Teaching Genre: Taking NDOW Back to School
Bryan Wallen, social studies teacher at J. H. Rose high school, participated in Fall 2012’s National Day on Writing. While his studies moved around campus, writing and thinking in different spaces, Bryan stayed in Joyner Library and worked with teacher consultants from the Tar River Writing Project on a professional development event focused on genre and how we can teach genre-based writing across the curriculum. What follows is Bryan’s account of how he took the activity back to his classroom!
Getting students to write has been the focus of the social studies department at my school during this current school year. Most of my colleagues who teach advanced placement or honors classes have always had their students write because it was part of the evaluative process.
However, most standard classes do not emphasize writing. There are several factors that explain this, but for the most part it is because the students in these classes read and write at least two grade levels below their current level. Other than English classes, they usually will not write a full essay for an assignment. Over the past two years, I have been attempting to introduce more writing in my class to reinforce the notion that written expression is the only way most colleges will evaluate their students. As an experiment this fall, I assigned writing prompts and activities in lieu of a standard twenty-five question quiz on the First World War.
After covering a particular topic or chapter, I would generally assign a note quiz to my class. The quiz would always be multiple choices and have maybe one short answer response. This time I decided to take the ideas I got from East Carolina University’s Tar River Writing Project to gauge the level of understanding this class has on World War I. Below is the assignment I gave my standard United States History classes.
Project Connect Symposium
At TRWP, we’re excited about the first Project Connect Symposium that was hosted at J. H. Rose high school in Greenville, NC, on January 8, 2013.
Beginning in Summer 2012, the TRWP initiated a partnership with J. H. Rose to redesign the English IV writing curriculum in order to focus the project on the types of participatory learning required by digital writing and research. Project Connect is a National Writing Project SEED-funded initiative which works at the intersections of Common Core State Standards, Carnegie Connected Learning, and the Frameworks for Success in Post-Secondary Writing. Having worked all fall term with students, the TRWP facilitators and J. H. Rose teachers were excited to make this work public at the inaugural JHR Project Connect Symposium.
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