Reflections on Week 2 of Mentorship

After my initial meeting with my student, Corey, I was very excited to really get started in helping him develop stronger writing skills, particularly when it came to organizing his ideas to formulate a clear argument. Going into week 2, I had planned to help Corey deconstruct his existing piece and plot his points onto a handout I had prepared in advance of our second meeting in order to help him better organize his arguments and supporting evidence.

It was frustrating, then, to arrive for week 2 and come to find that Corey was not present (even though we had been warned ahead of time that this was likely, it was different once I realized it was true). I had never met Alan, the student I would be working with that day, and had no idea what type of writing he was working on or how to best help him. Luckily, he was working on a fictional story and had the first page for me to look over for him. I was able to help him with some basic editing and formatting problems, as well as with plotting out the rest of his story. The handouts I had prepared were quickly turned over and used to identify the climax of Alan's story, what events would build up to it, and how it would be resolved. Even though I will not be working with Alan again, I will be sending him a graphic organizer to build upon the work we did during our session together (posted as part of the Resources blog entry).

Despite the fact that I was initially frustrated with this change, I am happy that it happened. In teaching, sometimes what you had planned does not work and you have to take your lesson in a different direction with no time to prepare. Despite only having to make the adjustment with one student, I proved to myself that I am capable of doing good work on the fly, a skill that I will most certainly encounter numerous times over my career, and perhaps even in my second practicum.

Photo: The first page of Alan's story, King Jewels and the Stolen Ring, and the work we did together during our session: jot notes of potential plot points to come and a rough plot line for the rest of the story.

Mentorship Resources

In my initial meeting with Corey, I asked him what areas of writing he thought he needed help in. Together, we were able to identify several aspects of writing I will help him with in our time together, including the proper flow of ideas, editing, constructing introductions and conclusions.

I have found a few initial online resources I will be using during our second session together:

http://www.dailyteachingtools.com/free-graphic-organizers-w.html

A website featuring a range of graphic organizer templates for various forms of writing. Since most of the templates are simply images to draw interest into purchasing the resource they come from, I will likely be modifying one of the templates for writing a persuasive essay to use with my student in our second session together. By using his existing piece of writing, the chart will be used as a means of better organizing his ideas and potentially developing new ones as we go along.

http://homeworktips.about.com/od/essaywriting/a/argument.htm

A website providing basic tips for writing an argumentative essay. Again, I will be looking through the tips and modifying the language in a way that I believe will suite my student. I don't want to overwhelm him with too much information in one session, so outlining basic tips may be best.

http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/editing-and-proofreading/

A website providing tips and handouts for editing writing. This seems to be an area of particular concern for my student. My goal is to either print a resource directly from the website or modify one that my student can use in future writing and not just for this assignment.

As our second week working with students was interrupted by a field trip, I was fortunate enough to work with another student, Alan, who had a creative writing piece to share with me. He mentioned that he needed help in developing his plot, which made up the majority of our discussion during our session together. The images below are resources that I have since sent him to accentuate our discussion:

Week 3 marked the second time I would be meeting with Corey. Despite the fact that we wouldn't get to everything I had initially planned during our time working together, I decided  not to speed up the process and focus on the areas Corey needed most help in. His original piece of writing was essentially comprised of one paragraph featuring a number of key ideas that needed to be separated. For our second session together, I brought in a graphic organizer to help Corey break up his writing into logical sections:

Now that we had broken up his original text into logical sections (reason, supportive evidence), I wanted to spend our last session together helping Corey with another area he identified as needing help - his introduction. I found this great image to help Corey better understand the purpose and structure for an introduction on one of my classmates' blogs (thanks Ian!). On the same blog was the image for conclusions, which I discussed with Corey but left it up to him to use when he finally got to that part of his essay:

Conventional Mode of Writing

In the English classroom, it seems as though there is no more conventional mode of writing than the literary essay. Although simple in its essence, I believe it is important, especially with students new to this form of writing, to spend time identifying and explaining each section of the literary essay. As such, one strategy to use would be to create an anchor chart to display in the classroom explaining the elements of the literary essay and how they function as a whole (above). To further student understanding, students could be asked to formulate their own versions of an anchor chart in their own words based on a previous class discussion about the different parts of a literary essay.

Prior to engaging in writing a literary essay, students would be provided with an organizational chart to map out their ideas. The chart would include sections for the introduction, the thesis statement (including the 3 main ideas), the 3 body paragraphs (including topic sentences, student ideas and supportive evidence) and the conclusion. This not only serves as a tool to confirm the students understand the function of each section of their essay, but also provides the students an opportunity to brainstorm their ideas before beginning a rough draft.