The Interpretive Essay: Exploring and Defending Big ideas about Life and Texts DRAFT
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Before the Unit Starts:
*The class does an on-demand essay. If they need support in basic structures of essay writing, a
day or two on that work might be helpful for them.

Planning/Writing in Paragraphs
(On this day, there might be a longer lesson with two active involvements. You can remind them
how to plan with boxes and bullets and let them practice saying a claim and then
because…reason 1, because…etc. They can use high-interest topics or claims from the read
aloud. Then you can remind them to defend their claim in paragraphs and teach into
topic/conclusion sentences. The class can practice speaking like essayists then go off to write
fast drafts of body paragraphs (could do a second for homework.)
Writers, we are the kind of writers who expect our work to get stronger constantly. We
are the kind of writers who draw on what we already know and make sure that our new
work shows that we hold onto all that we have learned about writing. We are not the kind
of writers who let teaching drop from our minds. For the next day or so I am going to
give you some quick reminders of what you already know about essay writing and you
are going to practice that work. Then we’ll take another on demand, and I expect (and
you should expect) it to be eons better than the first. It is our jobs to ratchet up the level
of our work always and when you take this second on-demand, know that you need to
bring everything you remember into that work and into all of your work from here on.
-When we write essays, we are writing to explain and defend and we need to make claims
and give reasons for these. Today I am going to remind you that when essayists come up
with claims, we immediately give reasons to plan out how to support our claims.
-When we write essays, we are writing to explain and defend and in order to be clear and
convincing, we need to write in passages of thought. That is, we need to write in
paragraphs, so we can make sure our readers know our main points and get enough
evidence to understand what our claim is and why we are making it. Today I am going to
remind you of the structure of a strong, clear paragraph.
o

Transitions
Intros/Conclusions
I: give opinion and reasons at the beginning
C: Now I’m starting to realize…
This matters because…
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The Interpretive Essay: Exploring and Defending Big ideas about Life and Texts DRAFT
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Class takes a second on-demand
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Revising on demand with checklist for strong/clear essays
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(See attached checklist.) Partners can look at the checklist and their essays together, quickly
noting what they did and need to improve. They can revise quickly and reflect on improvements
in their second on-demand and what they will keep in mind as they move forward into the unit.
These pieces and reflection can be hung up. The last item on the checklist is to have anecdotes
to support some of your ideas and this can lead into the beginning work of the unit.
Bend I: Starting Work Toward an Interpretive Essay: Generating Ideas about Ourselves or Someone
Close to Us

