The Six Academic Writing Assignments: Designing the User's Journey - Softcover

Burke, Jim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0325050945 ISBN 13: 9780325050942

Publisher: HEINEMANN, 2018

Synopsis

Writing assignments are road maps-or they should be. They guide the writer on a journey. They lay out a process, envision a destination. They are designed. As Jim Burke explains it: "What we are really doing when we create a year's worth of writing assignments, of experiences, is designing a story. Each day's class a sentence, each week a paragraph, each unit a chapter in the story of the year students spend in our classes. And as with any good story, there needs to be tension and transformation by the time one arrives at the end, or what I have called 'the user's journey.'"

These maps are crucially important for engaging students with academic writing, which is often unfamiliar territory. Drawing on his extensive review of academic writing assignments across the country, Jim identifies six major categories of writing assignments that help students become better writers, readers, and thinkers:

- Writing to learn
- Short answer
- Writing on demand
- Process paper (which goes through multiple drafts)
- Research paper/report
- Alternate forms (multimedia presentations, etc.).

For each assignment type, Jim invites us into his own practice. He shows how he composes the assignment, how he creates gateway activities to help prepare students, how he troubleshoots common problems, how he gives response, how he clarifies the criteria on which students will be judged. He also shows how these assignments are related-how the earlier assignments build to later more complex ones

So please join a master teacher at work. Take this journey with him.

About this title

About the Author

Jim Burke is the author of numerous bestselling Heinemann titles, including the English Teacher's Companion, Fourth Edition and What's the Big Idea? The question he's always tried to answer is "How can we teach our students better?" He seeks these answers daily through his work in his own classroom at Burlingame High School in California where he still teaches after twenty years. Facing the same constraints and challenges as every other teacher, Jim shares his creative solutions in bestselling professional titles with Heinemann such as Reading Reminders and Writing Reminders as well as through Heinemann Professional Development Services. As part of his commitment to helping teachers and learning how to use the latest technologies, he founded the English Companion Ning, described by Education Week as "the world's largest English department" and winner of several Edublog Awards for Best Social Network for Education. In addition to the EC Ning, Jim offers a steady stream of recommended resources through his website (www.englishcompanion.com) and Twitter (@englishcomp) where he is ranked in the top 100 educators to follow at the top within the online English teacher community. Jim serves on several national commissions related to adolescent literacy and standards, including the Advanced Placement English Literature and Language Course and Exam Review Commission with the College Board and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) where he serves on the Content Technical Working Group, which advises PARCC on the national assessments being developed for the Common Core State Standards. In addition, he is a senior author on the Holt McDougal Harcourt Literature series. Jim has received numerous awards, including the NCTE Intellectual Freedom Award, the NCTE Conference on English Leadership Award, and the California Reading Association Hall of Fame Award. He served on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Committee on Adolescence and Young Adulthood English Language Arts Standards. Through his work in the class and on such commissions, Jim Burke seeks not only to clarify but reimagine what English should be, honoring the past even as he works with others to create the future of the discipline he loves so much. Visit his website (www.englishcompanion.com) for more information.

Review

Jim Burke is among the finest writing educators we have today. He keeps up with research, instruction, students and society and mines them for ideas to try out, refine and formulate as instructional principles and activities that support students' writing, thinking and learning. The Six Academic Writing Assignments is a ground-breaking amalgam of his work with his own students and the efforts of so many teachers with whom he has worked. It is phenomenal. Read it! --Judith A. Langer, Vincent O Leary Distinguished Research Professor, University at Albany

A new generation of high school teachers now write books as once only college professors did, and they write better ones--and with greater relevance to teaching--than most of those professors. To me Jim Burke is the leading figure in this emerging trend, and in this valuable new book he applies "the principles of design thinking" to writing assignments, "the secret operating systems of our classes," as he calls them, that, for better or worse, affect whether students learn to write well for academic purposes. --Gerald Graff, Professor of English and Education, University of Illinois at Chicago, former President of the Modern Language Association, and author of They Say, I Say

In this impressive book, Jim Burke offers a deep and thoughtful look at why we do what we do in designing academic writing assignments, inspiring us to be mindful of the mental moves we want our students to engage in and intentional in creating intellectual experiences to teach and transform them. At once theoretical and practical, this book is filled with a rich array of user-friendly classroom-tested practices teachers can use to map out a year-long writing journey for their students. --Carol Booth Olson, Professor of Education, University of California, Irvine, and author of The Reading/Writing Connection

Edition details

• Publisher: HEINEMANN
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0325050945
• ISBN 13: 9780325050942
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200