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An outline template cleverly disguised as a fill-in-the-blanks
activity is the essay graphic organizer I prefer for a five-paragraph
essay or research paper built on the thesis-plus-support pattern.
Outline is negative term for students
I prefer to refer to the graphic organizer as a comprehensive
plan template or planning form. I avoid the word outline
because of its negative connotations.
In the students' view, an outline is some "dumb, English
teacher thing." Students may even be so ungracious as to
omit the comma.
The template is helpful in getting students to plan their writing
because it:
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Indicates the information students must provide.
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Shows the relationships between major essay elements.
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Gives students a place to park source information
they will need when they compose.
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Makes embedded writing strategies easy to learn and
use.
Don't teach as I did my first time
Don't do what I did the first time I taught using an outline
template: I made a detailed template incorporating every strategy
students needed to use.
It ran several pages.
When I handed it out, students nearly died of shock.
Teaching outline template use
Now I keep my outline template out of sight until after
I've shown students:
-
How to enter the information for the first point, and then
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How to enter information for the second point, and then
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How to enter the information for the third point.
By the time we go through the process three times, most
students get the idea that they can produce a detailed essay plan
by doing the same few steps over and over and over.
Repetition aids learning of strategies
Remember, it is the repetitive nature of the five-paragraph
essay that makes it the best
learning tool for beginning writers.
Show students just the section of the outline template
for the strategy you are teaching. The bright students
will catch on and have their entire essays planned before the
struggling students do one section, but the slower kids can learn
to plan if you take it slowly.
Teach template use in stages
When I teach students to plan their expository essays, I use
several graphic tools make it easier for them to record information
they will need. I present and teach the tools over a period of
days or weeks as most students are ready for each step.
2 tools for the big picture
The first outline template I show students is a graphic organizer
for entering their writing skeleton™. It looks like
this:
Students
can learn to create a full-sentence writing skeleton™ in
just a few minutes using a simple formula. Once they finish
each point, they put their points into the appropriate place in
the template. Later those points will become the topic
sentences of the body paragraphs.
The second graphic organizer I show students adds a place for
entering three pieces of evidence for one of the writing
skeleton™ points. The space for evidence to be entered
as single-sentence summaries is indented below the writing
skeleton point to which it applies. (The indentation makes the
organizer into an informal
outline.)
Notice that I use colors to give a visual clue to what part of
the essay plan template a student is working on. Using colors
in print materials may be too expensive, but you can do use colors
as a learning aid in digital materials students will view.
Together these two graphic organizers compose an outline template.
You can put the symbols for a formal outline in your graphic organizer
if you wish. If you want to avoid any connection with the dreaded
English class outline, skip the symbols and "gray out"
the boxes students cannot use.
Add 2 tools for details to template
I use two additional graphic organizers that provide a place
to record information students must have to write expository essays
but which is not normally placed in an outline. I do this un-English-teacher
thing because the typical student finds it easier to have everything
in one place.
My third graphic organizer adds a place for recording the source
of the information. A source is the person or organization
who provides the information. Source information is entered as
a single sentence summary.
A fourth graphic organizer adds a place for recording where
the writer found the information. Locator data is information
the writer needs for a citation or bibliography entry.
I set my the data entry columns for the source and the locator
information so that the source and locator information is indented
below the evidence to which it applies.
Using all four organizers together produces an outline template
each point of which looks like this:
When students actually use the outline template, they are likely
to complete all the information about one evidence source at one
time, like this:
That's the most efficient way to prepare a comprehensive plan.
However, I've found most students l earn best if they get three
chances to do one small task before I introduce another small
task, regardless of how closely related the tasks are.
