A Two-Week Personal Narrative Unit for High School: Lesson Plans, Mentor Texts, and Writing Workshop

Teaching writing often feels less like following a logical order and more like making constant decisions about what to fix first.

Should you get students to work on paragraphs when their sentences are weak? Why focus on elegant sentence writing when their stories have no point? And how can you talk about conclusions when they don’t even know how to write a first sentence?

What finally helped me to stop spinning out on all the ways my students’ writing needed work was to start focusing instead on professional writing.

First, I found examples of good writing. These were essays that grabbed me from the opening line, told compelling stories, delighted me with their insights, and stuck with me long after reading.  Then I broke those essays apart and examined them with my students, asking what made the opening effective, how the story was constructed, where the writer’s insight came through, and why the essay stayed with us.  Studying strong examples of personal narrative writing gave my students a concrete model of what this genre can actually look like.

Over time, I refined the order of those elements based on when students were actually ready to use them in their own writing. 

Eventually, the experimentation turned into a clear two-week personal narrative unit—one that gives students a foundation in story, structure, and craft before polishing. Here’s how I structure that unit.

Day 1: “What is a Personal Essay?”  My motto as a teacher is “never assume,” and so I begin the unit with the question of what we even mean when we say “personal narrative writing.”  We read “Fish Cheeks” by Amy Tan and “The Terror” by Junot Díaz.  These essays are relatable and well-written.  As a class, we discuss some of the elements of the essays (they’re autobiographical; they don’t explain everything; they’re not structured like a five-paragraph essay…) We also spend the first day freewriting on prompts about failure and get started on the Two Truths and a Lie Game. These fun narrative writing prompts lower the stakes and get students generating real material before they ever draft a full essay.

Day 2: Telling Good Stories and Show Don’t Tell. No matter how beautiful the sentences or earnest the message, a good personal essay needs to tell a story well.  And so on day two of the unit, we play Two Truths and a Lie.  There is something about trying to trick their peers that really gets students writing some great stories!  After we have listened and guessed a few times, we talk about what makes the good ones good and what the not-so-good ones might be missing.  I encourage them to think about people in their lives who tell great stories and people who don’t.  Then we talk about what the elements of those stories are.  Students’ answers often include things like “they have a point” or “they have enough details but not too many.”  We also work through a handout that, using the essay examples we read in class, gets students experimenting with how to show rather than tell in their own writing.  

Day 3: Grabbers and Structure.  At this point in the unit, students have realized that narrative essays can be both enjoyable and interesting.  We still haven’t tackled their  first draft, though, as I want to make them as full of ideas as I can before they get started writing.  So day three gets us doing a few more freewrites, looking together at how writers grab a reader with the first sentence, and discussing the different ways the essays we’ve read are structured. Rather than just tell them “your grabber has to be interesting!” we discuss together how the authors we have read really pull in a reader with the first line.  Breaking down what can seem like a mystical craft into a concrete suggestion really helps students to see that they can do this too. We read “Finishing School” by Maya Angelou on this day as well.  

Day 4: Writing the First Draft.  It’s now dayfour of the unit—students have written at least three freewrites plus their two truths and a lie; they know which essays they like best and why; they have some ideas about how to show rather than tell, grab a reader, and structure a personal essay. They’re ready to write!  I take some time to go over the expectations of writing workshop. (Whether this is our first writing workshop of the year or our fifth, it’s worth the time to do this.) I remind them of what Anne Lamott famously says in Bird by Bird about, um, the crappy first draft.  And I let them start writing!

Days 5-6: Writing Workshop. In my early days of teaching, I would have students go home and write their first drafts for homework.  But given the temptations of AI, I think that students should do all of their writing in class.  Plus, there are few things more lovely than the sight of a group of teens typing away, squinting and pursing their lips as they think, getting excited when they have ideas.  I use a checklist to track their process in the writing workshop and also give them a process grade when they finish their final drafts.  We’ll continue on with writing workshop for the next few days, punctuated by a few focused lessons.

Day 7: What’s the Point? At this point in their process, students often have a great story but don’t really know what they’re doing with it, or they have some ideas of what they want to say but a story that doesn’t really fit that message. So once they have made some progress with their first drafts, we talk about the point of an essay.  Even though they don’t have a thesis statement anywhere to be found, personal essays still make a point.  I remind students of some of their friends and family that we thought about back on day two who do not tell good stories and ask if any of them know people who tell stories that have no discernible point to the listener? Inevitably, they know exactly what I’m talking about!  We spend some time, again, talking about the sample essays we read—what points they make and how they make them.  And then they start thinking about what point they might be making with their own essays and if the stories, details, and structure of the essay really support those ideas—or if maybe they have new ideas that have developed as a result of them writing those stories.

Day 8: Peer Conferences. Something else that I avoided out of fear for years was having students do peer conferences.  Any time I tried, my students would read their friends’ essays, write “nice job!” and call it a day.  The structure that I finally developed keeps students accountable without making the process too rigid.  I have a checklist, they focus on one or two elements only, and they have to do a bit of writing on their partner’s work. The most effective part of the process—and the most painful!—is that students listen to their own essay read aloud to them without reading along.  I’ve found that students learn so much about what makes good writing from doing this process.  And before I ask them to do peer conferences, I model one with a willing student.  

Day 9: Revisions. I have found that giving students some concrete revisions to try works way better than just saying “revise for voice and tone.”  So I give students a revision handout with concrete options to try, such as “Did it take you hours and hours to write your first paragraph while your second was faster and much easier? Chances are that your reader will feel that pain. Cross out the first paragraph and start with the second instead” or “Could you be more innovative or original with your grabber? Is it interesting but not really so different? Try a technique that you saw in one of the mentor narratives—preferably one that seemed too difficult to pull off.” Once I’ve gone over the handout with them, they’re back to working through whatever stage they’re on in the writing process.

Day 10: The Special Sentence and Sample Student Essays.  The final instructional day of the unit (though many classes benefit from an extra workshop day or two) includes two of my favorite activities.  First, we work through a handout that gets students imitating—for form, structure, tone, and voice—some of the most interestingly written sentences from the sample essays we read together.  When students intentionally incorporate one carefully crafted “special sentence” at a key moment, the quality of their writing noticeably improves. In fact, this technique is so effective that I’ve built it directly into the rubric.  

And finally, I give students copies of the rubric I’ll be using to grade their final essays and we grade two actual student essays as a class. What I love about the examples that we look at is that one was written by a self-professed “non-creative,” a math kid who was able to construct a very compelling essay bit by bit using the lessons of the unit.  The other essay—knowing what I know about the student who wrote it—was probably dashed off late at night before a college application deadline.  Still, it’s funny, interesting, and includes a lot of the elements we’ve been discussing as a class. As real student examples, these essays are far from perfect.  Let me tell you that my students are extremely eager to point out all the flaws in both essays!  And when they have a rubric to really examine it, the flaws they point out are a lot more meaningful than a typo or a misspelled word.

On paper, this may sound like a lot. In practice, it becomes one of the most focused and energizing stretches of our year.  This unit never fails to help me get to know my students on a deeper level, and I can see how they apply the lessons they learn about good writing to everything else they do.

If you’d like to build your own version of this unit, everything you need is here in this post.

But if you’d rather skip the prep and have the handouts, peer conference checklists, revision guides, mentor text links, and grading rubric ready to go, you can check out my full personal narrative unit here. 

It includes all of the materials I use in class—organized and designed to move students through the writing process step by step.