In the 1999-2000 school year, I, the DESK Program Director, visited Louisiana School for the Deaf and conducted workshops for students from four English classes taught by Pat Lively, Joey Nipper and Connie Tullos.  The workshops were held approximately every other week and lasted one fifty-minute class period.  I conducted each workshop twice during each of my visits in back-to-back class periods.  Two of the four English classes met together for each of the two workshops sessions with approximately fifteen students attending each workshop.  Workshop titles included: “Beginning to Evaluate,” “Essay Introductions,” and “Working One-on-One with Students.”

The DESK Program 2000-2001:

In the 2000-2001 year, we adopted a slightly different structure based on Pat Lively’s excellent suggestion that I work with one teacher’s English class, meeting once a week for approximately nine weeks on a writing project to be completed during that nine-week period.  Then I would move on to the second teacher’s class for a second nine-week period, and then on to the third teacher’s class.   It was our hope that this restructuring would provide more focus and consistency of contact for the students than did the 1999-2000 format.   Also, this structure would allow the classroom teachers to more easily integrate the activities generated by the DESK Program into their individual course lesson plans. 

The DESK Program Handbook 2000-2001:

The handbook reflects this restructuring in that each chapter covers the content and activities of one nine-week unit.  The three units present three essays each using a different pattern of development.

While within each unit separate activities are delineated, a strict week-by-week lesson plan is not presented.  Thus, teachers using this handbook can modify and adapt these units to meet the different needs, skill levels and time constraints of their classes.  Additionally, step-by-step instructions are presented in a bulleted format but I have added, in italics, a more detailed narrative which describes what was done during DESK Program sessions.