Using Beloved as a model of a work with multiple narrative perspectives, students use a visualizing activity and close reading to consider ways in which subjective values shape contradictory representations.

As part of the Worcester State University OER initiative in Spring 2017, Dr. Elizabeth Osborne created and translated course materials for her SP 322, Advanced Spanish Composition II, course. Materials have been divided into peer review (revisión por pares) handouts, close reading activities (actividades de lectura detallada) and other miscellaneous materials. The materials included here are by no means exhaustive, but they serve as a starting point to making education affordable and to filling the gap in Spanish-language OER for upper division courses.

Using published writers' texts and students' own writing, this unit explores emotions that are associated with the artful and deliberate use of commas, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points (end-stop marks of punctuation).

In this literary unit, students explore rural life during the Great Depression by analyzing Richard Peck's A Year Down Yonder.

In this lesson students use a simple SOAPSTone form (College Board resource) to analyze six aspects of informational texts: subject, occasion, audience, purpose, speaker, and tone.

This set of lessons extends over a few days. Students read and annotate Ernie Pyle's "A Long Thin Line of Anguish." Students complete a SAYS/DOES graphic organizer, working on summarizing the text, noticing the choices the author makes about use of details, and describing the choices the author makes regarding the structure of the article.

Students complete a SOAPStone handout, identifying subject, occasion, author, purpose, speaker and tone (SOAPStone is a pre-AP/AP strategy). Students develop claims about why Ernie Pyle makes the writing choices he makes. Students write an informal, free-response style assessment about the impact of Pyle's choices.

This set of lessons extends over several days. Students work with a partner to read and annotate G.K. Chesterton's "The Fallacy of Success." Students take notes which summarize each section of the text. Students write an objective summary of the text, identifying two claims and determining how those claims are developed in the text.

In this lesson students use a Tuning Protocol to give and receive peer-to-peer feedback on student writing in a structured, safe environment.

In this lesson students will create a graphic organizer that uses the titles and subtitles of an informational text before they begin reading.

This "jigsaw" activity will give students the opportunity to work in groups to summarize a 1 to 2 page informational text. It "jigsaws" down to 1 class summary and can be done in 2 or 3 days. This plan was designed for a class of 22 students but can be easily modified by varying group size.

Silent Discussion takes the strengths of a well-managed verbal classroom discussion and moves into a written discussion. Some of the benefits of this move include: all students participate; students practice writing in a low-stakes, social format; and students engage with content skills and knowledge.