Instead of writing the generic five-paragraph essay, Daniels suggests a modified essay called an I-Search paper. I-Search papers allow students to choose their own topic, use their research skills, and help them discover what is valid or non-valid information. By allowing students to choose their own topic, they’re more likely to work and harder and be interested in the research topic. Like all writing assignments, students need to be informed of their audience and it helps to make it about more than just the teacher. Adding in a presentation component allows students to take more pride in their work, and think about their writing in a more complex way. The I-Search paper can be time consuming with its layers of pre-writing, time for research, in class writings, and the presentation, but it beats student’s dashing out a paper because they have to and not because they’re interested in what they’re writing about.
Confession time: I was supposed to assign an I-Search paper last year, but the other teachers told me not to worry about, so I didn’t. I wanted to give my students a longer writing assignment, and I really like this idea. I wrote about comics every chance I had in high school, so I think my students would have liked to research sports, games, gangs, animals, and all their various interests. I’ve mentioned my classroom management difficulties in not wanting to take them to the library much, but I’ll have a stronger start this year and a better idea of what I’m doing. Motivating the students will be a problem, as will scheduling time to get them in the computer lab, but I want these kids writing, and I hope they will want to write and work on this. I think it will be good to sell the presentation as them just being the expert on something they’re telling their friends about. Also, I want to scaffold this for myself as well as them. Maybe it will take us longer to do it this year than the next, but I’ve got to break things into small pieces to help me along the way as well as them.
And it's also great to combine this with multigenre papers too. That way, students could research comic books and even write a short comic strip about comic books - interview characters, etc. I've seen students "wake up" when they get to do this kind of research and writing.
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