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Essays Prompts

Amber Llewellyn

Our goal in the history department at my school is to have students writing 5 paragraph essays in 10th grade at least every other week; when they are Juniors and Seniors, they write them weekly. One of the challenges I faced in meeting this goal was coming up with writing prompts frequently. I have finally gotten smarter and started using the Unit Problem as at least one of the prompts. I have also uploaded my weekly notes to Chat Gpt and had it come up with a prompt. I admit the Chat Gpt prompts need to be reworked, but they at least give me a starting point. How do you come up with essay prompts? This is an area where I freely admit I need help because mine normally are not very good. 

  • Wow, that sounds like a lot of grading. I usually get essay prompts from past AP exams and textbooks, and I also use compelling questions (aka unit problems) for my units to develop prompts. Of course, here at OER we have lots of prompts, but I also use questions from various curriculums such as the DBQ project. This way I have a broad array that I can choose from on the same topic. Using ChatGPT can also be a good starting point though, but I always need to do some editing. 

  • That is a lot of writing!  Is the goal to strictly write 5 paragraphs every other week or are you working up to that?  If that is the case, asking students about historical developments leading up to a particular event is always great, helps them review the content, and can be used over and over.  Definitely borrow from here and other programs like past AP prompts or DBQ Project prompts.  There are paid and free prompt banks on places like TPT or just Googling.  I do use Chat GPT but I find that Gemini.google. is better and if you can get your district to pay for it, Magic School AI is the best!  Also, one students get the hang of the process and what prompts look like, have them write the prompts.  Use a program like "short answer" to have them vote on the best prompt.