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Using Slides to Focus on Writing as a Process
Irene Payan
Negaunee High School, Negaunee, Michigan
Subject: English
Grade: 10
"After seeing something from another part of the world, the
students developed global art awareness and added one more dimension
to becoming citizens of the world."
Purpose and Description of Project
Irene Payan's sophomore students in a course entitled "Facing
Life" were required to practice various types of writing-descriptive
themes, poetry, biographical sketches, and short stories. For
the first assignment-writing paragraphs-Payan devised an instructional
sequence using slides to facilitate the writing, revising, and
rewriting process. Payan was able to demonstrate to her students
that writing was a process, not a finished product, as she showed
them a series of slides three separate times-each time for a different
purpose and each showing followed by student discussion and writing.
By showing the slides in a darkened room, Payan hoped to focus
her students' attention on the work at hand. And by separating
the process of writing a descriptive paragraph into a series of
steps and objectives, she could allow students to concentrate
on one thing at a time and pace the lesson according to their
progress, giving them feelings of accomplishment rather than frustration.
Activities
Payan showed her students a dozen slides of castles in Denmark,
Spain, and Russia. The students shared their reactions orally
for about two minutes, and each student wrote at least one opinion
on his or her paper. Then students exchanged papers to check whether
or not the written opinions were valid. A few of the students
read their statements to the class.
After this exchange of ideas, the slides were shown a second time.
This time the students were to look for and write down specific
facts that supported their initial observation. While the students
studied the slides, they added to and improved the content of
their paragraphs. By this stage they had become more observant
and more critical of their own work.
The fact that some students thought their paragraphs "still
didn't sound right" led to a discussion of the logical sequence
of ideas. The students discussed which details were most important
and thus should be shown or described first. The slides were re-ordered
based on the students' suggestions and then shown to the class
for the third time. Finally, students revised their paragraphs
so that the specific details supporting their initial reactions
were presented in logical order.
Materials, Resources, and Expenses
Payan used slides from her personal trips in other countries for
this exercise. She found it stimulating to the students to view
the castles she had photographed because they enjoyed looking
at them and because they were seeing something unusual. Payan
suggests that slides could also be provided by members of the
community. The expenses were minimal.
Outcomes and Adaptability
According to Payan, "The students not only wrote good paragraphs
or essays, they developed criteria for critical reading-their
own work as well as others'." She noticed that the students
utilized their powers of imagination and concentration more fully
and that the good habits of communication reinforced by the project
provided a solid foundation for later writing assignments. Because
the students shared their work after each step, they became aware
of the importance of others' opinions and they accepted each other's
criticisms during these peer proofreading sessions more readily
than the teacher's. They also learned to appreciate each other's
differences as they saw how ideas could be developed in many different
ways-none any better or more correct than any other.
Payan suggests that any collection of slides that reveals unique
features of a particular place-for example, a local main street-could
be used for a similar project. She herself has also used the same
technique to facilitate other types of writing. She used
close-up
slides of flowers and leaves in a unit on haiku poetry. Later
in the semester, she used a series of slides on a bullfight as
the basis for student-written news items and narrative essays.