate with them to draft an essay that, with a little editing, would receive a high score according to the rubric they studied during the Focus Lesson. This exercise should be a hybrid of sorta combination of demonstration and collaboration. The goal of this task is to help students see how a proficient writer takes on an on-demand prompt, how he or she uses knowledge of the rubric and benchmark essays to shape a piece of ondemand writing. During this work, be sure to regularly reference the rubric, the Characteristics chart, and the model, on-demand essays.
Independent Reading
Sharing/Closure
Use this time to debrief the Work Period experience with the class. Consider working with the class to generate a list of tasks you completed during the demonstration (e.g., underlined key words in the prompt, crafted a concise statement of your argument, and listed three specific examples to use to support it). Tell the class that during Writing and Reading Lesson 19, they will have an opportunity to apply their learning during an in-class, on-demand essay writing task. Distribute an on-demand essay prompt to the class and give students the following assignment for homework: Read the prompt. Write a high-scoring essay (one that has the same characteristics as the meets and exceeds models and meets the criteria of the rubric. Bring your draft to the next reading lesson.

Exiting ticket: What topic might you consider for the prompt essay?
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 18: Composing Commentaries

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Eighteen: Composing Commentaries The Essay Writing Project assignment (see Writing Lesson 7) Transparency and student copies (two per student) of the Essay Commentary form (see end of lesson) Writing notebooks, chart paper, notebook paper, and markers
Standard
Plan, draft, revise, and edit for a legible final copy.
Big Ideas
Intended Learning
Students will be introduced to a way of explaining the reading, writing, and thinking that went into their essays.
Focus Lesson
Connection
Notes
Direct Instruction
Briefly review The Essay Writing Project assignment (see Writing Lesson 7) with the class. Point out that students are to craft two essays, and that each one should be like one of the model essays they studied and located on the Essay Continuum: Characteristics of Authors Presence. Explain to the class that this write-like work is a very important part of their work in this unit. Write the word commentary on the board and ask volunteers to help the class arrive at an understanding of the term. Explain that students will need to write a brief commentary on each of the two essays they composed during their work in this unit. The purpose of this commentary is simple: Give students a chance to explain their reading, writing, and thinking that went into each essay. Distribute two copies of the Essay Commentary form (see end of lesson) to each student, place a transparency copy of the form on the overhead, then review it with the class. Take time to illustrate portions of the form and answer any questions students have about completing it. Remind students they must attach a completed Essay Commentary form to each of their two essays when they turn them in.
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Lesson Plan
Work Period
Give students time to complete tasks listed on their short assignments lists. Confer with students about this work.
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class and ask volunteers to describe work they completed during the Work Period. As students share short assignments items they are working on or have completed, write them on the board. Encourage students to note these items and revise or amplify their own lists, and to note as well ideas encountered during the Closing Meeting. Reiterate any impending deadlines.

Exiting ticket: Base it on todays lesson.
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Lesson Plan
Essay Commentary
Name:_______________________________________________________________ Date:________________________________
Essay title:__________________________________________________________________________________________________ Directions: Please answer each question below. Be sure to illustrate your answers to each question with references to your essay and the essays you studied during the Faces of the Essay unit. 1. Where would you locate this essay on the Essay Continuum: Characteristics of Authors Presence?
2.
One challenge of this assignment was to write-like one of the model essays you studied. Which model essay is your essay like? List at least four ways your essay is similar to the model. Be sure to illustrate each of your points with examples from both essays.
3.
What arguments are you making in this essay?
4.
What did you do to make your arguments compelling?
5.
How did your work on the other essay you wrote influence or help you think about writing this essay?
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 18: Reviewing On-Demand Practice Essays

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Eighteen: Reviewing On-Demand Practice Essays Characteristics of High Scoring On-Demand essays chart (begun in Reading Lesson 15) Transparency copy of CDE rubric used to score essays Transparency copy of on-demand essay prompt Writing notebooks, chart paper, overheads, and markers
Standards
Intended Learning
Students review on-demand essays.
Big Ideas
Focus Lesson
Connection
Notes
Direct Instruction
Place the on-demand essay prompt you gave for homework on the overhead and review it with the class. Review the Characteristics of High-Scoring On-Demand Essays chart with the class. Answer any questions students have about the prompts or high-scoring essay characteristics.
Link to Work Period

