Every Monday morning from 7:30-8am, the residents discuss with our content coach what the week is going to look like, schedule times to plan and get observed, and talk about how our lessons went. Today Brian Flores, our literacy content coach, came and discussed this weeks plan. We discussed my writing lesson I was teaching today and I showed him the student's performance task. The students were going to be reading two texts, one being about having a pet bunny and one about having a pet dog. After reading each article, the students have to decide which pet is more challenging to take care of and have text evidence to support their opinion. I was sharing my lesson with Brian about how I was going to model two articles I compare and how I underlined reasons to support my opinion. He loved my plans but asked me who was my student's audience when writing their opinion piece. He restated his question by saying, who is their audience? I was puzzled and answered with because its the performance task? This really got me thinking, the students would have no motivation to write this essay. Brian explained to the residents that students need an audience or they are going to feel they are writing for no reason. He told us to think about college papers we had wrote about and when we knew a professor wasn't going to take their time to read it. He asked did we put 100% of our effort into our writing and we all answered no. So I thought about my class and who I could make their audience be. I explained to Brian that my students adore Mrs. Wulf and get so excited when she comes into our classroom. I told Tracy that my plan was she was deciding on either getting a pet rabbit or a pet dog, but couldn't decide which one and she wanted my students help. When I told my students this they were so excited to get the articles and start reading, they were underlining reasons of why each pet was difficult to take care of, then making their final opinions as to which pet would be more difficult to take care of. They were so excited to start writing their essays so Mrs. Wulf could read them. I had to tell them that today we were just reading our articles, underlining evidence, and picking which animal is more difficult and that tomorrow we would get to start our pre-plan and essay. The rest of the week will go as followed. I will model my pre-plan and how I would write my introduction, they the students will write their introduction. Then I will model my first middle paragraph, then the students will do their first middle paragraph. This process will continue and when we finish the conclusions, the students will be able to give their essays to Mrs. Wulf. I love how guided this process will be because my students are struggling with making a pre-plan and writing four paragraphs on their own, so my making our pre-plans together and going through each step of the writing process daily, the guidance and support will help their writing pieces in the future.