Looking for Significance in the Moments in our Lives and Questioning Ourselves to Grow Ideas
from Them
In writing workshop, we’re going to be growing ideas about ourselves, or about people we know
and care about, just the way we’re growing ideas about our characters in reading workshop.
Today I want to teach you that, just as we’ve been paying attention to key scenes in our novels
and thinking: what does that scene say about who this character really is, essayists sometimes
use this same strategy to get ideas about their own lives. We can think back to a moment in our
life and quickly write it down, then ask: “What does this show about me? What kind of person
would act in this way?” Then we can jot down an idea to try out and question ourselves to write
long about it
o
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Mid-Workshop Teaching Point: Reflecting on our Writing to Grow ideas
Writers, I have something very important that I need to tell you. We’re working
so hard to find the significance in moments in our lives but here’s the thing.
There is no one meaning hidden waiting for us to find it. Anaïs Nin said, “We
don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Our own unique perspective
on our lives makes us see different meaning in moments. We’re interpreting
them—that means making meaning of them. So when we look back on moments,
we can find lots of hidden ideas in a moment and we can also write about one
idea and come to another. Today I want to remind you that as writers, we push
ourselves to write not only from what we’ve just written but also from ideas and
moments we recorded days, weeks, and months earlier. I often reread my old
writing, find an entry I care about, and write another entry in which I reflect on
and think about the first one. This is a way for writing to grow like the rings of a
tree, with layers of insight and thoughtfulness.
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Small group for writers who need more support in this work: Letting new ideas surface
by being open to multiple possibilities
I’ve noticed that some of us can get stuck after we jot down our moment. You
know, writing is sort of like fishing. You need to keep your line in the water if you
want to catch a fish. If we keep writing and writing, ideas will surface and we can
catch them. One way to keep writing and let ideas surface is to be open to
multiple possibilities about a moment. We can write…could it be that maybe…or
maybe…then again perhaps…and push our brains to keep thinking of other
thoughts about this moment until we get a good idea and we say Yes! and catch it
and write it down and write a new entry about that idea.
Small group: Re-enacting moments from our lives to grow ideas about ourselves and
others
Just the way we reread scenes and can gain new insights or even act out a scene
to get a better sense of how the character was feeling to grow new ideas, we can
re-enact scenes from our own lives either with partners or in our heads to help us
relive them again and find new meaning in them. So, for example, if I reread and
maybe re-enact the scene with my mom, I could gain new ideas about myself or I
could gain new insights about my mother. So let me try that.
o
Teaching Share: Tailoring Familiar Strategies to Come Up With Material for New Work
We have just finished publishing our memoirs, and at the beginning of the year,
we used many strategies to come up with areas of our lives worth writing about.
When we write essays (instead of memoirs), we tailor familiar strategies so that
we now come up with material that will lead us to this new kind of writing
We know we can start with a moment from our lives and write about it to
make meaning from it or we can start with a large issue and write from that. So I
might take a person or place or object and list ideas that I have about that. I can
make the idea even bigger by making it more general. Then I can choose one and
write from that.
Mom
My mom takes better care of us than she does of herself.
Sometimes people take better care of others than they do of themselves
My mom…
Sometimes in life people can push us and make us want to push ourselves
Sometimes when you love someone, you don’t always want to tell them the truth
because you don’t want to hurt their feelings
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The Interpretive Essay: Exploring and Defending Big ideas about Life and Texts DRAFT
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Homework: if you wrote about yourself/write about someone else—vice versa—
writers are fluid and not only can they shift writing big/small—they can shift between
making meaning of their own lives and the meaning of others’ lives
Using What we Know about Growing Ideas in Reading to Help Us Grow Ideas about Others
and Ourselves
Today I want to teach you that we can use all of the strategies that have been so successful in
helping us grow ideas about our characters to grow ideas about others and ourselves. Just as we
know that there are certain places in our books that are extra worthy of digging and re-digging
into to find hidden ideas, we can find times in our lives that are significant and especially worthy
of our digging into them. Like times that we have made choices. We can pay attention to times
we have made choices and see them as windows into what kind of people we are.
o
Mid-Workshop Teaching Point: Our Objects and Possessions can Reveal our Character
We know that objects and possessions of characters in stories can reveal what
kind of people they are. Today I want to remind you that the objects and
possessions that we keep and that other people keep can also reveal our
characters, our personalities and who we truly are.
You are working so hard to grow ideas, writers. I see many of you using the
strategies from our old charts and I want to compliment you on making use of all
you know about growing ideas. Today will you try out a different strategy on a
chart that you haven’t used yet or will you pay attention to see if there are new
strategies that you are using that are not on our charts? What is working best for
you?
o
Teaching Share: Sharing our Most Successful Strategies
Writers, I want to share with you some work that Karen has done. She has said that
she knows paying attention to the minor characters in stories and looking at how
they influence the major character always pays off to grow ideas. So she’s been
looking at her relationships with different people in her life and asking herself what
that says about who she is. What a great strategy! I’ll add that to our chart. Will you
think now about what strategies you’ve been using to grow ideas? What have been
the most successful for you? Have you tried new ones? Turn and talk to a partner.

Write long to uncover new thinking using thought prompts
Writers, this kind of writing is complicated and it can get messy. The truth is that our ideas
aren’t always neat and organized. That’s okay. What’s important now is to keep writing and find
new ideas through our writing. We are writing to discover, to learn about ourselves and others to
grow new ideas. Today I want to teach you that one way to keep yourself writing and writing and
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writing towards discovering new ideas and truths is to use thought prompts to elaborate on your
thinking.

Write with Risk in order to write with Depth: easy truths are surface level, we need to dive
deep to dig up the good stuff
Growing ideas about ourselves is brave work. We have to be willing to put who we really are on
the page. It would be easy to back away and say that we don’t really want people to know that we
sometimes can get angry over small things or that we can get jealous of our friends or that we’re
afraid to do something. But the thing is that real writing takes guts. It takes us writing from our
heart and our guts to bring all the hard stuff in our lives onto the page because that writing will
be powerful. Robert Frost, the poet, said, "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No
surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." To me that means that the writing has to
matter to me so much that it moves me and then it can move others. It also means that writing
about the difficult stuff might help me realize new ideas about myself or others. Today I want to
teach you that in order to write with depth, we have to write with risk.