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Lesson Plan
Work Period
Shared Reading
Pair students with partners then give the class the following Work Period assignment: During this Work Period, partners must work together to review essays each of you wrote for homework. Do this in the following way: Read the essay together Review the Characteristics of High-Scoring On-Demand Essays chart and the rubric. Work together to come up with a list of 35 changes that would help turn this essay into a high-scoring one. Each item on the list should reference either the Characteristics chart or the rubric. Do this work for both essays. Be prepared to discuss the results of your work with the class during the Closing Meeting. Give partners the Work Period to complete the assignment.
Independent Reading
Sharing/Closure
Review the following ideas with the class: Writing deemed good is writing matched to the expectations of a particular writing situation. Someone who seeks to write something considered good in a particular situation had better take time to study the expectations that shape that situation. You can write something that really is goodor that would be considered good in a different contextand that writing can be rejected if it doesnt match up with the demands and expectations of that particular situation. Take time to discuss with the class how these ideas might affect the way an individual prepares for an on-demand essay experience. Remind students they will be asked to write a high scoring on-demand essay during the next writing and reading lessons. Point out that the rubric theyve been using to score the model on-demand essays will be used to score these essays as well.

Exiting ticket: What questions do you have about the review process?
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Lesson Plan
Lessons 19-20: The On-Demand Essay Task I

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Nineteen: The On-Demand Essay Task An on-demand writing prompt Writing notebooks, chart paper, notebook paper, and markers
Standards
Plan, draft, revise, and edit for a legible final copy. Develop ideas and content with significant details, examples, and/or reasons to address a prompt. Use standard English, complete sentences, correct conventions, conventional spelling, and proper paragraphs.
Intended Learning
Students write on-demand essays to a writing prompt.
Big Ideas
Focus Lesson
Connection
Notes
Direct Instruction and Work Period

Administer the on-demand essay task during these two lessons. Be sure the prompt matches the rubric studied earlier in this portion of the unit. Collect students essays at the end of the lesson.
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Lesson Plan
Lessons 1920: The On-Demand Essay Task II

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Nineteen: The On-Demand Essay Task Transparency copy of on-demand essay prompt Writing notebooks, chart paper, overheads, and markers
Standards
Intended Learning
Students continue writing the on-demand essay task introduced in the writing lesson.
Big Ideas
Focus Lesson
Connection
Notes
50/44 Learning Strategy Instruction: Acquiring Self-Help Skills 50/18 Cooperative Learning: Group Interactions to Accomplish Goals.
Direct Instruction and Work Period

Continue with the on-demand essay task during these two lessons. Be sure the prompt matches the rubric studied earlier in this portion of the unit. Collect students essays at the end of the lesson.
Reading Workshop
Lessons 1920: The On-Demand Essay Task II
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 21: Scoring On-Demand Essays

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Twenty: Scoring the On-Demand Essays Transparency copy of the scoring rubric used in prior lessons On-demand essays composed during the previous two lessons Blank paper Writing notebooks, chart paper, blank notebook paper, and markers
Standards
Intended Learning
Students use the rubric to score their essays and, in writing, explain their scores.
Big Ideas
Focus Lesson
Connection
Notes
Direct Instruction
Place a transparency copy of the scoring rubric on the overhead. Distribute students on-demand essays composed during previous lessons. Review the rubric with the class. Tell the class they will have 15 minutes during the Work Period to use the rubric to score their essays and to explain, in writing, their scores.
Work Period
Distribute blank pieces of paper to students and explain they will have about 10 minutes to review and score their essays. Have them write their names at the top, then score each essay. Explain that each score must be include at three reasons explaining their decisions. Each of their reasons must be supported by, or illustrated with, references or quotes from the rubric, the essay, or the model on-demand essays. Give the class time to do this work.
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Lesson Plan
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class then write the following question on the board: Consider how your experiences of reading and writing essays like those by Jimnez, Dillard, Hospital, Wimsatt, and Rosenthal compare to your experiences reading and writing on-demand essays. Keep in mind that your studies of these essay sets were very similar. What have you learned? What kinds of demands did each experience place on you as a reader, writer, and thinker?

