Essay Writing: Demonstrating Student Progress

In our ninth grade Economic, Legal and Political Systems (ELPS) class my mentor and I taught our students to reflect on politics by writing essays. An early essay assignment showed us that the students needed additional help in learning to make clear arguments in their essays. To teach this skill we provided the students with a guide to making clear arguments. Many students who had difficulty making an argument in their essays made great progress using the guide. Follow these links to see how one student wrote an early essay without solid support for his argument, but then used the guide to outline the same argument and finally used the same guide to compose a different argument that demonstrates much greater clarity..

Declaring Independence: Assignments that Teach

This sample is also from the ELPS class. To teach the structure and content of the Declaration of Independence, I had the students write their own. I first had the students read the Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson and pointed out how he structured the Declaration. I then read them an account of a very mean fictional teacher and a fictional student who wrote a Declaration of Independence from that teacher's class. Then I assigned them the job of writing a Declaration of Independence from our class using the same structure. Follow these links to see one student's notes on the Declaration of Independence, the assignment, and the student's response to the assignment (Page One, Page Two).