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o
Mid-Workshop Teaching Point: Paying attention to how we react to conflict
Writers, I want to stop you for a minute. I’ve been reading over your shoulders
and I see you all writing things like—“this is hard to say, but…” and “I guess what
I really was thinking was…” I know your writing will have more power because
you are willing to dig deep and not just write easy-to-say truths like “friends are
there for us.” You are exploring ideas that are brave and a little hard to admit like
“Sometimes I think I need to be a better friend because I don’t always tell my
friends what I’m really thinking.” Today I want to remind you that we can think
back on times that were difficult for us to help us write with depth. We can look
on times of conflict and pay attention to how we react to conflict and ask
ourselves: What does that say about who I am as a person?
o
Small group: when there are images/moments we try to push away—these are always
laden or brimming with truths that are not easy to write about but they will be
powerful
o
Teaching Share: Reach for true, precise words
o
Homework: take best idea you have had so far—do some collecting around that
tonight—explore that idea—write some entries starting big or start small and then go
big
Paying attention to reoccurring images/feelings—making connections
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We know that when images or feelings repeat in books it’s significant. The author
purposefully made the image or action reoccur because it’s important and because thinking
about patterns we notice can help us have larger ideas. Like remember in becoming Naomi
León, when Shayla kept going shopping for Naomi? Remember she came home over and
over again with new clothes for Naomi but nothing for Owen? We all stopped and asked
ourselves why this was repeating and what it meant? Well, today I want to teach you that we
can pay attention to when images or feelings reoccur in our own lives and ask ourselves why
that is important.
**Mark places in my writer’s notebook where I am angry—ask myself what is the
pattern there? What is the connection?

o
Mid-Workshop: Expecting complications in ourselves and others: Studying when we
act “out of character”
So, writers, some of you have been noticing that when you are looking for
patterns in how you and others feel or act, sometimes there are times when you
don’t follow your pattern. You get mad at your brother every time he wants to
hang out with you and your friends but this one time he came into your room and
sat with you and you didn’t get mad. That’s so important. We are not going to
always follow patterns. People are complicated. Like Shayla. Over and over she
didn’t buy Owen anything and then one day—Wham—she buys him a bicycle.
And we were so surprised, but the thing is that she’s complicated. She hurts her
son’s feelings but she also does love him. Her love is complicated. That’s how the
people in our lives and we are too. So today I want to remind you that when you
come across a time that you or someone you know “acts out of character” that’s a
time to dig into because it is brimming with hidden ideas that will complicate
your thinking and make it stronger.
o
Small group: Writing with Metaphor
o
Teaching Share: Complicating our thinking can take it to new heights: My thinking is
complicated
 On the one hand I think…on the other hand I think…
 I used to think…but now I’m starting to realize…
Connect to fiction to uncover new thinking about our ideas
Writers, I realized as I was preparing for read aloud today that there is a connection between the
character in that story and what I’ve been writing about myself in my essay work. Today I want
to teach you that another way essayists write to think through an idea is by connecting to fiction.
We can write about a character who feels the same way we do, or has a similar character flaw, or
and that will bring us to new thinking about the idea.
Look through post-it notes and jot idea
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The Interpretive Essay: Exploring and Defending Big ideas about Life and Texts DRAFT
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*This reminds me…
*This connects to…
*This is making me think more about why people…
o
Teaching Share: Writing off of Quotes
Another way writers connect to literature is by gathering quotes from our reading
that speak to us about who we are—and write about what they make us realize
about ourselves or why they resonate with us. Will you listen to this quote from
our read aloud and think about it for a moment? What does it say to you?
Turn/talk. As you read, you can read like a writer and be alert for parts that speak
to you.
Bend II: Writing to Develop More Thinking Around a Chosen Terrain, Develop a Thesis and Structure,
and Gather Evidence
 Crafting a thesis statement
Today I want to teach you that essayists choose the most interesting, fresh idea that they’ve had
to craft a thesis statement. We can ask, “What do I really want to say about myself and the kind
of person that I am?” We can remember from reading workshop how people are not always what
they seem, and we can try to choose a seed idea about ourselves or another person that gets
behind the surface and shows something true and harder to see.

