Curated opinion columns from the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. These students will discuss the columns within their small group and dissect the columns to identify the opinion/s raised and how each opinion was supported by evidence. These students will be challenged to select the best column in their opinion which they will annotate and present to the class.

Top political speeches. This group of students will be provided with links to the top and most quoted speeches by politicians and public personalities from Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, to Barack Obama. The students will be given guide questions for them to underscore the opinions and the manner with which these public figures were able to create a following for their opinions.

This type of assessment is a challenging project which will propel the students to go into a full Oregon-Oxford debate about a topic of their choice and will be approved by me as the teacher. The topic must be extracurricular involving their current subjects and will be judged by a panel of students from the higher grade levels.

Through this assessment, I will be observing the quality of reasoning that is backed by research and preparation. I will require these debaters to write their introduction speech, an outline of their points, and also a final closing argument. These writing pieces are a form of extended learning for these students who have shown excellence in Opinion Writing. I will run a class poll to see which side of the argument the class favors at the end of the debate. The poll results will serve as significant data and feedback to the debaters about the strength of their arguments. This time, they will need to use their reasoning and logic facilities into a more challenging platform.

This group of students will have one-on-one discussions with me about Opinion Writing and these discussions will become reteaching opportunities where I can likewise forge better relationships with these students who will benefit from my one-on-one attention.

Mock Rally
In this assessment, the students will divide into groups and hold a mock rally outside of the White House. In this mock rally, there will be placards, speeches, and other tools of propaganda to swing people from the public, media, and the politicians themselves to be swayed. The rest of the class will pretend to be people watching on TV or passersby and will be asked if they sympathize with the rallyists or not.

Mind Mapping
This assessment activity unravels these students’ logical thinking in terms of how they connect ideas and support each one. This also allows them to develop their reasoning and organization skills for them to become better opinion writers.

The first assessment will gather the class’s pulse to show if the mock rally exercise managed to convince the class about their position. The data will be helpful for both the students and for me as a form of peer feedback which can be quantified.
The second assessment is created primarily as a learning exercise where these students who need remediation and have been given one-on-one instruction will be supported further with mind map tools to help them craft their ideas and connect these with each other.

The outputs of both the written speech and the PSAs will reveal the depth of understanding about the content and will push these opinion writers to sharpen their reasoning skills in choice-based and engaging assessment activities. I will gather data on the students’ attainment of the objectives based on the outputs delivered. I will also open up the class for feedback to support these students in their growth.

This group of students will be challenged to further their knowledge and to reach a higher level of understanding of the content. This will be done through an activity which is called, The 5 Why’s. The 5 Why’s is when students are given cards that have blank opinions and students will fill in the blank. After filling in the blank, they will give 5 Why’s to support their opinion within a span of 3 minutes. Each student will go through 10 different cards and as such, will create about 50 why’s. To elevate the challenge, the rest of the members of the group will rate each reason in a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 as Not Convincing at All and 5 as Extremely Convincing. This activity will sharpen their reasoning skills and develop these students to perform and think at a higher level and at a faster pace to support their growth in becoming much better opinion writers.

Speech Writing
In this assessment, students will assume to be the characters that they choose to be, be it LeBron James, Angela Merkel, or Pope Francis. They will write and deliver a speech that seeks to convince their audience to take action.

Create a PSA (Public Service Announcement)
In this activity, students will create a print, digital, film, or any kind of PSA which they choose for as long as it will meet the objective of generating an actionable response from its audience.