A twelve-year teaching veteran and a California regional Teacher of the Year, Heather Wolpert-Gawron's musings on educational policy, curriculum design, and daily school life can also be read at www.tweenteacher.com.
I'm currently prepping my classes for another research unit, this one a blend of Memoir, Advocacy, and Speech Writing. After all, never in real life are genres categorized. They blend together; and the Common Core assessments to come recognize the desegregation of writing genres and the need for performance-based assessments.
I'm basing this blended unit on TED.com, and the plan is to host a middle school TED-esque conference, combining it with a book drive for our media center. So, in a series of posts, I am going to describe some key steps I'm using with my eighth graders in order to scaffold our way towards our TED conference. On my own website, you can learn about how students chose topics and you can download the worksheet that I used to guide them towards their choice.
In this post, I will describe how I introduced the concept of the project and the development of our student-created resource library, a tool that helps everyone to research more deeply. So follow me as I describe real-time writing in a real-world classroom. Hope this helps in your own possible blended genre unit.
Sent from my iPad
