Elizabeth Terhorst
Narrative Essays
For the end of the six week grading period, the high school my placement was at has the students in English classes write an essay for their midterms. For 10A, it was narrative essays. This experience truly was my make or break moment as a new educator in my field, but with the aided supports I created for my students, it showed that my mastery over English from my other degree was beneficial in blocked out/scaffolding the steps for my students.
Narrative essays are short anecdotes that cover the basic elements of a narrative (plot structure, archetypes, and indirect versus direct characterization). After reading several short stories together and praciting our story crafting skills, we had the kids create their own personal narratives on teacher provided templates. Due to the rise of AI, the students were only allowed to work on their narratives during class time. Including the pre-writing, it took a total of five class periods- two for the pre-writing and three for the essay writing.
All Of The Moving Parts
Visual Organizer
To ease the students into the drafting process, we had them tell their story entirely in pictures. This helps with differentiated instrutcion because it allows children of multiple backgrounds who struggle with their words to still fully express themselves via pictures.
Outline
This was a more traditional outline. Piggybacking off of how we created the visual organizer, the students were tasked with filling our a blank template with boxes for plot element, the imagery within the story, and characterization/emotion elicited in that part of the story. They had to do that for each of their five paragraphs or each part of the basic Freytag's plot pyramid.
Teacher Models
To aide the students, I created a visual organizer, an outline, and a fully fleshed narrative essay about myself. I chose to do it about my disability because it had been a point of morbid curiosity and contention in the classroom. While it helped some students structure their essays, it was specific enough that there wasn't a chance that someone could use what I had written and called it their own.
Artifacts/Student Final Drafts
Over the course of the unit and grading, I was able to collect samples of the students' visual organizers, their outline, their rough drafts that I provided specific feedback and suggestions on, and their final drafts.
This was a difficult but rewarding task. The students fully enjoyed the feedback I was able to give all three sections of 10A I cover and they were able to utilize it in the early stages of their writing.
Visual Organizers
We used the visual organizers to help scaffold up to writing the actual narrative essay. By having the students entirely plot out their stories via pictures initially, it gave them a basis to refer back to when trying to outline. This helps prevent writer's block and, despite this typically being done at the pre-K/Kindergarten level, truly is beneficial to the students- especially those who struggle with written language.
I've provided high ability, on target, and low ability as well as low ability ENL.
Outlines
For the traditional outlines, we did it in a graphic organizer style where the students could refer back to their visual organizers to bulletpoint out their plot (exposition, rising, climax, falling action, and resolution), some characters traits, and emotions that they wanted to focus within their narrative. For both the visual organizer and the outline, the students had a total of two sixty minute class periods to work on these assignments.
I've provided low ability, low ability ENL, on target, and high ability.
Teacher Models
For the project as a whole, I thought it was important for the students to have access to an example. Coupled with this, I had received question after question regarding my disabilities as their teacher, so I thought this was a good way to kill two birds with one stone. The students got some of their questions about me answered while getting the help for their narratives that they didn't always know that they needed.
These are the modeling materials/rubric I provided (had to use the rubric from the textbook).
Artifacts/Student Final Drafts
For this, there were some stages in which they received feedback. After reviewing how the students did with "Powder" by Tobias Wolff for their baseline as to how the narrative essays would go, I knew that these kids needed more direct guidance when crafting their narratives. So, after the first day of drafting, I went and gave personalized, specific feedback on their structure and grammar as well as suggestions for edits within their Google Documents. It was a lot to do that for ninety essays, but it truly did help them nip so many problems in the bud and prevented them from asking me repetitive questions later on. It also has encouraged them to use me as a resource more often, which I do enjoy.
Below are examples of the feedback I gave and artifacts of their final drafts. I've provided high ability, on target, low ability, and high ability ENL.
Slides Move On Autoplay Every Eight Seconds
