Every senior at Boston Latin Academy is required to write a “Senior Paper” as a graduation requirement, but due to departmental decisions to revamp the curriculum, we’re shifting what the assignment will entail. It was originally a literary analysis paper that every teacher structured differently but required some element of engaging with outside sources and a student-selected literary text. Now the department wants teachers to align around a single common assessment and envisions this as a "Senior Capstone" assignment which implies that this is bringing in a wider array of skills from across the student's experience and that a strong element of independence and public sharing are components of the assignment. 

I have concerns about this shift, not because I take objection with the overall aims, but more because I'm afraid of the standardization of the assignment. When I last taught seniors in AP Lit, I feel like I was able to guide students through a really rigorous process that helped them engage with what writing looks like at the post-secondary level and what it means to engage the wider academic discourse rather than typical high school assignments that parrot skills in isolation and lock students into novice work that looks very different from what experts and professionals do. 

I'm also concerned that what I often see when K12 folks aim for "authentic assessments" is that they see this as in opposition to academic writing: they want students to only produce things like podcasts and blogs while I think that students can engage authentically with higher level academic work and that that is equally meaningful and equally revolutionary and liberatory since it's not the type of discourse we generally make availabe to students. The tasks we give in high school tend to be weak imitations of what true academics do, and we tend to have them write for no audience, talking to a wall, rather than writing to engage with expert colleagues in contributing to expanding our understanding as knowledge creators and also as reviewers who determine what ideas are accepted. 

My vision for this assignment is to take the basic building blocks of the two currently proposed Departmental Drafts and create something that both pushing students closer to engaging in authentic academic research (recognizable within the conventions of peer-reviewed articles) while giving them a wider scope of choice in how they write and approach this assignment. At the same time, I want to make it clear and structured enough to be both accessible and assesable and able to serve as a common assesment across different teachers and classrooms. 

There was a second version of the assignment proposed that took it in a different direction. 

Since the product I'm planning towards right now is the final Capstone assignment for the course and must be agreed upon with others in my department, I'm less concerned with finalizing all of the details of the final product and more interested in how I scaffold students to understand the components while working with two different courses with different curricula (AP Literature and the standard English 12). With that said, my hope would be that instead of having a single rigid structure for the final paper, that students look at several models that meet the criteria and look at sample project plans for each of those models and then adapt one (or more) of those into a proposed structure for their own paper. I would then approve or suggest revisions to the proposals based on the criteria for success and the whole class timeline for the project. This would help students to pursue the style of paper that best matches their research interests while still having a clear, structured plan for their research process and multiple models of both student and peer-reviewed academic texts that match their chosen investigation. 

Senior Paper Rubric & Peer Feedback