creative writing curriculum map pdf

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Our 2020-21 Writing Curriculum for Middle and High School

A flexible, seven-unit program based on the real-world writing found in newspapers, from editorials and reviews to personal narratives and informational essays.

Update, Aug. 3, 2023: Find our 2023-24 writing curriculum here.

Our 2019-20 Writing Curriculum is one of the most popular new features we’ve ever run on this site, so, of course, we’re back with a 2020-21 version — one we hope is useful whether you’re teaching in person , online , indoors , outdoors , in a pod , as a homeschool , or in some hybrid of a few of these.

The curriculum detailed below is both a road map for teachers and an invitation to students. For teachers, it includes our writing prompts, mentor texts, contests and lesson plans, and organizes them all into seven distinct units. Each focuses on a different genre of writing that you can find not just in The Times but also in all kinds of real-world sources both in print and online.

But for students, our main goal is to show young people they have something valuable to say, and to give those voices a global audience. That’s always been a pillar of our site, but this year it is even more critical. The events of 2020 will define this generation, and many are living through them isolated from their ordinary communities, rituals and supports. Though a writing curriculum can hardly make up for that, we hope that it can at least offer teenagers a creative outlet for making sense of their experiences, and an enthusiastic audience for the results. Through the opportunities for publication woven throughout each unit, we want to encourage students to go beyond simply being media consumers to become creators and contributors themselves.

So have a look, and see if you can find a way to include any of these opportunities in your curriculum this year, whether to help students document their lives, tell stories, express opinions, investigate ideas, or analyze culture. We can’t wait to hear what your students have to say!

Each unit includes:

Writing prompts to help students try out related skills in a “low stakes” way.

We publish two writing prompts every school day, and we also have thematic collections of more than 1,000 prompts published in the past. Your students might consider responding to these prompts on our site and using our public forums as a kind of “rehearsal space” for practicing voice and technique.

Daily opportunities to practice writing for an authentic audience.

If a student submits a comment on our site, it will be read by Times editors, who approve each one before it gets published. Submitting a comment also gives students an audience of fellow teenagers from around the world who might read and respond to their work. Each week, we call out our favorite comments and honor dozens of students by name in our Thursday “ Current Events Conversation ” feature.

Guided practice with mentor texts .

Each unit we publish features guided practice lessons, written directly to students, that help them observe, understand and practice the kinds of “craft moves” that make different genres of writing sing. From how to “show not tell” in narratives to how to express critical opinions , quote or paraphrase experts or craft scripts for podcasts , we have used the work of both Times journalists and the teenage winners of our contests to show students techniques they can emulate.

“Annotated by the Author” commentaries from Times writers — and teenagers.

As part of our Mentor Texts series , we’ve been asking Times journalists from desks across the newsroom to annotate their articles to let students in on their writing, research and editing processes, and we’ll be adding more for each unit this year. Whether it’s Science writer Nicholas St. Fleur on tiny tyrannosaurs , Opinion writer Aisha Harris on the cultural canon , or The Times’s comics-industry reporter, George Gene Gustines, on comic books that celebrate pride , the idea is to demystify journalism for teenagers. This year, we’ll be inviting student winners of our contests to annotate their work as well.

A contest that can act as a culminating project .

Over the years we’ve heard from many teachers that our contests serve as final projects in their classes, and this curriculum came about in large part because we want to help teachers “plan backwards” to support those projects.

All contest entries are considered by experts, whether Times journalists, outside educators from partner organizations, or professional practitioners in a related field. Winning means being published on our site, and, perhaps, in the print edition of The New York Times.

Webinars and our new professional learning community (P.L.C.).

For each of the seven units in this curriculum, we host a webinar featuring Learning Network editors as well as teachers who use The Times in their classrooms. Our webinars introduce participants to our many resources and provide practical how-to’s on how to use our prompts, mentor texts and contests in the classroom.

New for this school year, we also invite teachers to join our P.L.C. on teaching writing with The Times , where educators can share resources, strategies and inspiration about teaching with these units.

Below are the seven units we will offer in the 2020-21 school year.

September-October

Unit 1: Documenting Teenage Lives in Extraordinary Times

This special unit acknowledges both the tumultuous events of 2020 and their outsized impact on young people — and invites teenagers to respond creatively. How can they add their voices to our understanding of what this historic year will mean for their generation?

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

Creative Writing: Curriculum

Learn what makes our curriculum unique, including our focus on culture and our cross-genre approach.

Cedar Crest College offers a Low-Residency, Pan-European MFA in Creative Writing in four genres: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or travel writing. Students may also choose to explore a dual-genre MFA by focusing on one genre during year one of the program and a different genre during year two, then completing a creative thesis and a critical essay that encompasses both genres.

Our MFA curriculum is craft-based, with genre-specific writing workshops and craft seminars comprising the residencies. A unique feature of our program, however, is its focus on creative writing as it relates to a sense of place. Thus, the residencies also include locale seminars, as well as scheduled field trips, lectures, and assignments specifically designed to inform and inspire writing through a study of the society, history, arts—in short, the culture—of each locale.

