The instructional design that you produce may be done either individually or in collaborative groups. Each design will include the following:

1. A description of the context in which you anticipate teaching the unit, including such factors as the Georgia Performance Standards, the district curriculum, the school or department curriculum, the demographical issues that affect your students' school achievement, the expectations of a mentor teacher or department chair, etc.

2. A rationale for both:

• the task you are assigning (e.g., persuasive essay, comparison/contrast essay, argumentation, personal narrative, expository essay, parody, satire, modern fairy tale, cause-and-effect essay, how-to explanation, literary analysis, evaluative essays, description, sonnet, research paper, etc. etc. etc.), and
• the approach you take in order to teach it.
  

3. An account of the assumptions that you make about your students' entry-level characteristics, such as their experiences with writing, their knowledge about how to write in various genres and for different audiences, their knowledge about writing conventions, their potential for improving during any short-term writing instruction, etc. Note: You CANNOT say that you assume that they already know everything that is involved in producing the kind of writing you are assigning; otherwise, there would be no point in teaching it. You should always assume that your students lack much of the knowledge that you have; that's why they are students, and you are the teacher.

4. Instructional design that clearly teaches students how to write the form/genre/task that you are teaching them. This instruction should:

• begin with a task analysis in which you outline the kinds of knowledge that students need in order to complete a particular writing task successfully. This task analysis should provide the basis for the activities that you plan; that is, if you determine that in order to write a comparison/contrast essay students must know how to identify similarities and differences between two given things, then you must design activities that involve them in making such distinctions.
• clearly scaffold students' learning by beginning with familiar, accessible knowledge that they can easily put to use (e.g., arguing about their favorite pizza vendor, comparing and contrasting different hair styles, explaining how to make a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, evaluating familiar television programs or recording artists, etc.) and gradually engaging students in increasingly complex tasks that involve the same knowledge or procedures; e.g., moving from evaluating familiar television programs, to evaluating a set of school rules, to evaluating a work of literature.
• involve students in a combination of small group, large group, and individual work.
• include opportunities for peer or teacher feedback at various points of development (e.g., writing groups where students critique one another's drafts, writing conferences between students and teachers, etc.).
• include a rubric that enables you to evaluate students' work fairly and systematically. Examples of rubrics are available at http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php.