I’m currently working on my MA project in English Studies for Teachers at Eastern Michigan University. It’s a teacher research project about what happens when I use the mini-units from the College, Career, and Community Ready Writer’s Program in my 10th grade classroom.

I started my second C3WP mini-unit on Friday and I really need to write about the wonderful things that happened in my classroom. It was just awesome and really showed what I love about the C3WP materials.

The second C3WP mini unit is called Writing and Revising Claims, and the texts are all on the topic of video games. For the first lesson in the mini-unit, students start by writing and talking about what they already know or think about video games with a very open ended prompt. Then, they examine an infographic and they write about and discuss that. I use a See-Think-Wonder graphic organizer on a Padlet to let them record their observations, thoughts, and questions about it.

Immediately when I told my classes that we were going to do another argument mini-unit, they were excited. A few actually said “Yay!” (On a side-note, my 10th grade classes are unicorns. I have two classes of them, and they are absolutely delightful day in and day out, and I am just so lucky to be their teacher. I’m already sad that my classes will change a lot at the semester break, because I will miss the nearly perfect classroom culture we have going right now.)

I put the writing prompt on the board, which was to write about any thoughts, feelings, or experiences related to the words “video games” for five minutes. My students in both classes wrote silently. The only sound was the scratching of their pens and pencils (in their writing notebooks that they all remember to bring to class every day. I have seriously never had classes like these before). Even my students who are usually most resistant to writing were intensely focused. I think it was because those particular students play video games a lot.

Then, I had them turn and talk to each other about what they wrote when the time was up. I walked around and their discussions were all on topic, and they were adding to and building on each other’s ideas. Then one person from each partner group reported out about their discussions for the whole class, and I shared what I wrote about video games playing a big role in my life from childhood through the present. Even though I shared this with them at the beginning of the school year, they are always surprised when I write about how much I love gaming for this unit.

Students got out Chromebooks after the discussion, and they used Google Classroom to open up this infographic. The first link I put up actually didn’t work and I had to quickly find that one for them. I am cursed with this lesson, because the same thing happened when I did it in the spring as a demo lesson for the Eastern Michigan Writing Project Summer Institute, and it also happened last winter when I did it with my 12th graders, and they were all different links. I even tested it before class this time, and it was working! Anyway, they studied the infographic and contributed to a See-Think-Wonder Padlet. Here is some of what they came up with:

As you can see, even my unicorn class is not totally perfect with the one cbvbrgrgvrjgr response, and I did have to delete a little bit of light-hearted silliness as they were typing, too.

But what I’m most excited about is what I see in the Wonder column. They are starting to question the evidence. “How much do you have to play to become noticably more agressive?” “How did they do all of this research?” Two people further down even asked what sources they used to make this inforgraphic. I heard even more of these types of comments in their conversations as I was walking around.

I did an argument writing pre-assessment at the beginning of the year, and in that pre-assessment, most students did not mention the credibility of the sources. Most didn’t question anything at all. They either summarized some of the evidence, or they used it simply to illustrate their claims. Here they are writing thoughtful questions and thinking about credibility less than two months later, after only one other C3WP mini-unit and a few minutes of weekly routine argument writing or discussion.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how they use the sources from this mini-unit in the written responses they’ll do at the end of next week. Not only that, but I love how engaged and excited they are about these types of assignments and discussions. And I wonder if starting the year with this style of interactive mini-unit that layers writing, reading, and discussing helped create this classroom culture in any way, but that’s a question for another research project. I have to finish this one first.