o
Mid-Workshop Teaching Point: Rewriting our Thesis Statements
Essayists write just a sentence or two that states the idea we want to develop: this
becomes our thesis statement. Then we try on a few of these thesis statements on
for size.
o
Small group: Using metaphor to help us write our thesis statements can help us tell
emotional truths
*loss has been both a teacher and a thief
Pause to plan, perhaps revise our thesis statement, then re-plan
Today I am going to teach you that essay writers, unlike narrative writers, do not make a
timeline or a story mountain and then progress straight into drafting. Instead we often pause at
this point to plan (or frame) the main sections of our essay. We plan the sections of our essay be
deciding how we will elaborate on our main idea. One way this can look is we can box out our
idea, and then list reasons why this idea is true.
*I’m the kind of person who…
*Reason
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*Reason
*Reason
o
Mid-Workshop Teaching Point: Create a logical structure for our pieces
The choices we make in how to structure our essays are very important. Making
purposeful choices in how we order our supports can make our essays more
cohesive and more convincing. We need to make choices that are logical and that
make sense, for the essay we are writing.
*order chronologically
*place in order of least convincing to most convincing
o
Teaching Share: Different structures for different types of Theses
Different kinds of thesis statements will need different structures to support
them. We can use alternate structures to support ideas that have more than one
part by making a bullet go with each part of the idea.
*I used to think…but now I realize
*I used to think…
*but now I realize…
*My thoughts about___________are complicated
*On the one hand I think…
*On the other hand, I think…

Collect stories as evidence
Today I want to teach you that essayists collect stories as evidence to go inside of each body
paragraph. In the same way that in reading workshop we’ve been finding “text evidence for our
ideas” about characters, now we can find “life evidence”: moments in our lives that truly show
what our thesis statements says.
o Use lists
o Mid Workshop Teaching Point: Collecting stories of others as evidence
Today I want to teach you that writers of essays are collectors, collecting not only
our stories but also stories of others, as long as those stories illustrate our main
ideas. We can think about the idea we have for writing about our own life then
turn to the lives of our characters and retell scenes where characters acted in a
similar way, or learned a similar lesson about themselves, as the idea we are
writing about our own life. “I’m reminded of…” we might begin. Or “I recognized
this characteristic in…”
o
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Small group with writers who might need more support: using alternate structures to
show how an idea is similar/different through using your own life and a character’s
story as evidence
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The Interpretive Essay: Exploring and Defending Big ideas about Life and Texts DRAFT
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Idea
My life shows this idea
A character’s life shows this idea
What I am now thinking about the idea
Revisiting our Plans and Revising to Ratchet up the Level of our Work before we Begin
Drafting
Today I want to teach you that essayists revisit their thesis statements and plan as they gather
evidence. We can change our thesis statements, cut from our plans if we are not finding evidence
that truly supports that idea.
o
Mid-Workshop: Listing as Evidence
Today I want to teach you that when writing essays, writers sometimes collect
examples that we do not stretch out and tell as stories, but that we instead list.
o
Teaching Share: Working with a Partner to Check if our Evidence Connects and is
Convincing
Writers, we need to make sure that the evidence we have gathered for our idea
truly supports that idea. Partner 2, will you listen to Partner 1’s idea and then the
stories that Partner 1 has gathered? Partner 1, be sure to pick your best evidence
to share and then be sure to say “This shows my idea because…” Partner 2, will
you listen and tell your partner if the evidence connects to the idea and if it is
convincing?
Bend III: Drafting and Revising Interpretive Essays about Our Own Lives

Moving from Gathering Evidence to Creating a Rough Draft
Today I want to teach you that after writers plan and collect for our essays (as you have done),
the day comes to put everything together. Once a writer has planned and collected, then presto!
The pieces of the essay can rise into place. It won’t be finished—writers revise essays just like we
revise any other kind of writing. But in the space of a single day, you can go from a bunch of
entries in some folders to a rough draft of an essay
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o
Mid-Workshop Teaching Point: Using transition words and key words from our theses
in our topic sentences like cement between bricks, holding one bit of material onto
the next
o
Teaching Share: essayists have language to help prove their points (consequently,
specifically (5th)
 (for instance, in order to, in addition—4th )
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Making Sure our Essays are Compelling from the Start
Today you’ll continue to cement your selected material into paragraphs, but I know you will also
want to learn a bit about how essayists write introductions and closings for our essays.
Specifically, I want to teach you that essay writers often use the beginning of an essay as a place
to convey to readers that the ideas in the essay are important. The lead briefly places the essay
into context. One way we can help guide our readers into our essays is to tell a small story, one
that we have not used for our body paragraphs and then show how the story makes us realize
our idea.
o Mid-Workshop Teaching Point: Conclusions-it is often powerful to circle back to the
start of our essays to help readers see and feel the urgency of our ideas. We can end
with an image/thought from our introduction to create an emotionally powerful
closure that can resonate with our readers
So when I think back to that day… Or So now I think…

