Of “Common Sense” & SMART Goals: Practice using Mentor Texts

This semester, Bayan Scholars asked professors to devote formal time to helping them prioritize and set goals - academic and otherwise. To that end, we played with the SMART protocol, an acronym that spells out traits of an effective plan: Specific, Measureable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time Oriented. Instead of relegating this topic solely to the Personal Development class, the professors wove SMART goals activities throughout the program. 

After a range of activities at the Winter retreat and Personal Development classes to develop ideas, students met up with both the Bayan professors to share their preliminary written SMART plan brainstorms. During these individual conferences, Bayan scholars received feedback, and subsequently revised and added in their journals more ideas into their prewriting.  

After all that, students had developed quite a lot of content they could use to create a statement, a narrative of their goals. In the English class, writers began to shape that content into a formal essay. 

To do so, students analyzed three “founding documents” of the United States: "The Declaration of Independence," The Preamble to the Constitution, and an excerpt of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet “Common Sense.” Our purpose was less about the content than about the “moves” the authors used to express their ideas, the decisions they made around structuring their content - the "bite" the authors' patterns of expression. 

For instance, the Preamble is basically made up of three “chunks,” three distinct moves that answer the questions:

• Who are we? 

• What’s our collective problem? 

• What do we propose to do? 

Dissecting the Preamble, students noted how the authors "chunked out" their ideas. Then, working in pairs, students composed, "on the fly," a version about the Preamble pertaining to a social group to which they belonged, emulating the authors' moves: 

• One pair wrote about personal development: “We, the college students of Southwestern College, in order to improve our mental health, time management, and work ethic, hereby swear to talk to our guidance counselors, using methods to improve our time management, meditate in and out of class and take breaks.” 

• A second pair, Bayan student leaders, used this activity to solve fundraising problems: “We, the Board members of Bayan, in order to create activities and events that will allow for a successful semester, must establish a source of income through fundraisers at places such as Chipotle, Blaze Pizza, and Jamba Juice.” 

• A third team focused on needs of Filipino males: “We, the Filipino Male SWC Students trying to transfer out of SWC, in order to meet family expectations, to receive higher education, to have a stable lifestyle, to work where we are passionate, are attending SWC to ultimately reach our career goals and surpass family expectations.” 

Students shared their "on-the-fly" preambles, locating the chunks, and noting where each move could be expanded for clarity. Indeed, each chunk could easily become it's own paragraph or set of paragraphs. 

All three drafts could have included more details in the “Who are we?” chunk. The section on problems could have been elaborated into its own paragraph or two. And the final chunk, with only a little more effort, could be blown up into a page full of details and specifics. For instance,  the notation that the group was “FIlipino males” in the third sample would benefit from more elaboration to specify what that group needs. 

For a first attempt, writers did a great job. They found the process useful, if a bit awkward at first. “Seeing the model for the first time was a little confusing,” writes one student, “but letting us put our own input in the model helped me understand how the model works and made it easier to follow afterward.” 

“I enjoyed how it started off easy and slowly increased in difficulty,” agreed another writer,“I would not say it was too hard though.” 

The single trio - everyone else worked in pairs! 

Another wrote about how the process could help develop a random jumble of pre-writing content into a structured essay: “[The mentor text] alleviated the struggle to try to come up with a way to sort of tie it all together in a cohesive paper or short paragraph.” Equally important, this writer noticed that paying attention to structure also helps with content: “Being able to sort of create a mini-proclamation that sets out what I will do is helpful since I feel like I would probably forget about some things . . .  or even might pass off as not as important.” 

In a subsequent formative assessment using authors’ actual texts as "mentors,” Bayan writers recognized they could mix and match different moves from all three texts we analyzed. They realized they could rearrange and manipulate the “chunks” to match their own goals and voices. They also noted that their own diction doesn’t have to replicate that of the original piece. The mentor texts’ structure and layering of moves, not particular word choices, are the issue. 

Several students pointed out that they can learn to write from another writer, that “biting” someone’s style isn’t plagiarism, but a way of standing on the shoulders of successful authors.

This particular writing workshop asked folks to work in pairs. The actual SMART narrative, however, is a solo essay, one that expresses individual declarations. Those drafts are due this week, so come back to see how mentor texts helped or hindered writers composing their own texts.

Note: This activity was cribbed from Gretchen Bernabei and Jennifer Koppe's Text Structures from the Masters.