A3 Daily Lesson Plans: 1

Week 6, Day 18—Friday, September 30

Lesson Objectives

  • Reflectupon assignment 2
  • Revisit the conversation metaphor transitioning into the gathering conversations/perspectives stage of the metaphor (in other words, you’re beginning the research portion of the class)
  • Initiate inquiry methods to prepare students for research

Prep

Have a set of post-script questions ready. Review the conversation metaphor and how it relates to the structure of CO150. Also review notes about the difference between topics and issues and how to narrow a topic to an issue. Since inquiry guides research in the next few stages of our class, think about inquiry questions you could start asking. Review Assignments 3 and 4 so that you know what you’re preparing your students to do with these activities. Prepare your lesson plan and find the necessary overheads from previous lessons and modify them or create new ones as appropriate. Since you’ll be discussing Assignments 3 and 4 in the next class, you may need to have these up at Writing Studio so that students can download and print them immediately after today’s class.

Materials

Overheads:

  • Post-script instructions
  • Writing as Conversation Metaphor
  • Topics and issues overhead (or markers to create these on the board)

Lead-In

Students are ready at this point to move beyond shifting an argument from one context to another, which they’ve been focusing on the past few weeks, and in today’s lesson you’ll prepare them to initiate their own critical inquiries, eventually selecting and incorporating texts that they find in response to their questions (rather than relying on someone else’s initial inquiry question and ensuing argument).

Activities

Attendance (2 minutes)

Post-Script and collect Assignment 2 (10 minutes)

Give your students a prompt like the one you gave them for the first assignment, though you may choose to modify it given the challenges your students faced while drafting the open letter. If they had particular problems shifting contexts or if they struggled with structuring the arguments in their letters, you may ask some specific questions about issues like these. These post-scripts give you helpful context when you’re reading and evaluating their assignments, but they also give students the opportunity to reflect critically on their writing processes.

Review Writing-As-A-Conversation (10 minutes)

Present the Writing as Conversation graphic and note that we’ve essentially completed the first two “steps”: we’ve listened to the conversation and we’ve expanded the conversation by setting aside our own biases and preconceived ideas to allow us to immerse ourselves in what others are saying and shift their arguments into a new context. We’ve looked at a variety of perspectives and we’ve begun to form our own opinions in order to engage more actively with the conversation and find out more. As we move forward in the semester, we will become increasingly interested in forming a clear position and making an informed contribution so that others may listen to us and respond as the conversation continues to become more sophisticated.

To arrive at an informed position requires us to once again look back at existing conversations. We need to ask ourselves: How do the writers/speakers/actors we’ve read so far begin their discussion of an issue they think is important? Look at Shirky’s “Political Power of Social Media,” and Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and the Economist’s “Who Killed the Newspaper?” A common denominator among these texts is that they all strive to answer a question that the author poses. Locate two or three representative passages from authors the students have read so far to locate the questions that have motivated their contributions, and point these moments of inquiry out to your students. Explain that all rhetorical acts have as their motivation exigence—they respond to a need in the world, a question that needs to be answered, and they attempt to answer.

This is called an inquiry question. Asking an inquiry question gives us a focus—we strive to find an answer to that question. The answer to that question is, often, our position on an issue (which we can turn into a thesis or a claim). However, with any good line of inquiry, we don’t just find one answer to a question—we find many answers from many different people. Therefore it is necessary for us to sift through the various ways to answer the question (various conversations/arguments being made by people who have a stake in the issue) until we have a deeper understanding of the issue at hand…this is what the third assignment asks us to do. After we have a deeper understanding of the issue at hand and the various conversations and stakeholders involved, we are ready to contribute our own answer to the inquiry question; in other words, we are ready to make an argument.

Transition: We’ll use questions to identify a valid exigence that will motivate our work in the upcoming parts of the semester. Exigence, in its simplest meaning, is the motivation/opportunity for needing to express an argument.

Narrowing ideas from a topic to an issue to an inquiry question (20 minutes)

Introduce the relationship between topics and issues. In the previous assignment, students used a pre-existing claim and merely shifted it from one context to another. However, the research and writing in the next two assignments will require more original thinking and will require the use of multiple texts that students find independently. Understanding how inquiry is born from issues and topics will help students create focused, specific lines of inquiry to guide them through the next several assignments. Perhaps share the following notes, emphasizing the idea of inquiry and creating inquiry questions.