o

Small group work with advanced students—conclusion follows from argument
presented
Teaching Share: Consider the other Side to Talk Back to It and Strengthen your own
Argument (Counter argument, rebuttal—Some people might say… There are those
who might think…)
Using What we Know About Narrative Writing to Revise our Anecdotes
Today I want to teach you that essayists use all we know about narrative writing to make the
anecdotes in our body paragraphs come alive, but quickly. We can cut all but the most essential
part of our stories, and revise our writing so that the action, dialogue, or inner thinking really
shows our thesis idea. We can do this across all of our entries.
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o
o
Mid- Workshop Teaching Point: Angling our Stories to Support our Idea
Writers, some of you are using examples from your reading as a way to explore
your ideas in your essay. Today I want to teach you that, just as we angled the
stories from our lives to show the idea of our thesis, essayists retell a scene from
literature making sure to pop out the part that really goes with the essay’s main
idea, and to cut the other parts of the scene. We can start retelling right before
the part that we have in mind to set up a little context, but we’re careful not to
retell everything, saving our stretched-out writing for the most important part
o
Small group for those who need further support—being purposeful about internal
thought and dialogue can reveal the large message of our anecdote for our readers
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o
Small group for enrichment—being purposeful about how we tell each story—some
we will stretch, some we will mostly summarize can help your readers to see which
part is most important.
OR play with structure
o
Teaching Share: Using the Language of Essayists
Writers , let’s stop a minute. I’ve noticed in most of your writing that you’re
working hard to explain the evidence in your body paragraphs. A lot of you are
writing “This shows that…” after you’ve told an anecdote, as a way to point back
to your thesis statement. Right now I want to teach you some other ways essayists
talk about their anecdotes. We can say, “When I remember this story, I think to
myself…” or “This moment clearly demonstrates…” Or even “As a result of this
moment and moments like it, I’ve…” Try this with your partner.
Bend IV: A Quick Draft of a Character-Based Interpretive Essay and a Possible Introduction of Essays that
Draw from Multiple Texts

Interpreting our Characters to Write Essays about Them
Writers, we’ve made first drafts and quickly revised essays interpreting our own lives—thinking
about ourselves and asking: What kind of person am I? Now, before we learn more revision
strategies, we’re going to practice this same kind of writing but turn our attention to the people
in our books. Today I want to teach you that writers write about their reading, and look back at
all their on-the-run post its and jots, and pick an idea about a character to try on for essay
writing

Essayists sometimes gather a little evidence first then create their plan and sometimes create
a plan then gather evidence
o Use same structures as we did when we wrote essays interpreting ourselves

Looking at How Authorial Choices Convey Ideas
Today I want to teach you that essayists work to show the reader not just what parts of the books
go with the idea of the thesis, but how those parts bring out this idea so well. We can use all we
know from reading workshop and about narrative writing to help us talk about this: we make
sure to use literary language in doing so, mentioning the setting and how the details of that
setting help us know how the character feels, or any objects or places that seem to be symbols of
a bigger issue for our character, or the dialogue, and how that gives us insight into characters’
relationships.
o
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Small group: quoting directly from the text to be as convincing as possible
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Planning Intertextual Essays
Essayists take big ideas or lessons from literature and write about how those ideas come through
in different ways in more than one text. We’ve been talking in reading workshop about how the
same themes or lessons keep coming up in different books. We can use essays to explore those
ideas more. This structure will probably look like this
 Idea
 How this one text teaches us this idea
 How another text teaches us this idea in a different way
Bend V: Essayists Edit, Prepare for Publication and Celebrate their Work

Noticing and Correcting Shifts in Verb Tense
Today I want to teach you that essayists think about the tense they are using as they craft their
anecdotes, and work to stay consistent in that tense throughout those stories. If we start a ministory in past tense, we want to stay in past tense; we might, however, try telling an anecdote,
either from our lives or from a book, in the present tense to make it feel closer to the reader.
Then we stay in the present tense all the way through.
o
Mid-Workshop Teaching Point: Using Editing Checklists to Ensure Our Pieces Will Be
Eminently Readable
Today I want to teach you that essayists make sure to use proper punctuation
when citing the title of a book or a short story in our writing. We can check our
work against our editing checklist to make sure that we’re using the right
conventions: underlining or italics for books titles, and quotation marks around
the title of a short story.

o Small group: punctuation in series
o Small group for advanced: vary sentence patterns and use parentheses
Let’s celebrate with a gallery walk! Writers love to get feedback from other writers. One way
to give feedback is to leave a post-it with a specific compliment next to another writer’s work.
Other possibilities:
*Using all we have learned in writing workshop to write flash drafts essays in reading workshop
*Intertextual/Interpretation Read Aloud w/writers notebooks---compare across texts and our own
lives and stop and write long
-emotional setting in texts/our lives (e.g. desert in Fox)
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