Today’s guest post is from Paige Timmerman, a high school English teacher in Salem, Illinois. You can connect with her on Twitter at @pbrink12 or via e-mail at timmermanp@salemhigh.com.
When I decided to take the plunge and try writer’s workshop over the summer, I knew I wanted a unit on college application and scholarship essays for the simple fact that I knew my students would crave it.
I also couldn’t help think about how rare and valuable it is to have a unit for a potentially “real” audience. Students spend much of their time writing hypotheticals for teacher eyes only, but this unit is an opportunity to really analyze the audience and think critically about what might impress them. I also viewed the unit as an opportunity for students to think very deliberately about craft, as they usually only have about 500 words to convince a group of people they don’t know to contribute to their education. It’s a tough feat!
Planning
I began by scouring the internet for mentor texts of successful college admittance and scholarship essays, and I came across the “Essays that Worked” page on the John Hopkins University website. What I liked most about this page was that each winning essay was accompanied by a “review burst” written by the selection committee, which detailed why the essay impressed them.
After I selected four mentors and examined them, I noticed they each possessed interesting textual features (dialogue, rhetorical questions, etc.). There also were a variety of structures; one winning essay was even structured like an instruction manual for how to “handle” millennials. These techniques, I realized, were why they won- they stood out amongst a swarm of simple sentences in long paragraphs. Therefore, I wanted to make sure I taught these features at the beginning of the year through a narrative unit and an informative writing unit before encouraging students to apply them to their college pieces.
Here are the mentor texts we used:
Pre-Writing
We spent four days in class analyzing four different mentor texts. Just as I had hoped, the “review bursts” from the selection committee deepened our discussion by causing students to consider audience. Next, I had students mine the mentor texts for commonalities in groups, each of which submitted a 3-5 minute video of its discussion and created its own anchor chart. With new knowledge of the unit in the back of their minds, students then developed questions they would ask members of a college scholarship/application selection committee if given the opportunity.
I asked two of our counselors, both of whom have been part of the selection process for
local scholarships, to select the anchor chart they thought best captured the spirit of the unit, and they came into my class the next day to explain their choice. After that, they answered questions about the genre, which helped students “get inside the head” of the audience.
Pause
While I needed students to write at least 1,000 words for a dual credit requirement, I considered that many prompts are 500 words or less. Therefore, I decided to have them complete two essays instead of one. Prompts were chosen authentically from real scholarships or college websites, or they were chosen from “general prompts” from The Common App.
Once the first essays were in the rear-view, I decided to facilitate mock “selection committees.” Students returned to their discussion groups and received a packet of three student essays, each of which had an “alias” to replace the name for anonymity. They read the essays quietly first, annotating pros and cons in the margins as they went along. Each group member used a different color of colored pencil so I could see the progression of their silent discussions as each essay was passed from person to person.
Group members then discussed what they noticed in each piece, and a criteria was determined for selecting the “best essay.” They then submitted a 2-3 minute video that explained which essay they believed was most deserving of the desired award and how they came to that conclusion, citing specifics in each of the three essays for support.
What I liked most about this activity was that students were no longer thinking about the audience; they were the audience. They got the opportunity to “try on” the selection committee’s shoes for an hour or so and walk around, which helped them understand what it takes for an essay of this style to stand out. Additionally, it allowed them to understand the impact of the specific textual features we had studied with the first two units.
Present
As my students are currently wrapping up their second pieces of the unit, I am reflecting back on what I have been seeing as I have been conferring with them. I’ve seen less “I am a really hard worker and deserve this scholarship” and more unique textual structures and craft techniques introduced in class. I am confident my students are entering the sea of paperwork known the college application and scholarship process armed and ready to give their competitors a literal run for their money, and I know this is due largely to the fact that we spent so much time considering audience.
While this unit encouraged my students to think about their futures, it also allowed me to continue considering my own future as a writing teacher. As I think back to common comments I made during conferences, I remember saying frequently: “You should incorporate some of the techniques we talked about in the memoir unit or the informative writing unit!” Although hypothetical, those units at the beginning of the year served as building blocks for the authentic piece constructed in this unit. This is leading me to believe students’ college essays could be even better if I added another unit into the mix before the college essay unit to give them even more tools in their toolboxes before constructing an essay they want to push out to a real audience. With this in mind, I plan to go forward next year by cutting the college writing to one paper rather than two in order to make room for another “building blocks” unit to precede it. With newfound knowledge that acting as the audience improved student writing drastically, I am saving a few student pieces and plan to kick off the unit next year by placing my students in the judge’s seat.
While the college writing unit may not have been as exciting as some of the others, the experience of having an authentic audience proved to be unique and invaluable. That said, as I go forward and continue to dabble in writer’s workshop, I am left with one main lingering question: If knowing a real audience will read students’ work pushes them toward more deliberate thinking about their writing craft, how can this phenomenon be replicated in units of writing where students do not feel authenticity from the audience?
What are you thinking, teachers? How might you use the analysis of audience in a different writing study? How have you used the college essay to teach more than just the college essay? Leave a comment below, connect with us on Facebook, or find Paige on Twitter @pbrink12.
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