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Genre Study - About the Author

Writing Standard - W.9-10.3.b

Topic - Modern Social Issues

Genre Study - About the Author

The Goal

The Texts

The Process

Student Responses

What is the focus of the lesson?

The Goal

The Goal

About the Author

For the first writing project of the school year, I ask students to craft an "About the Author" autobiographical piece. There are a few reasons we start the year with this project:

• It's a short project - takes only a few days, & isn't overwhelming for students.
• It's novel - students haven't written these a lot, if at all.
• It's a good get-to-know you piece that allows students to show personality without asking for too much vulnerability.
• It's a good task to assess where students are at with various basic writing skills.
• It's the perfect project to introduce students to the idea of using mentor text to craft better writing.
• Students immediately begin applying the "author" label to themselves - builds self-concept!

The goal is that by the end of the week, students have crafted a short (1-2 paragraph) About the Author piece that is original and attempts to show a unique voice or personality. The secondary goal is that students begin to understand how we can use mentor texts as models to learn from and improve our writing.

The Texts

Jason Reynolds

About the Author

Another reason an "About the Author" piece is great to begin the year with is it's easy on you! Because literally every published novel has an 'About the Author' section, there are infinite mentor texts to choose from. If you find out that students like certain authors, try to bring in ATAs from them. Choose ATAs from authors you like or authors you'll explore in class throughout the year. Most importantly, select authors whose ATAs show strong personality and unique writing voice. Aim for variety, so students can see multiple approaches. Here are some of the mentor texts I've used to introduce this genre of writing:

Lemony Snicket

Elizabeth Acevedo

Deborah Giles

I picked this Jason Reynolds 'About the Author' because he's a popular author that students are often familiar with from their independent reading, but also because there are elements of personality and voice to notice and discuss with students.

Lemony Snicket is always a favorite for his uniquely dark, mysterious, and sometimes sarcastic tone. His 'About the Author' is another excellent example of unique, interesting, and slightly absurd voice.

I picked Elizabeth Acevedo's 'About the Author' for a few reasons. First, this one has a slightly different style than the others in that it focuses more on listing Acevedo's accomplishments- a structural element that I know will be easier (and safer) for some students to emulate. I also chose Acevedo because we will focus on her poetry later in the year, and the book this ATA is from (The Poet X) is a book club option later in the year as well.

I chose this 'About the Author' from Deborah Wiles because it reads more like a mini-autobiography. Instead of simply listing accomplishments like Elizabeth Acevedo, glossing over details like Lemony Snicket, or avoiding them entirely like Jason Reynolds, Wiles includes lots of smaller details about her life that the younger readers of her books can relate to and that connect to the historical fiction genre in which she writes. Basically, it's a strong combination of both personal facts and unique voice so students see it's possible to blend the two together!

The Process

About the Author

After students complete an "emulate" quick write, which will become a first draft for some of them, students work with a partner to explore a handful of 'About the Author' mentor texts and draft a list of what they notice about this genre. We then discuss and generate a whole-class list, which I later combine with the relevant CCSS standard to create the rubric for the best draft students will eventually submit. This way, the rubric used to assess student writing incorporates standards, but also allows for student input based specifically on our shared observations of authentic pieces within the given genre.

Student Responses

About the Author

Writing Standard - W.8.3.b

The Goal

The Texts

The Process

Student Responses

What is the focus of the lesson?

The Goal

W.8.3.b

While working through a narrative fiction unit, it was obvious that CCSS standard W.8.3.b was one my students struggled with. Their writing lacked appropriate and engaging description. Dialogue was either all over the place or non-existant and was often punctuated incorrectly. Character descriptions were elementary at best, and I died a little inside every time I read a new variation of, "She was 16 years old with brown hair and brown eyes and was an average girl." Clearly, my students could tell that they were

supposed to have some sort of description in their stories, but they didn't have much clue how to execute it beyond a very basic level. As a class, we turned to some experts with a goal of building a toolkit of descriptive and dialogue strategies to take our writing from elementary to extraordinary.

The Texts

Descriptive Writing -Excerpt from "If I Stay" by G. Forman

W.8.3.b

Develop Characters -Excerpts from "Look Homeward, Angel" by T. Wolfe & "The Golden Compass" by P. Pullman

Dialogue -Excerpt from "Look Both Ways" by J. Reynolds

This mentor text was one I found from another teacher on the web, and it is the perfect passage to study several descriptive writing tools! Using only this short passage, we were able to discuss:

• Strong Adjectives
• Vivid Verbs
• Sound Words & Sensory Details
• Stretching Out a Single Moment

If you don't have time to explore a mentor text and/or quick write every day, it's useful to find texts like this where you can cover multiple writing skills. You could revisit a text like this over multiple days, rather than introducing new texts.

Character descriptions always seem to be a place where students struggle in narrative writing. Some students overwhelm us with every minute detail about a character when they're first introduced. Others tell barely anything, and we can't possibly imagine the character the student pictures in their head. Mostly, though, students give very boring and straightforward descriptions that haven't evolved from their elementary writing days. They need strong examples and good discussion to help their writing (and characters) move forward.

Dialogue is another area where students struggle to develop past clunky, awkward, stilted conversations in their writing. Even students who are stronger dialogue writers are usually not yet adept at giving their characters unique voices or speaking styles. So, we turn to Jason Reynolds, who is not only a master of developing interesting characters, but also giving them unique and realistic-sounding voices. The dialogue in Reynolds' stories helps these characters come to life, and this is something students can definitely learn to imitate in their own writing. This particular excerpt has the double bonus of a great character description we can discuss as well!

The Process

W.8.3.b

Generally, these lessons all followed a similar pattern: Students read and listened to the new mentor text, then immediately did a quick write. Students were strongly encouraged to try and emulate the mentor text using characters and details from their own stories, but students were largely given freedom in how they approached their quick writes. After the quick write and some sharing time, we discussed as a class what we noticed happening in the quick write, and I filled in any gaps toward the end of the discussion regarding elements of descriptive writing I wanted students to notice. During this discussion, we kept notes in real-time by annotating our copies of the mentor text. After the discussion and mini-lesson portion, I asked students to pick one descriptive or dialogue skill we'd discussed in the lesson and either write a new portion of their narrative or revise a current portion to practice and apply the skill.

Student Responses

W.8.3.b

Topic - Modern Social Issues

The Goal

The Texts

Student Responses

What is the focus of the lesson?

The Goal

The Goal

The modern social issues unit is a book club-centric unit designed to correspond with the study of Civil Rights in 8th-grade humanities.

Ultimately, students will craft a literary analysis essay with multiple sources based on our quick writes, book club readings and discussions, and whole-class discussions. We also explore language as a form of protest, and we look at how protest songs, slam poetry, opinion pieces, and even protest art can be used as a means of advocating for change in the face of unfairness. Students greatly enjoy the opportunity to confront modern issues that they've been hearing about online or in the news but have never been given a chance to learn about or confront!

Modern Social Issues

• Help students make modern-day connections to the topics and issues at the heart of the fight for civil rights in the 50s and 60s.
• Introduce students to a variety of voices, ideas, and perspectives to help students clarify and understand their own beliefs about the status and treatment of people with different identities in our society.

Unit Goals:

The Texts

The Danger of a Single Story

Why Are Muslims So...

Cash Me Ousside

Native Tongue & Stealing Bread

Modern Social Issues

My Name is Zainab & I am Not a Terrorist

Even More Texts!

This piece was, hands down, my students' favorite of the entire year. You want to see a class full of middle school boys get excited about a poem? Here it is. For context, if you missed this when it happened a few years ago, "Cash me ousside, how bow dah?" is a reference to an episode of Dr. Phil in which a teenager became internet-famous because she had a very unusual accent and was generally a pretty awful person. In a move that even my students agreed is awful and totally unfair, she somehow landed a recording contract and was branded as "Bhad Bhabie," the name your students might know her by. I did not show the original Dr. Phil clip to students for obvious reasons, but when I asked "Is anyone familiar with the 'Cash me ousside' girl?" around 2/3 of the class was ready to drop the knowledge on us. Students were pretty tickled that this girl was coming up in class at all, so they were already pretty excited about this slam poem, and then the poem itself blew them out of the water. Now that you have context for it, I'll leave you to enjoy! After watching and writing, we talked a lot about delivery and word choice, and the next day I asked students to pick a line they liked and try crafting their own poem. Link to Poem Transcript

This poem was one I found through YouTube, and while the performance and content were what made this piece a great fit for our unit, the other big reason I chose this poem is that the two girls performing it look about the same age as my students. There are tons of these "Youth Speaks" and "Brave New Voices" poems on YouTube performed by middle and high school students, and exposing your students to these videos helps show them that they aren't too young to write awesome pieces, and that poetry and great writing aren't exclusive to adult writers. There's also something powerful and intense about the brutal honesty of teenagers that comes across in this poem as well. Content Warning: There is one use of the 'N' word in this video, in the context of the girls reciting slurs that have been directed at them and others of their ethnicity. When I showed this video to my own students, I downloaded it to my computer and used iMovie to cut the split-second of audio so students weren't exposed to it. If you are comfortable having pre-discussion about the use of the word with your students, you certainly don't have to cut it, but I did so at the request of my principal.

