In this chapter you can (re)design a narrative:
1. Writing prompt
2. Writing checklist
3. Rubric
4. Preassessment
(Re)design a Narrative Writing Prompt
A prompt is a task teachers design that elicits from students the creation of a product to demonstrate what they come to know, understand, and do. For this unit, you will devise a prompt in which students apply what they have learned concerning narrative writing and perhaps subject matter content. In The Fundamentals of (Re)designing Writing Units (Glass, 2017a), I discuss curriculum-embedded and complex project performance assessments as the type of culminating project students will produce in response to a task. These assessments rely on an integration of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. They:
Not only measure learning, as is characteristic of summative assessments, but they are also designed for continuous involvement in learning through a host of meaningful assessment opportunities along a continuum of formality and intensity. Each learning experience you conduct requires students to think, produce, and build expertise to acquire many skills. (Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity [SCALE], 2015)
It is about not just the end product of the narrative they compose but also the process of working on the many steps it takes to complete it. Curriculum-embedded and complex project performance assessments immerse students throughout the duration of the unit to acquire skills that culminate in a polished product—in this case, a genre within the narrative text type.
There are innumerable possibilities for generating narrative writing tasks across content areas. In social studies, students might compose historical fiction to demonstrate understanding of a civilization, culture, or situation based on historically factual characters, settings, and events. In science, students might write a biography about a scientist who overcame obstacles to make a discovery that has worldwide implications. During language arts, students might write an original fiction or nonfiction narrative to apply what they learn about genre characteristics, elements of literature, figurative language, and targeted literary devices. Or they can change one or more aspects of a published story and rewrite it accordingly. For example, students can alter the ending, make the protagonist into an antagonist, convert a minor character into a dynamic one, redirect a significant decision, write from a different point of view, invent a new setting, or infuse literary devices like allusion, dialect, or foreshadowing.
Figure 2.1 is a template with specific examples to support you in creating and customizing a narrative prompt for your students as a culminating assessment. Feel free to deviate from the template and access it to foster ideas. Case in point—not every example provided in the figure aligns precisely to the template. As a friendly reminder, use your unit map as a guide for task design because it keeps you focused on what content, material, and skills students can prove they know and understand.
Figure 2.1: Narrative template for generating tasks and examples.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Exercise: (Re)design a Narrative Writing Prompt
Design a narrative prompt and input it on the unit map that you began in the Unit Map—KUDs and Guiding Questions exercise in chapter 1 (page 22). When you devise a writing checklist in the next exercise, you’ll place this prompt at the top of it to make students aware of their assignment. To design a narrative prompt, consider the following.
• To fashion an original prompt from scratch or revise one you already have, use the narrative template ideas and examples in figure 2.1 (pages 30–31) as a resource.
• Search for prompts that align to your unit from the SCALE (www.performanceassessmentresourcebank.org/bin/performance-tasks) resource bank for performance assessments across content areas. Although argumentation and informational or explanatory assessments dominate the site, peruse the various tasks to find those for a narrative. Feel free to edit what you find to align to your unit goals and match learners’ needs. Also, consider converting an argument or informational prompt to a narrative. For example, read this “Spreads Like (Exponential) Wildfire” (SCALE, n.d.) prompt on the SCALE website:
For this task, students will create and solve a problem that addresses a situation involving exponential growth or decay. Students imagine that the school’s math department is conducting a math competition. The problems that they create are intended for that competition. The topic must be able to be modeled by an exponential function. (Examples include rumors, infections, wildfires, and so on.) Their final solutions should include graphs, charts, and other mathematical work supporting the solution.
You might rewrite this original task so students demonstrate understanding of the mathematical concept of exponential growth or decay by writing a story.
(Re)design a Narrative Writing Checklist
Students can use a checklist as a guide when they write to be sure they fulfill an assignment’s requirements. The Fundamentals of (Re)designing Writing Units (Glass, 2017a) covers the function, rationale, and suggestions for using a checklist in more detail. In this section, I provide information, examples, and an exercise (page 37) for you to revise or design a narrative student writing checklist. Additionally, I include an activity that you can conduct early in the unit to prepare students for using the checklist as an effective instructional tool.
Figure 2.2 features a generic narrative writing checklist. It covers five categories: (1) general, (2) story elements and literary devices, (3) description, (4) sentence structure and transitions, and (5) grammar, conventions, and format. Each category contains items or indicators describing narrative writing requirements. In the figure, I have combined certain subheadings within the categories (for example, sentence structure and transitions) because I consider some of the grouped elements intrinsically linked. You can organize categories differently or use alternative ones to those in the figure. Whichever way you choose, work in concert with colleagues to ensure consistency so that students in your school or district see and learn the same or similar terminology and indicators for writing. In the exercise at the end of this section, I share several possible categories as a tool to use when working on your checklist.
As options, you might also add or replace any of the categories and indicators in the checklist in figure 2.2 with any of the following.
• Organization:
• My story follows a plotline and logical sequence.
• My story is well developed.
• My memoir is logically sequenced with a beginning, middle, and end.
• I clear up questions readers might have or reveal the significance of the event on my life.