Planning

Unit 1: Analysis

Lesson Materials: 1. PPT on Analysing, Synthesizing, and Writing

Lesson Objectives: 1. Identify a strong research topic; 2. Practice identifying relevant reliable research; 3. Develop a connection between academic writing and the familiar concept of synthesizing in music and research; 4. Identify sources to summarize and synthesize; practice synthesizing using action verbs; 5. Understand and practice conducting thorough rhetorical analyses

Connection to Major Paper/Project: Receive support for your endeavors to identify a meaningful issue, gather relevant information for your research, and make sense of the information to solve the issue.

Connection to Course Goals: This lesson will assist you in learning to use appropriate linguistic conventions when analyzing information, combining ideas from various sources to express your own perspectives, learn to identify and/or practice identifying tropes, audience, and purpose.

Day One Activities:

  1. Topic choices: Share your topics with the class one at a time and provide feedback. Upload your table (homework from last class) to Blackboard.
  2. Set up Google Docs: See Google Docs Guide
  3. Introduce new assignment: 1. Read the assignment sheet silently. Prepare questions about what you may not understand, what might seem scary, anxiety-provoking, or too much work. 2. Speak with each other and help each other understand the assignment, answer questions, and feel better about the assignment. 3. Discuss as a class any remaining questions or anxieties about the assignment.
  4. Reflective Annotated Bibliography Handout: Read the reflective annotated bibliography guide, make notes of any questions, work with a partner to answer them, and finally discuss as a class to address any remaining questions.
  5. Research Guide for Finding Sources: Use the research guide to begin finding relevant sources.
  6. Put APA references for each of the sources that you identified. You will be asked to briefly explain your choice of sources in terms of reliability and relevance.

Day Two Activities:

  1. Establish a collaborative code of engagement and keep it in the shared drive
  2. Rhetorical Situations: Use the OWL slides in the above PPT to go over important aspects of a rhetorical situation.
  3. Discuss
  4. In your Google Doc, write your one, two or three research topic ideas. For each, list elements of the rhetorical situation.
  5. In the second part of class, I will meet with you separately to discuss your research topic ideas
  6. For the remainder of the class, take time to work on your papers, identifying more sources, emailing professors to set up interviews, reading, summarizing, organizing layout, asking and answering questions, etc.

Day Three Activities:

  1. PPT Lecture: Assisted with the PPT in the lesson materials above, we will go over key concepts that are essential to understanding how to analyze and synthesize information.
  2. Learn to evaluate sources using the CRAP Test
  3. Think, pair, share: Take time to begin your research and brainstorming for your paper. You are encouraged to ask questions of your classmates and/or the professor.