Essay Prep: Dynamic Thinking provides a transition between the free-wheeling, personal experience-driven writing of youth and the more disciplined, rhetorically-driven thinking of academic writing. The goal is to protect and nourish a student's original writing voice while also calling on that student to develop a sophisticated investigation of academic topics.
Students learn to think about the controversial nature of a topic for writing; powerfully associate ideas using metaphor and analogy; identify their true perspective about a topic to aid thesis development; believe and doubt the same argument, to grow their thinking skills; and create a collage of writing (a final project synthesizing writing from the class).
Syllabus
Week One
True Truth. Students use the technique of freewriting to get to the heart of what they really want to say. This activity focuses on narrowing a topic and finding the underlying themes associated with one’s experiences.
Week Two
Powerful Association. Students associate their words with other images, ideas, and experiences to expand communication power. They’ll finish the week by choosing messages to relate through shared associations in a short writing piece.
Week Three
Exploring Viewpoints. This week, students explore multiple viewpoints in a novel way as they come alongside varying perspectives on controversial issues in an attempt to understand them better.
Week Four
Collage Writing. Students’ final projects incorporate bits of writing and ideas from the exercises in this course to create a fresh work called a collage.
Common Core and Academic Standards Support
What follows is a word bank and set of skills associated with this class. Use them to craft your own learning narrative for use in year-end evaluations, charter school reports, or any other accountability source.
Word Bank
- Argument
- Associations
- Counterargument
- Editing
- Idea generation
- Metaphor
- Multiple viewpoints
- Opening hook
- Perspective
- Poetry
- Revision
- Theme
- Topic funnel
- Vivid Detail
- Writing voice
Core Skills
- Argue with support for multiple points of view
- Edit writing for standard English usage
- Employ strong verbs to create clear images
- Employ vivid detail to engage readers
- Generate topics for narrative writing
- Give and receive feedback from the point of view of a curious reader
- Make comparisons to surprise and provoke insight
- Maintain distinct writer’s voice
- Revise writing for clarity, flow, order, interest, and economy of language
- Utilize literary devices to connect with readers
- Write detailed, organized, structured original narratives
- Write for a particular audience
- Write poetry to facilitate new perspectives on a topic
