Sisler Grade 12 students’ final English project a reflection of themselves

If you happened to walk by a Grade 12 English class at Sisler the week before exams, students were not sitting silently in their desks reading and writing. Instead, the room looked more like a workshop with students discussing, composing, and creating their final narrative piece for Transactional English. 

For this project, students completed a performance-based assessment centred on the theme “About Me”. The final weeks of class were spent studying narrative texts from various disciplines including short stories, videos, photo essays, poetry, photos, and memoirs. Many of the selected texts were written and produced by local writers, filmmakers, and artists.

Together, students created lists of features common to all forms and created and composed their own work based on their shared criteria. Throughout the creative process, they met in small groups to discuss purpose, audience, and design decisions and the impacts of particular choices on their intended viewer or reader. They used the success criteria developed by their teacher from their shared work to check and recheck that their pieces contained the features that they had identified.

"The students’ vulnerability, risk taking, and honesty is evident in their finished pieces and the reflections they shared about the work. Students showed their deep understanding of voice, design process, and different modalities as they drafted, shared, accepted feedback, and revised," said Sisler teacher, Jill Cooper.

Glue guns, art supplies, animation and film editing, clay, word processing, yarn, photos, and creative and expository writing were all parts of the individual and collective work of this remarkable group of students.

The Transactional English course is intended to help students manage the vast array of information with which they are presented daily, and to think critically and independently in order to function as responsible citizens. A student's personal, social, and civic life is enhanced by being skillful in reading and assessing a wide range of oral, print, and other media texts, and by being able to communicate effectively with others.