Tag: lesson planning

Classroom Activity: Genre Awareness Check-Up

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By Marina Bydalek

I designed this genre awareness activity as a primer for my class’s deep-dive into genre, genre analysis, and genre research. You can think of it like a check-up—we all have genre awareness, but we still need to dust off that shelf in our brain every once in a while. Because of this, I place this activity at the beginning of the second sequence of my class, in which students have the option to compose in the rhetorical genre of their choice for each assignment. By that point, we have already discussed the rhetorical triangle and rhetorical strategies at length as they apply to the course outcomes. This activity marks the beginning of a broader exploration into the utility of these strategies as they apply to different genres.

The goals of this activity are three-fold:

  • To show students that they already have genre awareness
  • To practice composing in and identifying different rhetorical genres in a low-stakes, fun way
  • To introduce students to genre analysis and genre research

Instructions

To scaffold this activity, I start with a review of rhetorical genre and an explanation of what genre awareness is. Students are then put into groups of 3 or 4. The whole class is given the same “situation” to write about, so all of their topics will be the same. However, each group is assigned a different rhetorical genre to write in. I use a collaborative Google Doc with one page for each group. They can add images, graphics, emojis, or any other elements, as long as
they adhere to their genre. After everyone is finished, we come back together and each group reads their writing out loud. Depending on modality and time, either the whole class will guess what the genre is, or the group justifies their decisions and adherence to their assigned genre.

Situation: The official mascot of UW, Dubs II, has disappeared!

Dubs II is an Alaskan Malamute with white and black fur. He was last seen outside of Loew Hall playing fetch with his guardian; he ran off to fetch the ball, but never came back. Dubs is known to frequent areas on campus such as Husky Stadium, the HUB, and the quad. He responds to “Dubs,” “Dubs the Second,” and belly rubs. Known enemies include the WSU mascot, Butch T. Cougar, who was also spotted on campus the same day as Dubs’ disappearance.

Rhetorical Genres

  • Clickbait Article
  • Missing Poster
  • Conspiracy Facebook Post
  • Group Chat Conversation
  • UW Daily Article
  • UW Crime Alert

Thoughts for Transferring into Your Course

This activity can be “reupholstered” and applied to whatever course theme, teaching modality, or time requirements you have. My course is focused on true crime, which is why I wrote a crime-related situation (purely hypothetical, I promise!). If you do change the situation, make sure that the rhetorical genres still make sense with that prompt (e.g. you wouldn’t want to have a “missing poster” as a genre for a situation about the climate crisis, for example).

Modality can also affect the logistics and post-writing activities. I’ve done this activity both in-person and remotely. Both were successful, but they played out differently. If you’re in a synchronous Zoom meeting, you can put students into breakout rooms, where you can assign their genre and let them work in secret. That way, when everyone is done, you can have the whole class guess the rhetorical genre of each group. This keeps all of your students involved and provides additional practice identifying genres. If you’re in-person, it’s harder to maintain the same level of secrecy, but it is possible. Passing out slips of paper with their assigned genre or letting some groups work outside of the classroom are just a couple of options. If confidentiality is not possible, you can instead have each group explain to the class how they adhered to their genre and what choices or discoveries they made.

Finally, the length of their passage can vary depending on how much time you have. If you have a whole class session, they can write longer, more complete passages, but if you only have 20-30 minutes, you can adjust the length to one paragraph.

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How To: Lesson Planning with the Classroom Activities Grab Bag

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By Alycia Gilbert

Sometimes filling out an entire lesson plan can feel like you’ve been asked to complete a puzzle without knowing where to find all of the pieces, especially during your first year of teaching. How can you create structure and engagement during active work time in your class meetings? How can you turn synchronous or asynchronous time into valuable preparation for students  as they work toward their assignments? How many free writes can you put into one lesson plan before your students check out?

If you’re looking to create opportunities for your students to practice skills and build classroom community, having a few go-to and varying classroom activities can be such a help! That’s why the Classroom Activities Grab Bag was developed by program ADs in 2020, to make lesson planning less laborious for instructors.

This post will walk you through the Grab Bag, highlight a few of my personal favorite activities that it features, and offer tips for transferring these activities into your lesson plans. Remember that the Grab Bag in its entirety is available for EWP instructors here!

What Is the Classroom Activities Grab Bag?

The Classroom Activities Grab Bag is a compilation of common, go-to classroom activities to help foster an active learning environment. While some activities focus on specified composition skills (like peer review or revision), most of the activities listed are contextually open, meaning that you can integrate these activities into any lesson plan, regardless of the skill you’re teaching.

