English 309W

mini-lesson and assignment checklist

You will be creating mini-lesson proposals and posting them on ANGEL.
I'll ask you to look analytically at your assignment with the help of the following checklist.

I will expect you to use this checklist format for the lesson design plan you submit when you teach your mini-lesson

  1. What kind of writing is this assignment?
  2. What is your instructional objective?
  3. How have your students been prepared for this assignment?
  4. Have you included any types of prewriting exercises?
  5. What will follow completion of this assignment?
  6. What is the time-frame for this assignment?
  7. Why should your students write this?
  8. Is revision part of the assignment plan?
  9. Who is the intended audience for the students' writing?
  10. Will students publish this writing? How?
  11. Which of the New York State English and Social Studies standards are addressed in this lesson?

Here are Louis Raths' "Thinking Skills" from pages 106 and 107 of A Community of Writers.
Consider which skills are being addressed and developed in this assignment. 

You do not need to include this information in your lesson plan.

  1. comparing
  2. summarizing
  3. observing
  4. classifying
  5. interpreting
  6. criticizing
  7. looking for assumptions
  8. imagining
  9. collecting and organizing
  10. hypothesizing
  11. applying facts and principles in new situations
  12. decision-making
  13. designing projects & investigations