Last year, my first as a junior high teacher, I was shocked by how little my students understood about paragraph writing. Honestly, my classroom para had to point out to me that when I said, "You should indent the first line," students didn't know what I meant by the word "indent." This was not, of course, because they hadn't been exposed to the form or had competent teachers. Of course they had. It was because I had been spoiled as a high school teacher for so many years working with students who owned a strong mental model of essay writing. These kids were just developing theirs. They did know paragraphs included 5 sentences about a single main idea. That was a starting place.
Our 7th grade team works hard to complicate students' understanding of the paragraph model, notably that the sentences aren't just related to the main idea; they prove or support it. My 7th grade students struggled the most with explaining their supporting points, or especially the quotations they pushed into their paragraphs as proof for those points. (At our school, we call this commentary, and the writing model is the point-proof paragraph Download Paragraph-organizer-1.)
Often, when asked to explain a quotation, a student would simply restate it. When asked why it had been placed in the paragraph or how it supported a particular point, a student would often shrug or say, "I don't know." This tells me they were filling in the blanks of a paragraph organizer, not using their writing as a thinking tool.
So, how could I facilitate thoughtful commentary in 7th grade literary analysis paragraphs? Art. If they could draw, paint, cut and paste it, they could articulate it. Rather than compose in words, I would ask students to compose with paint, marks, shapes, and zones Download Readinggraphics. All ideas would be rehearsed before we attacked a paragraph organizer. Instead of explaining (or typically restating) quotations within the paragraph, they could describe the features of their artworks that related to the text passages they had selected to quote. I revised our graphic organizer to include description of the artwork in place of commentary to explain proof. Download Symbolism_paragraph Download Behnke
While the finished paragraphs weren't conventionally perfect, they did recapture the sense of discovery that I appreciate most in student writing of any age group. I would much rather see writing used as a tool for thinking than a performance of convention any day.
