Purposeful Paragraphing
Leading students towards a deeper, more organic way of thinking about their papers.
During the first semester I did a series of lessons with my AP Seminar students where I tried to shift their concept of what a paragraph is and how it functions within their writing. The main take-away was that paragraphs, in addition to dividing ideas, tend to have functions or serve a discreet purpose in advancing a line-of-reasoning. Part of this lesson sequence was providing them with possible ways to organize their essays as adapted from C3WP and They Say, I Say.
As my students work on performance task 1, several asked me yesterday if I could provide them similar guidelines for the IRR. Instead of just giving it to them, I quickly created this activity that guides them through critically thinking about the model essays that college board has released and has them create the resource they wanted.
Lesson prep:
- Print out a copy of a different perfect score IRR for every group. I did 2017-present. These are all easily found through quick internet searches or AP classroom.
- If you don't want them to write on them (I have multiple classes and loath the trek to the copy room and the ogre that lives there) give every group a stack of post-it notes.
- Have poster paper, markers, glue, scissors, and other crafting supplies out and available.
Directions:
- I told students to read aloud the IRR at their table and discuss: what does each paragraph accomplish? How does each advance the paper's line of reasoning?
- Add post-its as they read, labelling the purpose of each paragraph.
- When they've read the essay, they should grab poster paper and create a visual representation of the model paper's line of reasoning / organization.
- I told them they needed to give the model that they identified a creative title.
Results:
- I noticed my students having some great discussions and prodded them to think beyond the list I provided them on the board.
- When students noticed that two paragraphs accomplished the same movement or that one half of a paragraph did one thing while the second half did something else, I encouraged them to move beyond a simplistic understanding of paragraphs. Do they think the author should have split paragraphs up more or should have combined others? On their posters, I invited them to rethink the organization of their flow-chart from paragraphs to "Sections" or "Movements" or "Beats."
- In the end, we had more than a dozen ways to organize your IRR visually represented on the walls of the classroom. Check out a few great examples below:
