If your students are anything like mine, you may have noticed that the proverbial wheels fall off their synthesis essays because they struggle mightily to juggle the sheer volume of information in the source packets.
Which is why I am opting to go the route of micro-synthesis (bite size sources that are easy to ingest and incorporate as textual support and analysis).
In this particular writing workshop, we do five things together:
- I'll show you how my students and I used former exams to create a stable prompt
- My students and I also created all of the source material. The kicker is this - each source must fit into one Canva slide (videos are less than 3 minutes long)
- From here, I show teachers and students how my kiddos wield the declarative and inverted thesis heuristic to craft their introductory paragraphs
- Most prompts ask students to keep their argument's central, so we explore how to do this with something I call a 1st premise (the topic sentences of the body paragraphs
- We then go over embedding quotes while addressing how we get the sources to communicate to each other ... all while sustaining that pesky line of reasoning
All of the slides are available for free - just scroll down a tad bit in the video's description.
If you like this unit, I also have micro-synthesis units in my YouTube channel that tackle the G.O.A.T. debate in the NBA as well as the possibility of banning energy drinks for teens.
Happy teaching and happy writing!
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