Capstone Project & Annotated Bibliography

For my Capstone project, I explored students’ behaviors towards narrative writing and how to appropriately integrate the knowledge and skills offered by creative writing into the classroom -- brainstorming, planning, drafting, revising, and editing. My guiding question was, how do students create stories that deliver a message? This directed my research on how to scaffold narrative writing in a way appropriate for my students. Through a strategy called “process writing,” students learned that it is more important to focus on the journey of practicing and strengthening a particular skill rather than only prioritizing the end product. My research also taught me that writing enjoyment, a development of creative writing, is tied to mental well-being, a strengthened ability to analyze the world as well as literature, and teaches transferable skills such as metacognition. The data at the end of my research showed growth in students’ abilities to integrate all parts of plot structure and incorporate stylistic techniques that make their writing pop. Overall, this project was a valuable opportunity to implement an instructional approach that breaks down and demystifies the writing process.