While students hone their skills in a particular genre, our program also provides cross-genre seminars as part of the curriculum. This enables students to derive effective writing strategies from a variety of genres and to investigate genres of writing that they may not otherwise have explored. Students may even find that the cross-genre approach invites more poetic language into their prose or enables them to create poetry that includes conventions employed by nonfiction writers. 

Pan-European Residencies

Our MFA program includes required attendance at three 15-day summertime residencies. All residencies will take place in Europe, rotating among three locales: Barcelona, Dublin, and Vienna.

Because our residencies take place in the summer, our program is accessible for professionally employed writers, educators, and graduate students with busy schedules. (Other low-residency MFA programs often require attendance multiple times a year, during fall, winter, or spring.)

Each of the Cedar Crest MFA residencies includes craft seminars and locale seminars (see details below). Between residencies, students work through distance learning with an instructor in a one-on-one writing mentorship. 

Residency Workshops

Workshops take place during the summer residencies and involve an instructor and a group of writers focusing on a particular genre. Workshop students will share their work four times during the course of the residency and will regularly critique their colleagues’ work. Individual conferences between each student and an instructor will also occur during the residency, which builds the foundation for the mentorships that will occur during distance learning.

Workshops improve student writing because they allow students to hear whether their intent equals the effect on the readers. It also allows students to hear what revision ideas, strategies, and opportunities readers might have, and it improves the crafting of their own work by requiring them to respond in an editorial fashion to the work of others.

Finally, workshops have proven successful by providing writers with a sense of real community, of colleagues they might turn to—not only during their graduate student years, but also beyond them—for help with revising their work.

Requirements for the workshop include assignments such as:

• The submission of four pieces of creative work, each either 8 to 25 double-spaced pages (for prose writers) or 5 to 10 single-spaced pages (for poets)
• The submission of critiques and annotated manuscripts of all colleagues’ work discussed in workshop
• Attendance and participation at all workshop discussions
• Attendance at individual conferences with the instructor
• By September 1st, submission of a reflective essay expressing what was learned through the workshop, craft and locale curriculum during the residency 

Cross-Genre Craft Seminars

Cross-genre craft seminars are offered to the entire graduate student body at each annual residency. These cross-genre craft seminars provide the opportunity to unite the program around a common curriculum and allow the students to learn from discussions that focus on other genres as well as their own.

Cross-genre craft seminars stem from the belief that reading beyond one’s genre informs the practice of one’s own genre. Reading broadly also provides inspiration to attempt other genres or include aspects of other genres in the practice of one’s own genre. It furthermore develops advanced teaching skills, specifically relevant given that most introductory creative writing courses at the post-secondary level are indeed multi-genre.

Requirements for the cross-genre craft seminars include assignments such as:

• Read in advance all assigned reading (selected by the instructor)
• Write journal entries about the reading and the seminar discussions
• Attend and participate in each seminar meeting 

Locale Seminars

Locale seminars include two modes of instruction: the seminars themselves and their connected field experiences.

Locale seminars are offered during each residency. They provide the opportunity for the program to ground itself in its setting and inspire students to inhabit the connections between the locale and their own development as writers. Requirements for the locale seminars include assignments such as:

• Write journal entries about the readings and seminar discussions

By going out of the classroom and into the city, field experiences supplement the curriculum of the locale seminars. Requirements for the field experiences include assignments such as:

• Attend every field experience
• Write a journal entry about each experience

Writing Mentorships (Distance Learning between Residencies)

The writing mentorships occur over the fall and spring semesters through distance learning, commencing in September and concluding in May prior to the next year’s residency. The mentorship approach extends each student’s literary development in a highly personal manner by regularly exchanging creative work and critical responses with a professional and practicing writer each month. The mentorship also requires the student to work with the instructor to create a challenging list of literary works to read and analyze.

In our MFA program, instructors work one-on-one with their students, and each monthly correspondence is a conference and exchange of ideas geared to the students’ individual literary development. Instructors respond on two levels: First, the instructor will offer margin comments and line-edit suggestions throughout the manuscript; second, the instructor will offer an end comment more broadly critiquing the submitted work and offering strategies for revision and, if merited, suggestions for publication venue.

Requirements for the tutorial include assignments such as:

• Submission of four separate creative works each semester, one on the first of each month with the exception of January. Each submission will be either 8 to 25 double-spaced pages of prose or 5 to 10 single-spaced pages of poetry, depending on the student’s genre.
• On each following month of distance learning, the submission of a brief response essay pertaining to one new book from the individualized reading list developed with the instructor
• Note: Instructors will respond monthly to the creative work and the response essay previously submitted by the student.
• Creative Writing
• About the MFA
• The MFA Experience
• Residencies
• Travel Arrangements