A bit of backstory
How I met Carla & Humanitas
The photo above is of me and Carla, who was Head of English at John Paul College, where she helped us test the very first prototype version of Writelike, 10 years ago.
When Carla left JPC to have children we fell out of touch, until, years later, she popped up in my email to say she was now helping establish a Brisbane city campus for Humanitas, a democratic high school running the IB program, and asked if I'd be interested in collaborating on some English teaching.
Obviously, yes! We are always collecting feedback from teachers (and thank you again to anyone who has emailed or met with us online), but there is nothing like direct classroom experience.
🎉 What we're teaching
We're co-teaching two units in Term 3:
- Suspense writing (mostly for grades 7-9)
- Argumentation (for grades 9-10)
What I've learned so far
We've done some planning and taught the first day in each unit, and I already have Thoughts, some big and some small.
🏯 The biggest thing: Unit plans
We need unit plans!
Writelike & Frankenstories are not organised by grade and the lessons don't fit into normal lesson blocks.
Instead, we represent the domain of writing as a whole, make our resources roughly accessible for Grades 7-9, and let teachers decide how they want to navigate that content.
That has some advantages, but the potential cost of such flexibility is choice paralysis, which is certainly what I felt at first.
My unit plans
I don't know what a long-term solution looks like, but I wanted to start by sharing the unit plans that I created, explain the rationale, and invite your feedback and requests for other units you might want to see.
- Suspense (10 weeks)
- Argumentation (4 weeks—Carla is doing the rest; this will feed into the IB Theory of Knowledge subject)
Note that you can save the Frankenstories game templates to your own account and use or adapt them how you like.
I can add teacher lesson notes to these as I accumulate them.
The 5+5 approach
After some consideration, I've broken these units into 2 x 5-week blocks.
- The first 5-week block is all about learning and gathering material.
- Class time (2 x 70-minute sessions) is used for direct teaching, class discussion, and Frankenstories.
- Independent/home time is used for reading, note-making, and Writelike.
- The final 5-week block is about application.
- Students will work on their assessable piece (a story in suspense, a podcast in argument).
- Class time is for sharing and feedback.
- Independent/home time is for production.
Both halves are intense but in different ways. I think of it as hiking up a mountain for 5 weeks and then wing-suiting down for 3-4 weeks.
Re workload & student motivation
Humanitas offers students a great deal of freedom when selecting units, so students who arrive in a particular unit are generally motivated, irrespective of ability. For that reason, I decided to bulk up the workload in these plans.
No plan survives contact with reality
I don't know how this plan will actually go. I wanted to share it as a possible way to combine Writelike and Frankenstories with class discussion and reading.
I'll keep you posted!
Want to talk about unit plans? Just ask!
Email me! I'm happy to chat, help or take requests! (My direct email is andrew@writelike.org)
