Informative Writing

Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Michael W. Smith, and James E. Fredericksen: Get It Done!: Writing and Analyzing Informational Texts to Make Things Happen

Informational Text!

Say

I am thrilled that I have been able to actually engage with my students using a number of informational texts for a project that they have been working on lately. Students are asked to identify one issue that they are faced with in their everyday lives—whether it is bullying or gang violence, they are asked to create some sort of project that raises awareness to these issues in hopes of irradiating the issue within their school environment. The perfect way to do that is through the use of informational text—Wilhelm, Smith, and Frederickson produce another great product in which they not only explain the significance in teaching informational text, but give very real examples on incorporating them into our unit plans. I like how they were able to break into categories different types of informational text such as cause-effect, compare-contrast, etc. Using these categories in writing is often what helps students with structuring their papers. For example, if I wanted a student to write an argument paper on corporal punishment, most likely they would be using a compare-contrast technique.  I will be the first to admit that I would much rather spend time working with fictional text with my students, but informational text offers a reality that you don’t get from other genres.

What I really enjoyed most about the book was chapter 5 which dealt with the process of inquiry. I believe that in this chapter the authors definitely go into great detail on how exactly we go about teaching using informative text in things like projects. For example, when they talk about creating a culminating composing task—the same type of project my students at Dreher are working on, the lesson plan ideas that are present would have been great to use beforehand. For the project that the students are working on, they need to identify a “problem” and then pose a question that they need to answer through their project. Wilhelm, Smith, and Frederickson describes this as an “essential question”. “Effective essential questions can accommodate many possible answers and provide a wide variety of opportunities to read and compose. What is the American dream? isn’t a good question, because in our view there’s consensus on the answer. To what extent is the American dream equally accessible to all? works much better because of the range of possible answers and how current and compelling such a question can be to students” (46). I can remember that when my students first started working on this part of their project, many had issues because they didn’t know exactly how to find an essential question. I believe that because my CT and I had our students come up with a project idea first, we may have limited them in the scope of their thinking about essential questions. Wilhelm, Smith, and Frederickson says that once our students have identified an essential question—then we go in to help them compose different text types and so forth. I can appreciate this book for the fact that we are able to understand the steps needed to guide students through a project in which they are using questioning and informational text.

Where I am able to see great parallel with informational text is with close reading! When our students are dealing with informational text the first thing we want to make sure they are doing is taking the text and reading it in detail—again, this isn’t fictional pieces we are dealing with. The primarily goal of close-reading is so we can get students to deeply engage with challenging and high quality text. Showing various techniques of how to work through an informational text (like a scholarly article) takes practice and scaffolding. I do believe the two can work hand in hand with each other however. Beers does state that when we put the energy and attention into a text (reading it closely), then the text and analysis starts to become more rigorous. This also relates to writing as well. I do believe there is a specific level of writing our students should be able to do when they are working primarily with explanatory text. I would expect my students to be able to define, detail components, explain behavior or rationale, as well as provide conclusive explanations for their topics that they are researching using both primary and secondary informational text. I believe that Wilhelm, Smith, and Frederickson offer tips on how to engage students in this type of discourse in the later chapters of the book.

I enjoy being able to challenge the way I would combat a project and then reading on ways that have proven to be successful. For me personally, I know I would not have taught to give students a mentor text to use when we gave them this project not realizing that mentor text offer a guided model to writing. Wilhelm, Smith, and Frederickson did a fantastic job on this, and I love how practical the book really is. I did recommend it to my CT after I left his class.

Do

For my DO this week, I was able to find a video of a middle school teacher who does exactly what I spoke about! Using close reading with informational text. What I find to be great about his video is his use of effective questioning to engage his students and elicit a response. He also is able to use a number of collaborative techniques to keep learning going for the students the entire 20 minutes. I certainly needed to watch this before I taught using informational text.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxzU2TmFLiw