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Project Based Learning Unit
Student Experts Teach "Comparing Themes Across Genre"

Connection to Writing

Project based learning provides an excellent opportunity to encourage and support student writing. In the case of this project on themes and genres, the students created a presentation that would teach an audience about how authors use genre and genre specific characteristics to convey a theme or main idea. 
  1. Enthusiasm: Learning the material deeply enough to teach others meant that students ended up having a lot to say about the literature they studied. 
  2. Confidence: Presentations provided students with many opportunities to use various digital tools to show what they knew. By the time students needed to write their essays they had already been successful in presenting their knowledge. 
  3. Resiliency: Because students felt confident about their content knowledge, feedback on essays was less threatening and students were more likely to benefit from peer and teacher criticism. 

Project Overview

The California State English Language Arts Content Standards, as well as the Common Core State Standards, require that students understand how an author's choice of genre shapes their message and impacts their audience. Students are also expected to understand how similar themes or main ideas are expressed using the various characteristics of the genres. This unit began with a teacher created, blended learning experience where students accessed a Prezi through Edmodo in preparation for a class discussion regarding genre and theme. The students were then organized into small project based learning groups and instructed to create a multimedia presentation in which they teach an audience about how three different texts in three different genres address a similar theme or main idea. The culminating assignment was a literary analysis essay that explored how an author uses the characteristics of a particular genre to develop a theme. 

Step-By-Step

  1. Know/Remember: Introduce lower level skills/knowledge. Be sure that students have ongoing access to this material. 
  2. Comprehend/Apply: Have student groups create some kind of presentation to demonstrate their knowledge.
  3. Analysis/Synthesis: Only after deep and rich engagement in step 2 should students be asked to write a formal essay.
  4. Evaluation: In addition to formally evaluating a text through literary analysis, students also participate in evaluation of themselves and their peers. Students' input can even be solicited during rubric development.  

1) Introductions

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I began this unit by providing the students with a homework assignment to view a Prezi I had posted to our Edmodo page. The Prezi basically outlined the same information available to them in the textbook regarding how author's use the characteristics of various genres to develop their themes or main ideas. Because they had viewed it for homework, students returned to class ready to discuss the literature we would be reading. Furthermore, because the Prezi stayed posted at the Edmodo site, it was easy for students to return to it for support or clarification.  

2) The Entry Document

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Those of you familiar with PBL will recognize the entry document. I created the document and distributed it to the students on the same day I split them into groups of three. After reading through the document, they made a list of "need to knows" that were shared with the whole class. From there it became a standard PBL project with planning and evaluation tools from Buck Institute's FreeBIEs.

The entry document, which is made to look like it is from a textbook publisher, asks the students to create a better way of teaching themes across genres. There was no shortage of ideas for how to improve on the "textbook" and "compare and contrast essay" associated with the "old curriculum."

3) Student Group Presentation

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Using Buck Institute for Education protocols for project based learning, the students worked several days on developing their presentations. As a class it was decided that each presentation should include at least three different presentation tools. Project logs and collaboration rubrics helped students share the work equitably, and when it came time to evaluate each other's contributions to the project students were fair and honest. 

4) Critical Friends Protocol

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Prior to their projects being shown to English department faculty, the groups presented to their classmates. Upon completion of  a presentation, the class would access a Critical Friends Protocol created in Google Forms and posted to Edmodo. Results for each group were shared with its respective members, and students then had a chance to make changes to their presentation before a final grade was assigned by the adult audience.  

5) Presentation Rubric

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Adult evaluators used a BIE presentation rubric to evaluate each member of the presenting teams individually. 

6) Essay Prompt

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Only after presentations were perfected and completed were students asked to write an essay in which they explored how an author used the characteristics of a particular genre to reveal a theme or main idea. I chose to have them write about only one of the pieces they had studied, rather than comparing and contrasting three. While I agree that comparing and contrasting is a valuable endeavor, I felt that it had been well done in their presentations, and for the essay I really just wanted them to focus on creating extraordinary writing by skillfully articulating what they had discovered through their project. 

7) Final Draft of Student Essay

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As students worked on their essays in Google Docs they received feedback from at least one peer editor and me during a multiple draft writing process. Even first drafts were by far some of the best student writing I have ever seen. Each and every student in the class completed an essay and all essays demonstrated a firm grasp of the effect of certain genre characteristics on presentation of a theme and its impact on the reader. I could not have been more pleased with the results. 

8) Final Assessment Writing Rubric

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I used a modified "California High School Exit Exam" rubric to perform a final evaluation and assign a grade. At my school it was recommended by our WASC visiting committee that this rubric be used for 9th and 10th grade students so that they will be familiar with how their writing will be assessed on the exam. My modification included removal of the language "errors are of a first-draft nature," and addition of a Modern Language Association format.