Agenda

Content and Language objectives for Narrative Writing (20 minutes)

“Characteristics of Narrative Writing” (40 minutes)

GOAL: Look at samples along the spectrum of narrative writing to define essential characteristics of narrative text for students.

Dept Discussion/Meeting (30 minutes)

re: How do topics discussed today apply to your site?

Characteristics

of Narrative Writing

Why talk about it at all?

Students have at least nine different ELA teachers from K - 8th grade. If these teachers are setting incompatible expectations, students will receive incoherent instruction.

However, if these teachers are working as a team with common expectations, classroom instruction will build from year to year, with greatly improved writing skills for student learning.

Words have multiple meanings.

• Political or social “narratives”
• Social science “narratives”
• News “stories”
• Literary “narratives”

One difficulty in defining “narrative” or “story” for students is that the word has many meanings.

Words have multiple meanings.

• Political or social “narratives”
• Social science “narratives”
• News “stories”
• Literary “narratives”

One difficulty in defining “narrative” or “story” for students is that the word has many meanings.

How do our students do narrative?

When asked to write a literary “narrative” or “story,” many students will not create good narrative writing - or may not even create narrative writing at all!

• Descriptive or informational writing only with no conflict or plot (“Bed to bed narrative”)
• Writing about an event, but in “news” or report of information fashion
• Writing a narrative, but oh-so poorly!

How do our students do narrative?

The upcoming Fall PBA 2014 will allow a concrete and objective measure of how students are doing in creating narrative writing across grade levels throughout the district.

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This will allow us to measure our success at teachers and get the feedback that we need for encouragement of what is working and to target areas that need improvement.

Teaching students to write narratives.

One way to help students improve their narrative writing is to focus on the characteristics that give narrative text its special “flavor.” But what are those characteristics?

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Let’s look at some examples and see what characteristics distinguish narrative text from informative and argumentative...

Is this narrative? Why or why not?

Is this narrative? Why or why not?

Let’s look at a range of examples.

What about biographical/autobiographical writing?

What’s narrative; what’s not? Why or why not?

7th Grade Lit Book:

754; 770; 118; 258

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Let’s explore some examples to inform our own perspectives.

(I will be pulling from the 7th Grade McDougal-Littel as that is the book I have in my classroom!)

Table discussion

Let’s explore some examples to inform our own perspectives.

• Let’s look through your own grade level book for examples and COUNTER-examples of narrative writing?
• Can you find something that looks “tricky”? That is hard to classify…
• Can you find something that looks similar to what students produce in their “narrative writing” that isn’t?

How does CCSS characterize narrative?

Your beloved Assessment Committee pulled directly from how the Common Core standards characterizes narrative text to create a narrative rubric, excerpted below.