Personal Narrative Task
Note to Teachers: Task Sheet
We have provided a high-level writing task sheet to mark how the instruction might look if we were in a face-to-face situation. It's helpful to plan out the task sheet to guide how you would adapt the task for online work. The work that follows is the online adaptations with task sheets as resources.
Your Task: Creating a Personal Narrative
We’ve worked this year to use writing to understand the texts that we’ve read and to communicate our thinking about the ideas authors have put forth in both non-fiction and fictional texts. We are now going to use writing as a tool to explore a piece of our own story and to communicate that story to our readers.
Purpose
This task has two purposes: (1) for you to use writing as a way to communicate your story to your reader, and (2) for you to develop an understanding of the diversity of identities and experiences in our learning community.
You will be successful with this task if you can:
use your pre-drafting work (identity map, story map, and quick writes) as the foundation for a full narrative draft;
write a narrative that communicates your story to the reader;
give feedback to a peer about the content of their writing; and
revise your writing to make your narrative clear to the reader.
Writing Task
Our stories develop over time. They evolve. They grow with us. This task asks you to use writing to explore just one piece of your story.
Select an aspect of your identity and tell a story that represents how you came to understand yourself as a member of a community. You’ll work to craft a personal narrative that allows your reader to experience and understand your story.
A few things to consider:
We'll be completing two pre-writing exercises to help you generate ideas for your writing.
You'll begin your narrative with some quick writes to get your ideas down on paper before expanding on your writing to fully capture your story.
You'll be creating a personal narrative, but you can play with voice and perspective. You may want to tell your story in first person, you may want to try telling it in third person - the decision will be up to you.
You'll have several opportunities to give and receive feedback throughout this process. Remember, feedback is an opportunity to hear from your reader, if they don't understand something consider how a revision would make your writing stronger and clearer to your audience.
Identity Mapping (pre-work)
Step 1: Individually create a representation of how you identify as a member of different communities. This could be a list or a relationship map, it’s up to you. As you capture pieces of your identity, you might ask yourself if you can be more specific. For example, you might be a female, but within being a female you might also be a sister, a daughter, or a granddaughter. The idea here is to make visible for yourself everything that makes you you.
Step 2: After you have completed representing the pieces of your identity, take a look at your list or map. Which piece of your identity or membership in a community has a story you’d like to tell? This might be the story of how you came to understand yourself as part of that community or how you introduced someone else to that part of your identity. You might also think about the intersection between communities that you belong to. For example, you might want to tell the story about how you came to understand yourself as an African American woman.
Highlight or circle that piece of your identity to mark for yourself what you’d like your story to be about.
Please use the linked resources below to help you create your identity map.
Resources for Identity Mapping
Model: Creating an Identity Map
Please watch this video for a model of how to create your identity map.
identity map.pdfSample Identity Map
This is one example of how your identity map might look. Remember, this is a tool for idea generation, so it doesn't have to be perfect.
Intersectionality
As you create both your identity map and story map, you may find that your membership in communities or pieces of your identity overlap or intersect. You may want to explore one of these intersections in your writing. The overlap of identity is called intersectionality. The linked video provides a little more detail about intersectionality.
Story Mapping (pre-work)
Step 3: Once you’ve made a decision about the piece of your identity you’d like to tell a story about, please create a story map. Your map should detail the location of your story. Use the following questions to help you think through the creation of your map.
If you close your eyes and imagine you are in the location of your story:
• What do you see?
• Who is there? What are their names? What do they look like?
• If you are outside, what are the buildings like? The plants? Which streets are around you? What do you hear?
• If you are inside, what is on the walls? Which room are you in? What do you hear?
Your map doesn’t have to be a perfect drawing but should have enough detail to help you remember what you need to write about to convey your story to your reader.
Please use the linked resources below to help you create your story map.
Model: Creating a Story Map
Example Story Map
This is one example of a story map. How your map looks will depend on the story you'd like to tell.
Step 4: Peer Feedback (in session work)
Share your map with a partner. This is your first opportunity to get some feedback on your thinking about your story. After you and your partner have shared your maps, talk to each other about your ideas for writing – what do you think you want to write about? Use the following question to give feedback on your partner’s ideas:
What more would you need to know to understand the story your partner wants to tell about his or her identity and how it was developed?
Step 5: Quick Write #1
Please compose a quick write in response to the writing prompt:
Select an aspect of your identity and tell a story that represents how you came to understand yourself as part of a community.
