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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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