AEN

308-309 Lesson Plan

11.16.15

1. Pass papers back to students with feedback.
2. Finish reviewing sentence combinations-
a. Noun Clauses/Phrases
b. Absolute Phrases (get poster from other room)
c. Look at dangling modifier exercisescome up with examples.
d. Look at cutting redundancies. (if we cant get to everything, keep moving)
3. 308: Pass out a cheat sheet for every area we have covered.
4. Look at a students piece of writing.
5. Model a descriptive review of a students writing.
a. Start by reading it all the way through and describing each sentence.
b. Reflect on what work this student is doing and what this essay means to
him/her.
c. Talk about what stands out in terms of language learning needswhat do they
notice about student needs in these areas:
i. Coherence
ii. Sentence structure and variety
iii. Emphasis
iv. Breath units
v. Rhythm
vi. Modifiers
vii. Whos kicking who?
viii. Cutting deadwood
d. Have them re-work the students paragraphs in groupseveryone take a
paragraph and re-write the paragraph.
e. Come up with a checklist of areas the student needs to improve for that
paragraph as well as grammar exercises that would help the student improve in
that area.
f. Share their findings with the class-reading their re-worked paragraphs out loud.
6. Have them each take another piece of student writing (high, medium, low) and do a
descriptive review locating what work that student is doing with each sentence and
paragraph and what content and grammar help they need.
a. Look for patterns in their writing in regard to sentence structure, fragments, run-
ons, punctuation, sentence variety, breath units, rhythm, emphasis, deadwood,
overwriting, dangling modifiers, parallel structure, subject-verb agreement,
apostrophes, consistent verb tenses, pronoun and antecedent agreement.
b. Read each sentence and ask what the meaning seems to be and how we can
better help the student strengthen their meaning by combining sentences, by
building in transitions, by creating parallel structure, by helping with run-ons or
fragments, or dangling modifiers.
c. Come up with a checklist of key areas in their writing that they need to work on.

d. Explain how you can use their writing to provide specific examples of how they
can improve.
7. Reflect on what we learned about the connections between content and formwhere
and how form supports content and vice versa.
a. Sentence variety
b. Coordinating clauses
c. Coherence and transitions
d. Emphasis
e. Rhythm
8. Go over assignment for interviewing a student in regard to his/her writing.
a. What was the exact assignment?
b. How was he/she making sense of the assignment?
c. What work was he/she trying to do?
d. Who was his/her audience?
e. What is his/her favorite part of the paper?
f. What challenges did he/she face?
g. What was his/her writing process?
h. Where does he/she want to improve?

Reflections:
This worked wella lot of steps but the progression from working to understand the
students writing from a broader perspective to working to understand the specific patterns in
the students writing that needed to be addressed, to working to understand specific moves
they needed to incorporate to help the student improve his/her grammar. They could draw
from Weavers chapter 11, which worked really well. And it was good that they were revising
their argumentative papers still for content because Wed we will need to dive in for editing.