Step 6: Peer Feedback
Working in breakout rooms:
Share your quick write with a partner and provide feedback to your partner on their quick write. Take turns reading your papers aloud. After your partner has shared his or her writing, note your thinking in response to the following :
What stood out as being clear?
What more do you need to know?
What needs to be moved around? Maybe there is something that seems out of order, doesn’t make sense, or could be left out.
Where do you hear your partner’s voice?
Be sure to share your feedback with your partner and to take notes on what your partner says to you.
Expand: Revise and Rewrite
Step 7: Revise and Rewrite
Review the feedback you received from your partner. You don’t have to act on all the feedback that you received, but you should add to and revise your writing to make it clear for your reader.
After you’ve reviewed the feedback, put your feedback and your first quick write to the side and work to compose a second draft - a revision of your first quick write.
Reflection
Once you’ve completed your revision, put it side-by-side with your first quick write and the feedback that you received on it. You now have to make some decisions to help you write a full draft of your narrative. Please use the following questions to guide your thinking:
Which version of your story--the first quick write or the revision-- captures the experience in a way that you like?
How might you combine the two pieces of writing?
What might still be missing from your writing that you’d like to capture in your full draft?
Please be prepared to share some of your thinking wit the whole group.
Draft: Creating Your Personal Essay
While we won't have time to draft a full essay during our session, we encourage you to do so before you engage students in this task. It will give you a sample that you can work and talk from as you model for students. The scoring guide below is just an example of a content based scoring tool.
As students are working on drafting, getting feedback, and revising, incorporate mini-lessons, such as the one on cracking open scenes, to help students make content improvements to their writing.
Peer Feedback on Full Draft
Share your the full draft of your narrative with a partner and provide feedback to your partner on their quick write. Take turns reading your papers aloud. After your partner has shared his or her writing, note your thinking in response to the following :
What stood out as being clear?
What more do you need to know?
What needs to be moved around? Maybe there is something that seems out of order, doesn’t make sense, or could be left out.
Where do you hear your partner’s voice?
Be sure to share your feedback with your partner and to take notes on what your partner says to you.
Feedback Tips
Feedback should:
be specific. Let your partner know specifically where you see something that works well and where you see something that might need revision. Ask a question about something you don’t understand. You are the writer’s audience – if you don’t understand the writing, let the writer know, it’s their job to make it clear for you.
provide an explanation: explain to your partner why something works well or why you think something needs to be revised. Comments such as “Your evidence needs work.” let’s the writer know that there is something wrong, but doesn’t give them much insight into why you think it needs work. Explain what you mean!
provide a suggestion: If you see a place in your partner’s writing that needs to be revised, provide a suggestion for a revision that might make the writing better.
This is one example of a helpful feedback comment:
It’s a short introduction paragraph. It answers the prompt, but it doesn’t grab the attention of the reader. I would begin your essay not discussing 1984 specifically, but maybe a little summarization of what a Dystopia is in a dramatic way. For example; “ The government appears as your friend, but is really your enemy; with a dead world outside that is no longer condoning individualism.”
Revision: Tips on Working with Feedback
You may have received a bunch of feedback from your partner(s) during the feedback task. You'll find that some of the feedback gives you great ideas about revisions to your writing. If you had multiple feedback partners, you might find that the feedback they gave doesn't agree, and you might find that some of the feedback you received you just don't agree with (and that's okay!). As you work through the feedback you received, consider the following tips as you make decisions about which feedback to act on:
Is your partner saying something that makes you think that he or she didn't understand your story? Don't place the blame on the reader - this is an indication that something probably isn't clear and needs to be changed.
Don't ignore feedback just because it seems like it will take time to use. Feedback that focuses only on spelling and grammar are easy fixes that will help with finishing touches but won't help you make your narrative stronger.
If you are working with more than one feedback partner and their feedback disagrees, begin by having a conversation with your partners. Ask them to tell you about why they gave the feedback that they did. You might find that your partners really don't disagree. Alternatively, you may find that they do disagree. When there is disagreement, your work as the writer is to decide what makes sense for your writing. Don't just accept the feedback that leads to an easier revision - you might even consider getting another opinion.
Self Assessment and Reflection
Reflection
Once you’ve completed the process of scoring your essay, please use the following questions to write a reflection on the writing process:
How was the pre-writing process (identity map, story map, & quick write)?
What went well?
What was challenging?
How well does your narrative communicate your story to the reader?
What worked well in your writing?
What do you want to work on next time?