My students have a lot of practice in writing dialogue. It offers them elasticity of voice and a plumbing of possibilities for character development I have not found in other exercises. For the predictive scenes I ask them to write and perform here I may first ask them to make character cards—index cards with one side an image of the character and the other a description of his/her attributes and motivations—in order to get them into their roles. The dialogue carries itself--I use New Haven’s Narrative Writing Rubric as a guide—and the class performs and writes reflections about what arises.
For homework reading, I rely heavily on dialectical notebooks, where the left half of the page contains quotes from the text and the right responds. The left-side quotes ground us in the text and the right-hand side, whose development I watch closely, projects students’ fluency and ability to make choices about what they read.
In reading plays, especially Shakespeare, I use my students’ own performances of the pieces. I find this invests them in the characters, and builds us as a community of thinkers. I just pause often asking them, “what does this mean?” or, “what is going on here?” They love their “ahas” and connections and anticipations in these discussions.
Found poetry is taking several words or lines from a piece of literature which just strike students’ imaginations or get them thinking. I like to use sticky notes for the writing of these lines because they are tactile and rough-draft feeling. Students arrange these lines on a page—I like large chart paper--and fill them in using their own words. In this space students can create new imagery or sound, or explain the connections between the words they have used, or draw new insights. The completed poem is a final draft of what is begun on the chart paper, simply according to where students feel the piece is taking them. Because this is not a creative writing class, I grade students simply according to effort. I find this exercise gives students an appreciation of the original writer’s process as well as a kind of new ownership of the piece.
During class I often jigsaw—break the class into groups each of which develops a topic for presentation to the whole class. I may assign each to a character, or a plot point, or a question about the text, and at the end of presentations of their conclusions the class reflects collectively.
So much has been written about teaching the writing process. In order to provoke students to own their work I construct myself as an active listener; I offer students choices of topics and processes; and I find ways for their voices to feel heard, whether by suggesting we gather our dialogues or drawings as a book or by suggesting social media as means of conveying insights and innovations.
The summative assessment I would use for this unit would consist of opposite-hand drawing and analysis. Because when we draw with out opposite hands we are calling on a half of the brain we use less, and simply because holding a pencil with the opposite hand recalls the awkwardness with which we first learned to write, clinicians use these drawings in order to elicit the unconscious, and I find the unconscious ideologically laden. If students are uncomfortable drawing, they would use right-left hands to write a dialogue. Their grade would not be about the art, but about the analysis which follows: a two-sided notebook whose left side points out details of the work in question and right asks questions or offers insights. Because mine is not an art class, I would tell students they are being graded on effort. Students have fun with this exercise precisely because it is so awkward.
