Lesson 1

Lesson Goals

Texts

Materials

Tools

• What does it mean to live a life well-lived?: Section 3 Diagnostic Checklist

• Forming Evidence-Based Claims Tool

• Organizing Evidence Tool

• Summarizing Text Tool

Reference Guides

• Avoiding Plagiarism Reference Guide
• Integrating Quotations Reference Guide
• Organization Reference Guide

Question Sets

• What Does It Mean to Live a Life Well-Lived?: Section 3 Question Set

Editable Google Docs

• What does it mean to live a life well-lived?: Section 3 Diagnostic Checklist

• Forming Evidence-Based Claims Tool

• Organizing Evidence Tool

• What Does It Mean to Live a Life Well-Lived?: Section 3 Question Set

• Summarizing Text Tool

Activity 1: Read – Discuss

We will confirm our understanding of the task, audience, and purpose for the Section Diagnostic.

Step 1

You have been working with your seminar team to develop key skills and research techniques and to learn more information about your pathway topic. Now, your team will begin the process of synthesizing your research and planning a presentation that you will go on to create and deliver to your learning community. Group presentations are exciting for both the presenters and the audience because they allow you to express a variety of perspectives, styles, and approaches within a single project. You will work together to plan for an interesting, relevant, rich, clear, and accessible presentation, and each team member will play an integral role in your presentation, bringing their own unique contributions at every stage.

Step 2

Review the Section 3 Diagnostic Checklist.

Task Questions

1. What have you—individually and collectively—discovered about living a life well-lived from the stories, metaphors, and potential compasses you have encountered in this unit?

2. How might you express your discoveries through an evocative presentation involving reflection, storytelling, and visual imagery?

Task

With your seminar team, develop and deliver a 5-7 minute presentation that synthesizes what you have discovered about living a life-well lived through reading and discussion. Design an evocative experience for your audience that pulls together the meaningful texts, stories, images, and metaphors you have encountered in the unit.

Step 3

Review and specifically discuss the various options you have for how to organize and deliver an “evocative” presentation. Go back to your notes from earlier in the unit when you discussed the concept of a literary work that is evocative or evokes a response from its readers. Think about what this might mean for a presentation to be evocative, and consider how you might use stories and imagery, as the writers in the unit have, to bring your presentation to life and evoke responses from your audience.

Note that many of the presentation options suggest using visual imagery; think about how you might find and use images related to the texts you have read and the ideas you have discussed.

Review the options from the Section Diagnostic Checklist, considering the pros and cons for each, and how you might go about bringing that option to life:

• a multimedia presentation that highlights stories, ideas, and imagery from the texts you have examined and the discoveries you have made personally and collectively

• a photo essay or short film related to stories, ideas, and imagery from the texts you have examined and the discoveries you have made personally and collectively

• A series of linked personal stories that illustrate discoveries you have made personally and collectively

• a TED Talk-style presentation in which your group discusses one or more potential life compasses you have identified and engages the audience with a mix of spoken word and visual aids

• a Google site that organizes your discoveries into multiple pages, including a mixture of storytelling, textual interpretations, and visual representations

• a mind map that illustrates connections among the various texts, ideas, human qualities, and experiences that you have identified as potential life compasses

• another student-designed and teacher-approved product

Step 4

Discuss the following questions with your seminar team to help you begin to develop your presentation:

1. Do you fully understand what is expected for the presentation you will be creating and delivering for the presentation?

2. What is your team's emerging definition of what a life well-lived might involve, based on the texts you have read and the ideas of members of the team?

3. How can each member’s research and ideas contribute to the presentation with respect to this definition?

4. What common texts or ideas might you use in your presentation?

5. What unique texts or ideas might each seminar team member present?

6. Thinking about your purpose for the task, what information for your team’s topic is the most important for your audience to know? What does your audience already know about living a life well-lived? How can you build on that information?

Activity 2: Write

We will review the organizing reference guide to help us craft a controlling idea and begin to develop our presentations.

Step 1

At this point, you have analyzed several sources in seminar teams. You will now begin to think about what you want and need to communicate to your audience in your presentation. You do not need to focus on the format of your presentation just yet. Right now, think about your central message.

Read the Organizing Reference Guide to gather ideas on how to develop your presentation. While this guide has information on writing, you can use it to organize presentations as well. Pay particular attention to the section "Organizing Your Own Writing." Then, read the sections "Controlling Idea" and "Drafting a Work Using Your Organization."

Step 2

To help develop a framework for your presentation, think of a controlling idea, which ultimately controls the development of a piece of writing, ties it together as a coherent whole, and conveys the purpose, parameters, direction, and unity for its specific content and structure.

