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| Standard One |

**Introduction to Thesis Statements** While student teaching, I taught a class called, "Today's Problems." During class we discussed issues that were occurring at local, national, and international levels. Towards the end of the semester, I assigned a paper for the students. They had four different prompts to choose from, but most dealt with issues that the students thought were unfair or needed to be changed. In order to make sure that each student was successful in writing his or her paper, I created a lesson on writing a thesis statement.

The class included students from grades 9-12 as well as diverse group of learners. While some students were capable of writing a thesis and recognizing one within a paragraph, other students had never heard of a thesis. I chose this lesson as my artifact because although it addresses a basic requirement of writing, students need to understand foundations in order to be successful writers. The students were engaged during the lesson, providing better thesis alternatives to the examples I provided, and even helped one another understand. Not all students mastered thesis writing, but they had a clearer understanding of what they need to include in their first paragraph to introduce their argument for the paper.


 * [[file:Thesis Lesson.pdf]]| |[[file:Thesis Examples.pdf]]|

**Editorials** My Today's Problems class read newspapers every week. At the beginning of the semester they did an activity to familiarize themselves with the layout of the Daily Herald, including the different sections, what a masthead was, etc. Towards the middle of the semester, I had students take a closer look at editorials. We read several editorials together over a couple of days and discussed techniques that the writers had used to get their opinions across. Finally, I had students choose a topic to write an editorial about. It could have been a large issue, or something more local and important to them as an individual.

This lesson was difficult for many students because of the style of editorials. The students had to provide their reasons for supporting or disagreeing with an issue, but also present the opposite viewpoint, as a counter example. I was available for students to ask questions and present first drafts. Below is the assignment and two student examples.

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