Know Your Strengths

My students can write about whatever they want in this unit. There are some guidelines, but they picked the unit topic and chose a writing topic that fits within their unit. Yesterday, everyone submitted proposals for what they wanted to write about and in what genre they were going to write. Everyone’s looked great, except one.

He wanted to do a persuasive piece about scary robot movies.

All sorts of things popped into my head as I was reading his proposal. How was this going to be rigorous enough for a capstone piece? How could this topic sustain him for the next six weeks? What kind of research did he anticipate doing? Is this just an excuse to watch movies? How is this going to showcase his best writing? Panic, panic, PANIC.

As the leader of a 5th grade classroom with a fair amount of student agency, I decided to talk to him about it. If he’s sure about this topic, he should be able to answer my questions. If not, it will fall apart with even the slightest scrutiny, and I can help him find a better topic. Win-win.

So today, I sat down with him and asked him these questions. There definitely were some details that needed to be ironed out, but in the end, he convinced me that he could make this topic sustainable, rigorous, and evidence-based.

Well, he is certainly persuasive. He clearly knows his own strengths.