Facing Research Paper Adversity

So... Research

We all have to do it. We all hate it, teachers and students alike. It's just awful. And the worst part is ... well ... everything about it. Research is the time of the year when a teacher really has to decide if she made the right life choices. I question mine every year. Seriously. But there are a few things that have made research bearable.

#1. Practice every part of the process BEFORE the dreaded paper. 

This year we typed a short story in MLA format, used the abstracts to take notes on everything we read, and did a group research project over the Great Depression after reading Of Mice and Men. The final product of the project was a PowerPoint, not a paper. It was accessible, they had their friends, and it was just a presentation.

#2. Do everything the students do.

When I had the kids writing an outline, I wrote one. Body paragraphs, got those too. Intros and conclusions, you bet. I did everything I had them do. This helped in three ways. One, it gave me something to do. There's nothing more boring than watching the kids write. Two, the kids couldn't complain as much because I was in the trenches with them the whole time. And third, and maybe most importantly, it gave me real examples to show the kiddos when they were struggling.

And I didn't type them up all fancy-like either. I just took pictures straight out of my notebook.

#3. Get them interested.

This is a no brainer. Choosing the research paper topic is just as important as writing lesson plans for it. If you pick something the kids hate, they will punish you with terrible writing. In the last few years, I've been tweaking the topic, but it's always surrounded the idea of adversity. It just happens that our research paper falls just before reading The Miracle Worker, which is chock full of dealing with one adversity after another. In the past, I had students pick one person that faced adversity and write a paper about them. In the end I got a lot of biographical papers about mostly interesting people. That's fine, but with the STAAR writing, it did little to prepare them for that. So this year, students wrote "an expository essay explaining how adversity affects people's lives." Sound familiar? It's modeled exactly like an EOC prompt, and the students write their paper like one as well. So instead of focusing on one person, they looked at three different people and explained how each was affected by adversity.

The results: I've never had so many research papers turned in on time as I did this year. Also, I'm not reading about the same twenty people over and over again either. Win win for everyone.

You Want Some of This??

You can get my entire Adversity Research Paper Packet here. Also, I posted a FREE download that I used for the peer review.

Happy Teaching!