Do your students find it difficult and not motivated to write their MYP personal project report after completing their product? Do you sometimes feel students write an extended diary entry instead of an academic report that meets the IB assessment expectations? After making their product following the inquiry cycle, MYP students are required to demonstrate their engagement with their personal project by summarizing their experiences and skills by completing their MYP Personal Project report (page 28, Middle Years Programme Personal Project Guide, updated May 2021). The organization of the MYP personal project is based on objectives accordingly: planning, applying skills, and reflecting.
If we do a Google search, many universities provide sentence stems or sentence starters to help students write their essays as academic writing requires deliberate practice. The MYP Personal Project is not a typical academic essay. The tone of writing combines both formal and informal. Students narrate their experiences and inquiry process and cite evidence and ideas by following correct conventions. When guiding students in writing their personal project report, the focus is on helping them understand the commend terms as in other MYP/DP subjects. Students will write to state, outline, explain, evaluate and so on. However, this might be difficult to grasp for some students as they cannot distinguish between ‘describe’ and ‘explain’, for instance.
As an English second language speaker, I learned to write academically by reading and mimicking other people’s writing. I wish my teachers had taught me how to do this at school and helped me understand the characteristics of academic language. The majority of my students are non-English native speakers. They have kept detailed notes in their process journal. However, translating their information and notes to the academic report format may be difficult for some of them. If universities provide sentence stems for college students, it makes sense that I put together some sentence starters/stems to scaffold the MYP Personal Project report writing process.
If you would like to use these sentence starters with your students, right click to save the image.
It is important to note that evidence must be included for all the strands of the criteria (page 25, MYP Personal Project Guide, updated May 2021). The guide mentions the importance of communicating clearly and concisely to demonstrate the elements of the report and reach the highest levels of the criteria. Here are four writing strategies that may support students writing with supporting evidence.
P-E-E refers to Point, Evidence, Explain. Students state the point they want to prove or develop, support it with specific examples or evidence and provide detailed explanations on how they connect to the point they are trying to make. This video gives a short and sweet introduction. Here is A Guide to Writing PEE Paragraphs created by The Ferrers Academy. This writing strategy can be helpful when students are writing about how they have decided on their learning goal and product. Additionally, the writing structures will also work when students are writing to explain how they have demonstrated their Approaches to Learning Skills (ATL) to help them achieve their learning goal and the product.
ICE stands for Introduce, Cite, and Explain Your Evidence. This strategy may be helpful when students are writing to explain how they developed appropriate success criteria for the product. The project is inquiry and research-based. To create robust success criteria or product specifications to guide their product making and evaluate the quality, students should conduct research and use the information to develop the success criteria for their product. In this section of writing, students might consider employing ICE statement to introduce their set of success criteria, cite their research information to explain what led to their decisions on their success criteria. Students will need to include the evidence of their success criteria in the report.
If you are interested in teaching students how to use ICE writing strategy, check out Fountain Middle School Teacher’s Programs and Strategies Website on ICE writing structure.
This strategy is shared in teachthought.com. It is introduced on the website that “SRE is initialism representing three central tenets of arguing and argument making (and thus writing): Statement, Reason, Evidence (or Example, Explain, or Expand)” Students can go beyond stating and describing by using this writing structure. The author also provides examples of critical thinking stems on the website to guide students’ thinking and writing.
Together with the SRE writing strategy, CEI writing strategy is introduced on the same blog post on teachthought.com. “‘C.E.I.’ is an initialism referring to ‘Claim, Evidence, Interpretation,’ and like its simpler cousin SRE.”
I think SRE and CEI writing strategies can help students respond to the assessment objective: evaluate the product based on the success criteria.
To help students reflect critically, there are some powerful protocols students can use. Reflection should be ongoing and regular, and it’s not a one-off task. Please refer to my blog post: 6 reflection sticky notes. Students are encouraged and reminded of doing small reflections throughout the process and record them in their process journal.
Portsmouth University has provided a comprehensive guide to help students with reflective writing. I adapted the information and also offered Here is What? So What? and Now What question prompts to support students. Please refer to my blog post: Reflective writing Guide.
I think PZ’s thinking routine ESP+I: Experience, Struggles, Puzzles plus Insights is an excellent tool to help students reflect on their personal project learning journey at the end. This thinking routine can help students write to respond to the assessment objective “explain the project’s impact on themselves or their learning”.
Finally, the CARL framework of reflection is worth mentioning. I came across this reflection framework while preparing for my job interviews. CARL stands for Context, Action, Results, and Learning. Check out the explanation of the CARL reflection framework and process on the website of The University of Edinburgh.
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