Stay on track with this Weekly Activity Guide for the Adult Learner Essay, created by Leslie McBride Salmon (Chuck Shaw Technical Education Center)

Week 1

Student Survey--a casual assessment of students’ writing.  Set class expectations high, and make the upcoming essay event sound fun--an exciting challenge!  Do short  lessons of writing mechanics.  What’s a sentence?  Have them write some. Teach a few rules of capitalization and punctuation--especially periods and commas.  Practice all that! 

Week 2

Integrate 1 or 2 short writing assignments this week into your classes using whatever content you are teaching.  Make the prompts easy for low levels and limited to 2 or 3 sentences.  Teach students how to use Google Docs and how to Share with you.  For higher levels, pick your favorite lesson of the week and ask students to write a reflective paragraph about what they learned or liked about it.  Have them share it with you on Google Docs. Talk about good paragraphs.  Continue mini writing lessons.

Week 3

At the beginning of the week, have students talk about one of the two essay prompts in small groups.  The next day, do the other one.   Later in the week, have them choose ONE!  Tell them to write the first draft of their essay and send it to you by the following Monday or Tuesday.  If teaching CCR/Level 7, consider teaching editors marks and explain the process of peer editing. 

Week 4

Read and respond to students’ first draft.  Make suggestions for revisions if something isn’t clear.  Decide how much you are going to correct details--perhaps just the glaring mistakes!   If teaching CCR/Level 7 do peer editing by Thursday, then have students make revisions (or not) and send their second draft to you by the following Monday.