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Week 4 - Our Final Assignment [Oct. 31, 2011, 12:01 a.m.]


As I hinted at during our live session last week, it's time for us to begin thinking about our final project for this course.  

And the assignment itself is the easy part - your task is to design a writing assignment of consequence for the area in which you work and teach.  You must determine if you're building a big assignment, or a collection of habits, or a process for your writing classroom.  And you also get to determine what "of consequence" means.  

But the National Writing Project has a fine resource here to help us with this work - and to help others create assignments, too.  Here's their Writing Assignment Framework & Overview.  For our purposes, I'd like for you to start with page 9 of the PDF (linked here) to help you consider what needs considering as you contemplate the resource you'll be creating.  

What's the writing framework?  Well, I'd rather share with you what the NWP says it's not:

Because this tool has been created by teachers for teachers, it is important to say what it is not. It is not a checklist or an evaluation instrument. It is not mandatory, compulsory, or required. It is, however, a tool that respects teachers and their continuous efforts to give their students challenging writing assignments.

For the next week, just take a look at page 9 and think about what resource(s) you'd like to create.  We'll begin the creation and sharing formally next week - but you're welcome to start early if you'd like.  There's plenty more in that NWP writing assignment resource - a PD plan for introducing this framework in your school, if you're so inclined, and some examples .  .  .well, you can read it for yourself.  

I wonder if it'd be useful to require that you work to build assignments for areas other than langauge arts - or if that's a choice you should make.  But that seems inauthentic - so go with what makes the most sense for you.  

One question, though - how would you like for us to share these resources?  Collection of Google Docs?  Comments to a P2PU post?  Let me know in th