To help you think about a controlling idea, reconsider the two Central Questions of the unit:

1. What does it mean to live a life well-lived?

2. What compass might you carry as you undertake your journey in the world?

Discuss the various ways in which the texts you have been researching, analyzing, and discussing relate to, or present, an idea that connects to the first question about a life well-lived.

You might organize your presentation in relation to a central text you have examined, an aspect or experience of life (e.g., family, culture, community, learning, nature), or a set of important qualities or virtues that you have identified as potential life compasses.

Step 3

Now, as a team, review your notes from your Summarizing Text Tools and seminar team discussions from the previous sections.

Brainstorm what general ideas about "a life well-lived" are emerging and write them down. Condense them down into one controlling idea that you can use to organize your presentation.

Activity 3: Write

We will use the Forming Evidence-Based Claims Tool to form an overarching claim to guide our presentations.

To help develop a framework for your presentation, you will form claims, or evidence-based conclusions, you have come to after having analyzed several sources in your seminar teams

Review your Summarizing Text Tools, discussion notes, and team claims from Section 2.

Using a Forming Evidence-Based Claims Tool, work with your seminar team to draft an overarching claim based on your research that responds to the first Central Question:

1. What does it mean to live a life well-lived?

Activity 4: Write

We will use the Organizing Evidence Tool to develop an outline for our presentation.

Step 1

Now that you have established your overarching claim, you will draft a series of supporting claims. This will serve as the outline for the content for your presentation.

Access the Organizing Evidence Tool. The Organizing Evidence Tool can be used to develop a plan for supporting a central claim, or thesis, through a series of supporting claims, each of which has evidence to support it. Once you have formed a central claim, you can use this tool to develop a logical sequence of supporting claims, be it for an argument, expository essay, or presentation. The tool provides spaces in which you can write down a series of supporting claims, then write down and explain supporting evidence, noting the source from which it comes.

Step 2

Use the space at the top of the tool to write down your central claim from the Forming Evidence-Based Claims Tool. The rest of the content in the document will connect back directly to it. The remainder of the document provides a series of claim-based sections for you to lay out the support for your central claim, using the following process:

1. Develop your supporting claims. A supporting claim is a statement about an issue, topic, text, event, or idea that develops and supports the central claim. Write down the supporting claims you develop in the rows labeled Supporting Claim 1, 2, and so on. These can be used to organize what points you wish to make about living a life well-lived.

   1. Provide evidence you can use to support each of your supporting claims. Beneath each claim statement is a space in which you can make notes about the evidence you will use when developing that claim. Use your annotations from your research texts as well as your Summarizing Texts Tools to assist you.

2. Analyze the evidence. In the space below the evidence you have noted, explain how that evidence supports the supporting claim and the central claim. There are two steps to this part of the process. First, connect the supporting claim to the evidence through one or two sentences that explain that connection. Then, connect the supporting claim back to the central claim.

3. In the final text row, identify the text you got the evidence from, including a page citation, because you might need to go back to clarify your notes, find additional evidence, or use a quotation.

Work with your group to complete the tool and develop an outline for the content of your presentation.

Activity 5: Read – Discuss

We will learn how to provide parenthetical citations for the sources of information and quotations we use.

Step 1

Individually, read through pages 1-3 of the Integrating Quotations Reference Guide and then respond to the following questions in a whole-class discussion:

1. What are the two ways in which you can cite evidence in a sentence?

2. Why is citing evidence important? How does it support your credibility as a writer or presenter?

3. What is included in the parentheses after you cite your evidence? What is that information linked to?

Step 2

Now look through the rest of the reference guide. As you cite evidence within your Organizing Evidence Tool as well as prepare for your presentation, you will want to think strategically about how to present your evidence through either quoting or paraphrasing. It will be important to cite all your evidence no matter how you include the evidence. Use the Integrating Quotations Reference Guide for support.

Activity 6: Write – Discuss

We will reflect on our work to determine our progress toward the Culminating Task.

Respond to the following questions in your Learning Log:

1. How did you, specifically, contribute to your group?

2. On a scale from one to four, how well do you understand the topic, your research, the texts you read, and the expectations of the Section Diagnostic?

Activity 7: Read – Write

For homework, we will carefully reread and take notes on the organizing reference guide.

For homework, reread the section titled “Organizing Your Own Writing" from the Organizing Reference Guide and presentation options listed on the Section 3 Diagnostic Checklist.

Respond to the following questions in your Learning Log:

1. What do you think is the best format to present your information to make it both interesting and meaningful in regard to furthering their understanding of your research pathway?

2. Do you have ideas on how to present in a way that will impact your audience for the long term rather than just fulfilling the requirements of the assignment?

Be prepared to share your ideas with your research team in the following lesson.