Reminder: These notes are more to guide your lecture, not share directly with your students. Adapt the ideas presented here and deliver the ideas to your students in the best way you know they will receive them.

What is a Theme?

  • A broad idea or message about life, society, or human nature. Our theme for the class is Internet and Social Media
  • Often timeless and universal

What is a Topic?

  • An area of interest; focus of debate—the categories within the reader are examples of various topics that are under the theme of Internet and Social Media
  • Subject of debate, discussion, discovery
  • Usually falling under the umbrella of a theme (since there needs to be some kind of exigency behind writing something)

What is an Issue?

  • A slice of an area of the topic
  • Points of disagreement, uncertainty, concern, or curiosity that are being discussed by communities of readers and writers
  • Topics contain multitudes of issues; it’s up to us to find them
  • To identify, look for patterns in what you read
  • Central concepts repeated in texts
  • Other topics being incorporated under the theme
  • Places of discrepancy
  • Recurring voices (“experts in the field”)/key players in the conversation

What is inquiry?

  • Asking narrow and refined questions to help develop knowledge and ideas about an issue
  • Getting curious
  • Exploring many different frames of an issue (not a topic—much more narrow)
  • The beginning of an argument
  • Often good inquiry will lead you to a good research question (which is just a question that is debatable that you choose to answer in a particular way with particular support)
  • The answer to the research question turns into your thesis statement/claim for the argument you wish to present into the conversation

Example:

Theme / Topic / Issue / Inquiry Question
Women Rights / Women and Competitive Sports / -Steroid use among adolescent girls involved in competitive sports
-Women’s NBA lacking the funds that the NBA brings in / - Which competitive sports do girls most likely abuse steroids in?
- How much are the adults involved in steroid abuse in teen girls?
-What are some side-effects of steroid use in teens?
College / College Admissions / -impact of college admissions standards on the makeup of US colleges and universities
-impact of waiving requirements in order to meet a particular “quota” / - What are the current admissions policies at State Universities across the nation, and how does CSU compare?
-Should CSU make admission harder to achieve?
Internet and Social Media / Privacy / -Social Network providers sell personal information to marketing companies so as to “tailor” advertisement to meet individual users.
-Every website, social network, etc…has different privacy controls and settings. / -Whose responsibility is it to understand the privacy controls and settings? The user or the provider?
-Is it ethical for the provider of a social network, say Facebook, to periodically change the privacy rules?
Internet and Social Media / Freedom of Speech / -Employees are being fired, suspended, or some other way reprimanded for content they’ve posted on the Internet via their own “private” accounts (ie: Facebook status updates, YouTube videos, Twitter, personal blogs) / -Do employers have the right to use what an employee does in his/her spare time against them?
-At what point does private life blur with public affairs? Should the two remain separate?
Internet and Social Media / You try one

Continue this pattern, having the students, working either individually, or in groups, supply additional topics, issues, and inquiry questions.

Transition. Since you’ll ultimately be choosing your own area of research and your own path into the conversation about Internet and Social Media, let’s share our brainstormsso that you have several places to perhaps begin your inquiry.

Share the brainstorms done in groups. Record the additional topics, issues, and inquiry questions the students came up with. (10 minutes)

If time: Allow students to develop some of their own inquiry questions

Give students an opportunity to independently begin finding their own inquiry questions related to the topics they find interesting. This will become their focus point for the rest of the semester—it will be the position they ultimately take in their argument paper (A4), and the research they will focus on gathering in A3. It is important that the inquiry question they select is narrow enough yet allows room for flexibility, is debatable, and is of genuine interest to them. While they don’t have to choose one on the spot, they should be seriously thinking about it now.

Conclude Class and Assign Homework

  • Download and print Assignments 3 and 4 from Writing Studio and bring them to class (unless you plan to distribute hard copies of the assignments)
  • Read pages 567-576; 582-589 in PHG about research techniques
  • Decide upon an inquiry question—or at least have several inquiry questions in mind that you can choose from for next week’s forum posting.

Week 7, Day 19—Monday, October 3

Lesson Objectives

  • Introduce Assignments 3 and 4
  • Narrow inquiry questions
  • Introduce idea of stakeholders and how to identify them

Prep

For today’s class, you should review Assignments 3 and 4 and prepare to print and distribute them unless you’ve asked your students to print their own copies from Writing Studio. Also, read pages 567-576 and 582-589 in your PHG about research techniques. Students will also have read this and although you may not be discussing it explicitly, it may come up as you introduce research to your students. You will need an example of an annotation, which can be found in the appendix. Compose your lesson plan and overheads for the activities as usual.