We started the Modern Social Issues Unit with a very popular TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This is a longer talk (around 18 minutes), and the day my class of 8th graders viewed it we happened to be in the rather warm library sitting directly in the sun right after lunch. I printed out transcripts of the whole talk for each student so they could more easily follow along and keep notes about their thinking, but I still fretted that with the less-than-ideal teaching conditions they'd all be checked-out or asleep by minute five. To my great surprise, nearly every student sat through the whole talk with rapt attention. Adichie does a great job of breaking her talk up with a mix of personal stories that are often humorous, but the students were also drawn to her message about how dangerous it can be when we view something with only one perspective. This was the first piece we looked at because of how foundational it was to the entire unit, and nearly every student independently referenced this text in a quick write or book club discussion at some point during the unit. It gave us a nice overarching message to frame the rest of our discussions, and students had a much better grasp of what the unit was going to be about and what sorts of things we might discuss once we had watched this video. Here are the video and a link to the transcript! Link to the Full Transcript

Micah Bournes featured twice in our slam unit, and could have easily featured more. He has several excellent poems about the black male experience that made excellent additions to our discussions and writing about modern identity issues in America and the connections to the Civil Rights Movements study happening in humanities. The first text, Native Tongue, was one I was introduced to at Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher's professional development session, and it was one of the 'gateway' poems that led to my growing obsession with this genre. It makes some really great points about how we value certain types of speech over others in our society, even though there is no logical reason for the difference in what we view as 'academic' speech and 'slang.' Link to Poem Transcript The second Micah Bournes poem we looked at in this unit was Stealing Bread. This is a poem that students tend to have stronger opinions about, which is encouraged during this unit and translates into students' writing. I frequently remind students during this unit that their opinions are entirely their own, and as long as they back those opinions up with evidence and critical thinking, that's the important part. This is also another great text to talk about delivery. Bournes is an intense and expressive performer, and this exaggerated delivery makes it easy for students to identify how his voice changes throughout the poem. Link to Poem Transcript

This poem was another good one to talk about delivery, and is also a slightly less intense alternative to the Why Are Muslims So... poem if that one is too heavy for your students. My students enjoyed this one and most of them absolutely lost it at the line, "Honey, I'm hot all the time." Link to Poem Transcript

A collection of other texts I used during this unit for you to explore! Excerpt 1 from Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga Excerpt 2 from Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga Most of the texts we explored during this unit had to do with race and ethnic identity, but there are many different aspects of our identities that could be explored with students. Here are some other texts you could use to discuss these other parts of identity in our society. Gend-o-meter from Teaching Tolerance What Do You Know?: Six to twelve-year-olds talk about gays and lesbians from Teaching Tolerance Health - Teen authors urge boys to express their feelings from NewsELA Girl in a Country Song by Maddie & Tae Website: Beyond I Do

Student Responses

Modern Social Issues

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Modern Social Issues

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Response Type: Respond to Ideas

Example #1

Example #2

Example #3

In these responses, students respond to the ideas in the mentor text by providing their own opinions, considering moves they see the author making, or evaluating favorite lines or elements they felt did not work well.

Mentor Text Student Responses Student Example 1 Student Example 2 Student Example 3

Mentor Text Student Responses Student Response 1 Student Response 2

Mentor Text Student Responses Student Response 1 Student Response 2

Response Type: Emulate the Text

Example #1

Example #2

Example #3

Example #4

Example #5

These quick write responses emulate the style or craft of the original mentor text; shape poems, figurative language, and other structural elements can be observed as students play with words.

Mentor Texts Student Responses Student Response 1 Student Response 2

Mentor Text From Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds Student Responses Student Response 1 Student Response 2 Student Response 3 Student Response 4

Mentor Text Hip Hop Analogies by Tara Betts Student Responses Student Response 1 Student Response 2 Student Response 3

Mentor Text Song by Alicia Ostriker Student Responses Student Response 1

Mentor Text Student Responses Student Response 1 Student Response 2 Student Response 3

Response Type: Write a Related Text

Example #1

Example #2

Example #3

In these responses, students wrote a piece that didn't necessarily directly emulate the mentor text, but was inspired by the content and may have borrowed a line or two from the original.

Mentor Text Student Responses Student Response 1 Student Response 2 Student Response 3 0 Advanced issue found▲

Mentor Text Content Warning: There is one bad word at the very beginning of the video- it's currently set up to skip that word, and I use a manually edited version of the video with my students. Student Responses Student Response 1

Mentor Text Student Responses Student Response 1