TILP: Choices & Revenge // Personal Narrative

For my TILP, I am creating a unit similar to one I actually taught, just making some changes to eliminate a massive amount of writing which our students complained about. I didn't want students to do over a weeks worth of only writing, but it's what my CT wanted and that was largely because of the district. And hindsight is 20/20.

So, to start out, we'd read our 3 texts: 2 short stories - "The Lady or the Tiger" and "No is Yes" and a poetry page with 2 poems and a verse and a Chinese proverb. All of the pieces deal with choices - revenge and forgiveness. Something that my students are familiar with.

As an ELA teacher, I have to teach personal narratives. They're usually easy, but sometimes teachers approach them in a way where this is a dreaded assignment when it's one of the easiest.

My formal summative assessment would be the students actually typing up a personal narrative telling me about a time they had to choose between revenge and forgiveness or some second option. For those who can't think of anything, they can respond to this prompt: "You really want to try out for [insert school club, sport, etc here] but you don’t want to do it alone. You ask your best friend, [insert best friend’s name], to try out with you. Your best friend makes the cut and you don’t. What are your two choices? Which do you choose?"

I'm looking for students to relate the 3 texts to their situation. I'm looking for something similar to: "Like the Princess in The Lady or the Tiger, I'm in a lose-lose situation. She had to choose if her lover would die or marry a woman she hated. I have to..." as proof in their story.

When we taught this unit in my placement, students had to actually write a practice narrative for a couple days. They were burnt out. Not only where they writing for over a week in our class between the practice and the actual narrative, but they were writing papers all week in their other 5 classes. So, that gave me the idea for this assignment. With ELA, I think it's hard to incorporate technology, especially when my 7th graders can't handle it. They abuse it and it distracts them and derails class more than not. But, instead of them writing a practice paper, I would have them create a visual representation of the main elements of what I'm looking for in the summative assessment to be sure they know what they should do, draw strong conclusions and relationships from the text and learn how to use voice and dialogue. I'd have my students create something like a paper-slide presentation or comic or some sort of presentation they could post to a class blog. Then, I can assess their basic understanding a lot easier than reading/skimming 100+ papers and it gives the students practice outlining a narrative and planning connections. It also allows students to comment and view their peers work. And most importantly, it's not more writing.

Then the summative assessment is the narrative that needs to include dialogue, relationships to the 3 texts, figurative language, organization, point of view and all of the other good things narratives need. Throughout the process of writing their summative assessment, students would have workshop days where they share the link to their narrative with a few peers and use the comment feature in Google Docs to comment and make suggestions. Then, they use the feedback to edit and revise their paper.