FRIDAY: Today the students were placed in small groups to form teams for the next writing assignment. Team are comprised of writers with varying levels of ability. Each team has a team captain who reports directly to me, the coach. The first task for each team was to spend ten minutes drafting a pre-write for the new essay's prompt. After drafting the pre-write independently, team members collaborated to determine if they favored the beneficial or harmful side of this particular topic. Next, team captains discussed personal writing strengths and weaknesses with team members to select "positions." By the end of the class period, each team member knew what position of the paper they were responsible for writing.
Throughout today's lesson, we discussed various strategies for creating an effective pre-write.