Materials

  • Overhead (or copies) of Assignments 3 and 4
  • Stakeholder notes
  • Instructions/example for narrowing inquiry question workshop
  • An example annotation

Lead-In

Students may be somewhat overwhelmed by all the information as you review Assignments 3 and 4, so be sure you reassure them that you are introducing both assignments now so they will have a clear idea of why they are gathering research in the first place. They don’t need to know the precise details of A4 yet. Students should have selected an inquiry question/topic to research as per their homework from last time. They will post their inquiry question on this week’s forum.

Activities

Attendance (2 minutes)

WTL (2minutes)

Last class you spent a bit of time referring back to the conversation model to explain where students have been in the conversation, and where they are going. Test to see that they remember their path. You may want to ask the following questions (or devise your own WTL): What is the next phase in our conversation metaphor? How do we get there?

Students should be able to explain that the next phase is to research in order to form and substantiate opinions in order to contribute to the conversation (which is the last step in the conversation metaphor). We do this by asking questions. This should be a quick review from last time, but reminding students of the course goals and structure is something that should be done frequently.

Introduce Assignments 3 and 4 (10 minutes)

As you introduced the other assignments, take your students through a critical reading of Assignments 3 and 4, though you should spend more time at this point on the particulars of Assignment 3. You’re introducing Assignment 4 today briefly so that students understand the goal of their research; therefore, you may want to begin with a preview of Assignment 4 before launching into a close examination of Assignment 3.

Emphasize the field research component in A3. Explain what a stakeholder is (briefly, as this is a concept we will come back to later) and encourage students to think about who they may need/want to contact to schedule an interview. It is important for the students not to drag their feet on this even though we don’t get into interview discussions specifically until Week 8. Students will need to understand who their stakeholders are early, figure out which of the stakeholders is a local authority (or at least easily accessible), schedule an interview, and conduct an interview. There is a time crunch to this, so you may want to encourage them to find someone to interview and schedule the interview as early as possible.

Transition.For this week’s forum post, you will narrow and refine a topic and inquiry question that you are most interested in. This focus will help you considerably as you begin pursuing who your specific audience will be for A4, as well as the various stakeholder perspectives you will need to try to find for A3.

Introduce the concept of stakeholder (5 minutes)

A stakeholder is very similar to a specific audience; it is a person, organization, institution, etc…that has a vested interest in issue at hand because they somehow or another have something at stake. For example, if the issue being discussed was about how college tuition continues to rise, there are many people who might have a stake in the issue. Students, obviously, have a stake because it is their education that is on the line. Parents, who often are footing the bill, are interested in where their money is going and how much more they’ll have to pay. The school board has a stake in the issue because they are the ones pushing for a tuition hike in order to cover expenditures. Now, some of these “stakes” are at cross purposes with one another, which is why it is important to examine what everyone has to say. This is what we mean when we want to “gather various conversations.” We want to know who all the possible stakeholders are and what their positions might be. We want to know this in order to be more fully informed about all the dimensions of the issue as well as in order to be able to write a persuasive argument.

Tip: It is useful for students to construct this knowledge rather than merely receiving the information via a lecture.

As we begin our “gathering,” we not only want to explore your own opinions about an issue, but also collect as many other perspectives as possible. Doing so will give you a better sense of what people are saying about the topic and may help you find a direction for a future paper. Since you will eventually need to argue about your issue, you have to know the opinions of others to be able to incorporate or refute them. Some questions for consideration through the next part of the class: What have you found out about the context of this issue? In other words, who else is interested in or affected by this issue?Who would you single out as the most important stakeholders in the issue?What kinds of publications are addressing this issue?Which academic disciplines are researching this issue?Summarize the various arguments and/or opinions you discovered during your research.What are the different ways of expressing the problems within your issue?What are some of the ways of addressing the problems in your issue?Are some of the ways of expressing the issue at odds? Are some of the ways of addressing the problem at odds?What is your current position on the issue (i.e., your claim)?Who needs to hear your claim? Who will disagree with your claim?

Workshop initial inquiry questions listing potential stakeholders (10 minutes)

Now that they have an idea of what they each want to research, prompt them to narrow their questions and begin generating a list of potential stakeholders. Example: