Making Instruction More Sensitive to Real Development Writing - Victoria Young Tuesday, June 4, 2019 9:25 AM Essential writing Understanding What district and campus leadership absolutely have to know from the inside out: • What the rubrics require in terms of level of writing performance • How the rubrics link to real student writing • What summed score tell you about your students and instructional programs ○ Tell you the strengths and weaknesses of your writing programs ○ What is your writing program and what it's not doing • How writing instruction can be made more sensitive to the knowledge and skills essential for students to improve ○ Planning is essential to the writing process ▪ Prewriting should not be a check mark or product - needs to lead to a better draft • How prewriting and revision can be better tools for students ○ You have to know what the purpose is of prewriting and revision STAAR Writing Rubric Overall descriptions of the score points - these should not be the measurement of student success, you should know the descriptors and how to help them • 1 - very limited • 2 - basic • 3 - satisfactory • 4 - accomplished Some Context: Spring 2018 Statewide STAAR Writing Distributions 67% of 4th grades are in the lower half of the grade scale 65% of 7th grades 62% of English I June 4 Page 1 62% of English I 45% of English II • Improvement between Eng I and II correlates to the two years of connected learning What a Good Writing Classroom is NOT • Not a lockstep linear process: prewrite, draft, reviews, edit, publish ○ Students may need to go back • Parsing writing into individual, separate features • Following a template or formula ○ Papers are not 5 paragraphs, or six, etc. • Writing to a prompt after prompt to prepare for STAAR ○ Destroy students' ability as writing • Practicing skills in isolation (the worksheet approach) ○ Kids cannot transfer • Valuing quantity of writing over quality of writing ○ Students will ingrain bad habits What a Good Writing Classroom IS - Writing Workshop • Understanding that writing is asocial, not solitary act that requires ongoing student-teacher and student-student communication and collaboration • Teaching students that good writing can't happen without good thinking ○ If students don't know how to approach the writing, they can't write effectively ○ I do, We do, You do - the teacher has to model the thinking • Emphasizing the reading-writing connection • Teaching deliberately/intentionally (even those skills teachers think students should already have mastered) ○ You have to review the students' writing to determine what the kids need - where are they falling behind ○ There has to be flexibility to teach mini-lessons to fill in the gaps ○ Less is more - what are students learning each class period ▪ Are they internalizing what they are learning Teaching writing does mean • Provide different kinds of guided practice • Promoting and guiding scaffolded conversations (modeling how to think through a piece) • Providing lots of time for attempting to apply what's been taught (both guided and independent practice) keeping the emphasis on communicating through writing while helping students work to master skills and understanding what it means to write for different purposes and audiences June 4 Page 2 What Underlies Rhetorical Decisions Choosing an approach to writing and writing that supports effective development of the topic, makes the response thoughtful and engaging to the reader and directly support the purpose of writing Critical Understandings • To improve their writing - and understand what makes writing good versus not so good - students need a real, up-close working understanding of two things: ○ What each writing feature demands in and of itself, since each writing feature represents an aspect of waiting critical to effectiveness ○ How the features fit together to form an entire piece of writing - and how this fit determines the quality for the writing based on its overall strengths and weakness STAAR Writing Across Grades - 3 ongoing weaknesses 1. Weak focus 2. Weak development 3. Weak sentences a. Elementary, middle, and high b. Even in papers that received good scores Actively Addressing Weak Focus Requires teaching students how to • Establish focus • Sustain that focus all the way through the essay To establish focus, students must be able to generate a controlling idea (thesis) that • Represents the essence of their thinking about what they want to write about the topic or prompt • Is specific enough to give the reader a clear idea of what they will explain or argue in the essay Teachers need to be able to write a controlling idea well in order to teach it To sustain focus, students must be able to generate writing that is unified and coherent • Writing is unified when every sentence helps develop the controlling idea and contributes to meaning ○ Does every sentence belong? • Writing is coherent when every sentence links seamlessly to the next, creating a logical, easy-tofollow structure June 4 Page 3 follow structure ○ Are all the sentences in the right order? Unity = the "what" Coherence = the "how" Development Think of development as the addition of details, examples, or reasons that specifically "flesh out" each idea which help the reading clearly understand the piece of writing as a whole To count as a development, it has to add meaning/substance to the writing Actively Addressing Weak Development Requires teaching students: • How to teach into their own experiences, understanding, and thinking ○ Students know more about the work than they think - they just don't know how to write it down • Why writing in clusters is bad for development strategy • How to build the development from idea to idea so that all the ideas as connected ○ Build depth, the better you do this, the more the reader understands • How to use a narrow and deep strategy to make the development stronger ○ Makes writing less daunting for students Why developing idea in clusters is bad strategy • Ideas are linked to the topic or prompt but not connected to each other • A roadblock to substance/depth/thoughtfulness because the student does not "build" from one idea to another If teachers don't know how to do this, they need professional development *Remember* Unconnected idea = superficial development Superficial development = basic writing (not satisfactory or accomplished writing) Development What is the best development strategy? Importance of Sentence Control Unless students have control of their writing a the sentence level, they cannot communicate ideals June 4 Page 4 Unless students have control of their writing a the sentence level, they cannot communicate ideals effectively Sentence control is dependent on: • Knowing how to create correct boundaries between sentences • Writing sentences that are logical and grammatically sound • Creating a natural flow and rhythm from one sentence to another so that ideas are easy to follow and understand Actively Addressing Sentence Control Incorporate sentence combining into daily instructional time: • The purpose: to help students improve their ability to write sentences that convey and enhance meaning • The rationale is research based: practicing sentence combining help students develop new strategies for expressing ideas and become better writers The Premise of Sentence Combining Consider the two short sentences: It surprised me. James arrived late. Put them together into a single sentence in at least two different ways. You can change the order of the sentences but not the meaning. The Premise of Sentence Combining Practice is based on: • Taking a set of short, simple sentences - called kernel sentences - and combining them in different ways • Talking about and reflecting on differing combinations - what makes one combination more effective than another June 4 Page 5