This document outlines a teacher's pre-assessment and lesson planning for an essay skills unit. The pre-assessment revealed weaknesses in students' thesis statements, transitions, evidence, and tone/audience. To address these, the teacher planned lessons on writing strong theses, using academic sources and tone, logical reasoning and evidence, outlining and peer editing essays. Lessons utilized worksheets, examples, and digital tools to help students improve their essay writing skills.

1. PRE-ASSESSMENT AND
LESSON PLANNING
TARGETS

2. Student Learning Project
Essay Skills
- Crafting a Thesis
- Providing concrete, logically supportive
evidence
- Transitioning from one idea to the next
- Academic tone and audience
- Concluding statements

3. Pre-assessment
 Watched the movie Hitch in class
 Assigned an essay based on the movie
 Wanted subject to be accessible so students
could focus on formal aspects of essay.
 Gave no essay instruction beforehand
 Gave the students a rubric by which the essay
was to be graded.

4. Results
 Thesis
 Nearly 75% of all students either had no thesis at
all, wrote a thesis that was vague and unclear, or
had two or more theses in the introductory
paragraph.
 Transitions
 Nearlyhalf of all students provided no transitions
between sentences and another 25% gave only
cursory, “canned” transitional phrases.

5. Results
 Evidence
 Just over 40% of the students did not provide
evidence for their thesis and another 30%
provided evidence that did not logically support
their thesis.
 Tone and Audience
 Whilemost students attempted to write with an
academic tone, many struggled with it and
approximately 25% opted for a non-academic
tone all together

6. Lesson Planning - Thesis
 Thesis instruction and practice
I went over and gave out a handout outlining 4
important aspects of writing a thesis.
 Had students practice writing theses on a
worksheet.
 Worksheets was 8 exercises that consisted of an
essay prompt and an example of a poor thesis.
 Students were instructed to create a better thesis
using the handout and instruction given prior to
exercises.

7. Lesson planning – Tone and
Audience
 Use of academic journal articles
 In preparation for a “fishbowl” discussion, I had
students read over an academic journal article on
gender in A Doll’s House.
 Students made notes and used this article as
evidence in their discussion

8. Lesson Planning - Evidence
 Logical Reasoning
I prepared a lesson that included a discussion of
logical reasoning.
 This lesson consisted of explaining the transitive
property applied to language
 Supportive Evidence
 Another lesson I devised was a trial for the main
character in the play A Doll’s House.
 Students had to either defend or prosecute based
on evidence from the text, which had to be cited.

9. Logical Reasoning - example
 No kitten that loves fish is unteachable
 No kitten without a tail will play with a gorilla
 Kittens with whiskers always love fish
 No teachable kitten has green eyes
 No kittens have tails unless they have
whiskers
 What logical conclusion can we come to from
these premises

10. Lesson Planning – Essay outline and peer
editing
 Essay outline
 When I assigned the final essay for ADH, I
required (for a grade) that students complete an
outline worksheet that included thesis sentence,
evidence, and transitional sentences.
 I also required a rough draft. The day these were
due, I planned a peer editing workshop. I created
a rubric and peer editing guidelines and had
students critique each other based on these
guidelines.

11. Lesson planning - Citation
 Citation was not a rubric requirement, but I
wanted to include it because it helps define
concrete evidence
 I planned a lesson to introduce students to
Noodle Tools, which creates citations from
entered information.
 This program also creates in text citation notes,
so students know how to properly cite their
quotes, paraphrases and summaries.