Exiting ticket: No exiting ticket.
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 21: The Unit Self-Assessment

Materials
Studio Course Unit of Study 2, Grade 6: Faces of the Essay, Session Twenty: The Unit Self-Assessment Transparency and student copies of the Self-Assessment: Faces of the Essay Unit (see end of lesson) Writing notebooks, chart paper, overheads, and markers
Standards
Summarize, synthesize, and evaluate information from a variety of text and genres. Locate and recall information in different text structures.
Intended Learning
Students write reflections on the Faces of the Essay unit.
Big Ideas
Read, respond to, discuss, and study essays that represent points of view from places, people, and events that are familiar and unfamiliar as they are presented in high-stakes school contexts and in relation to other essays. Generate write like essays.
Focus Lesson
Connection
Notes
Direct Instruction
Distribute student copies of the Self-Assessment: Faces of the Essay Unit (see end of lesson). Place a transparency copy of the self-assessment on the overhead. Walk students through the assessments categories and questions. Distribute students on-demand essays they wrote during the on-demand essay task from Writing and Reading Lessons 1920. Answer any questions students have about the self-assessment.
Work Period
Shared Reading
Give students the Work Period to complete their self-assessments.
Independent Reading
Students use this time to continue doing their self-assessments or read their own books.
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Lesson Plan
Sharing/Closure
Reconvene the class. Moving category by category, ask volunteers to share their responses. Collect the self-assessments.

Exiting Ticket: no exiting ticket
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Lesson Plan
Self-Assessment: Faces of the Essay Unit

Name: ___________________________________________________________________ Date: _____________________________
Directions: There are four categories on this form. Please answer the questions in each category. Be sure to support your answers with examples.
Understanding Essays
Please explain how you did when working with the Understanding Essays protocol. Also, please describe how your work with this protocol will influence the way you work with other challenging texts.
Characteristics of Authors Presence

The notion of characteristics of authors presence was introduced to help you notice similarities and differences among a variety of essays. Please explain how you did when working with this idea in mind. How did it help you read essays better?
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Lesson Plan Writing Essays
The task of writing two essays about the same topic provided you with an opportunity to see how different types of essays: 1) require different kinds of work, 2) use different kinds of details and examples, and 3) often take on very different shapes or forms. Please discuss at least three things you learned from writing two different essays on one topic.
Essays and On-Demand Essays

Consider how your experiences reading and writing essays like those by Jimnez, Dillard, Hospital, Wimsatt, and Rosenthal compare to your experiences of reading and writing on-demand essays. What did you learn from doing work with these two sets of essays side-by-side?
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8 4 Faces of The Essay Lessons

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Lesson Plan

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

Lessons 1-3: Introducing the Understanding Essays Work

Lessons 1-3: Introducing the Understanding Essays Work

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

Active Engagement during Direct Instruction

Link to Work Period

Lessons 1-3: Introducing the Understanding Essays Work

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

Opportunities for Assessment

Lessons 1-3: Introducing the Understanding Essays Work

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

Understanding Essays: A Protocol for Working with Texts

Essays are Compelling

The First Reading: Looking for Arguments

The First Quickwrite

Small Group Discussions

The Second Reading: Are the Arguments Compelling?

Be sure to identify specific passages to support your answer.

The Second Quickwrite

The Second Small Group Discussion

Lessons 1-3: Introducing the Understanding Essays Work

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

Lessons 12: Understanding the Essay

Lessons 12: Understanding the Essay

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

If students need additional help understanding what an essay is,

Active Engagement during Direct Instruction

Link to Work Period

Academic Workout: Student Practice Book,

Opportunities for Assessment

Lessons 12: Understanding the Essay

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

Lessons 12: Understanding the Essay

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

Lessons 12: Understanding the Essay

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

Theres No Place like It: The Very Humble Cave

Lessons 12: Understanding the Essay

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

Living Like Weasels

Lessons 12: Understanding the Essay

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

Lessons 12: Understanding the Essay

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

Lessons 12: Understanding the Essay

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

Lessons 12: Understanding the Essay

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

HipHop as a Double-Edged Sword

Lessons 12: Understanding the Essay

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

Lessons 12: Understanding the Essay

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

Lessons 12: Understanding the Essay

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

Lesson 3: Completing the Essay Work

Link to Work Period

Lesson 3: Completing the Essay Work

Grade 8: Unit 4: Faces of the Essay

Opportunities for Assessment

Lesson 3: Completing the Essay Work

If students need additional help understanding what an essay is,

Academic Workout: Student Practice Book,