The Grab Bag is intended to be a working document that grows to represent a variety of teaching styles and modalities; if you have any activities or activity formats that you’d like to add, please consider doing so!

Go-To Activities from the Grab Bag

1. For Revision: Reverse Outline

A reverse outline is a revision activity working where students work with a completed draft backwards, mapping out their composition’s organization in retrospect. The instructions ask students to label each paragraph’s main idea or subclaim, then consider if the order of these ideas is effective for readers. This activity is especially useful for teaching organization and structure—not just for papers, but also for multimodal assignments—because it asks students to think about reader/viewer experience and the navigability of their argument in a very concrete way. It can also be helpful for prompting students to think about transitions!

Instructions here.

2. For Full-Class Discussion: Roundtable Discussion

This Roundtable activity was developed by ADs in 2017 and has been tweaked by different instructors’ use ever since. This full group activity asks students to discuss a series of set questions for fifteen minutes. The catch? For every thirty seconds of silence, another minute is added to the time, and the instructor’s participation is limited to listening in and taking notes. It may sound intimidating, but I’ve always gotten positive feedback from students on the activity—and I’ve never had to add time to a discussion. Instead, I’ve always had to speak up at the twenty-minute mark to stop the conversation from going on even longer!

Instructions and sample here.

3. For Peer-Review: Read-Around

A Read-Around is a peer review activity in which students read and respond anonymously to multiple student papers in one session. This activity exposes students to more writing on the same prompt and helps students articulate successful writing in the context of this assignment can look like. It’s also a great way to generate group feedback by asking students to give broad advice to the class based on the trends they noticed in the activity.

Sample instructions here, but there are a variety of read around formats out there!

4. To Motivate Class Discussion: Think Pair Share

Activities like Think Pair Shares can be written into your lesson plans, or they can be quick solutions to low student engagement in a class discussion. Even the most talkative classes can have off-days, and it’s useful to have a few backup strategies to spark conversations when student participation is low. Activities like Think Pair Shares give students a lower stakes environment where they can work on a discussion question, get affirmation about their answer from a peer, then return to the group to share more confidently.

And that’s the formula for a TPS: Individual reflection (typically written), partner collaboration, then a full class share-out. Other great activities to prompt discussion in a pinch are asking students to free write an answer to the question, individual brainstorming, or asking students to get up and move!

Instructions for Think Pair Shares here.

Tips for Using the Grab Bag to Lesson Plan

1. Know your lesson plan’s learning goals and how they scaffold to your course assignments

Lesson planning is always easier if you scaffold down to them from your course assignments. For each lesson, start with the overall goal you want students to have learned and practiced by the end of the lesson (Ex: students will learn about rhetorical appeals and begin connecting the lesson to their MP 1 argument).

If you have a strong learning goal, it’ll be much easier to go into the Grab Bag and find an activity that aligns with that learning goal (Ex: if students need to connect today’s lesson to their MP argument, an individual brainstorming activity like listing or a subclaim brainstorm would be a useful way to prompt transfer).

2. Consider your classroom space and your students

It’s very likely you’ll have to consider your classroom space when looking through the Grab Bag. What things can be transferred online and how if you’re teaching remotely? How will students move in a physical classroom if they’re at tables instead of desks? What teaching technologies do you have on-hand in the classroom?

As you get to know your students over the quarter, let that guide your activity choices too! If you have a class that’s less talkative, consider how you can combine individual work + instructor check-ins with activities that scaffold discussion or presentations so that they’re less intimidating for students (TPSs, Jigsaw activities, group polls, etc!). Consider your class’s general learning styles, what they’ve seemed to find helpful, and how you might need to adapt an activity’s framing for your students’ needs.  

3. Collaborate with ADs!

If you have any activities that you’d like to practice facilitating, or if you have questions on how to adapt materials for your classroom (both in-person or online), ADs are readily available and excited to collaborate with you on lesson planning. Check the EWP Newsletter for AD communal and individual office hours.  

Let us know below if you have any go-to activities for lesson planning, or if you’ve had any experiences with or tips for the activities that we’ve included here!

And don’t forget that the EWP Archive also has sample class activities + instructions that are tied to more specific writing skills/outcomes! Make sure to check out the sections sorted by topic to find detailed activities on genre translation, sample rhetorical analysis, handouts on claims, etc. The Library Resources for EWP Canvas site also provides potential activities for lesson planning.

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