“Take out your previous argumentative essay.”
“The one I passed back last week.”
“With the rubric stapled to it.”
“I wrote on the rubric with blue ink.”
“It should be in your yellow folder.”
“The only essay you have completed so far this school year.”
What should have been a simple one-step direction deteriorated into a 15-minute ordeal before I could even process what had gone wrong.
My eighth graders were ready to move from collecting ideas and planning to drafting an argumentative essay for the second time. It was an exciting moment—the moment that transfer of student-owned writing skills from one piece of writing to another was about to happen. Or so I thought.
During my first class of the day, I had given the exact same instruction: Take out your previous argumentative essay. Within three minutes, the result was a classroom filled with students looking at a completed draft of an essay.
The next step was to have students take a look at their claim statements. I wanted to remind them of the thought process behind the organizational structure of their essays—to remind them that they already knew how to be intentional about crafting a claim statement that would drive, or reflect, the organization of ideas throughout the body of the essay. It was a simple task that served to boost their confidence and set them up for a successful transfer of skills. It had worked smoothly. During the first class of the day.
The last class of the day was another story.
When asked to take out their previous essay, students were dumbfounded. They seemed to have forgotten the meaning of essay or that they had even written anything in the past. When asked to place a finger on the claim statement (after 15 minutes of tracking down the essays themselves), students were all over the place.
I wanted to berate them. This process had been flawless for the first class. Why couldn’t this class just be more like them? Didn’t they even care about learning? I felt like shaming them for struggling, as if the success of the lesson with the first class was an indication of a fault in the last class.
I do not want to be someone who shames others for struggling.
So I stopped. I got completely silent. The students all looked at one another and shifted in their seats uncomfortably. I felt like exploding, but because I do not want to be a person who explodes, I tried something else.
“This is not working the way I expected it to work. Something is going wrong. I don’t know what it is, but I promise I will figure out a new plan by the next time we meet.”
There was a collective sigh of relief amongst the students. I could see the slack come back into their shoulders. We put our writing aside and moved on to another activity, but my mind continued to chew on the experience as if it were a brand-new piece of bubble gum.
I wondered what had caused such a drastic difference between the first class and the last class. I wanted to blame it on something simple, such as lack of organizational skills, but I knew better. This was not just a simple matter of misplacing papers.
It was a lack of ownership.
Why weren’t the students in the last class owning their work as writers? It seemed as if they were just going through the motions and did not feel any sense of attachment to their work or the process. It called to mind the difference between knowing the algorithm in math and knowing the concept behind the algorithm.
I considered that perhaps the last class had lost sight of why we were even writing argumentative papers in the first place. So I regrouped.
Beginning Again
The next time we met, I asked students which they thought they needed to include more of in their argumentative essays: their own ideas or evidence from other sources? The answer was resounding: evidence from other sources. That was the root of the problem. Somehow, I had sent the wrong message and this class had completely missed that the whole point of writing an argument is to state your own ideas and persuade others to see your point, maybe even to take action as a result.
So, I showed students the mentor essay we had been working with as part of our unit on argumentative writing. I had highlighted the sentences that demonstrated the author’s own ideas in one color, and the sentences that came from other sources in another color. The students were surprised to see that the mentor text had more than double the number of original ideas as pieces of evidence from other sources.
Students spent the next class period drafting their second argumentative essay without any access to other sources or even to their notes. They simply had to write from their heads and hearts and rediscover the true purpose of writing an argumentative essay—of writing in general—to convey ideas.
This simple step allowed students to draft papers driven by their own ideas. It became clear that many of them had begun to shape their ideas based on the “evidence” they wanted to use from other sources instead of determining their own thoughts and opinions and then locating evidence in other sources to support their ideas. By drafting without access to other sources, students were forced to craft essays that mattered to them, essays they would not soon forget, essays they could locate in a yellow folder in well under 15 minutes.
Sometimes, the hardest thing in teaching is allowing ourselves to pause. By stopping to acknowledge the problem and work past the inclination to assign blame, I learned to trust that my students and I can shift gears and get back on track. I am thankful my final class taught me this, even if it wasn’t a lesson I wanted to learn in the moment.
