"We are what we repeatedly do." Someone said that at some point. Now everyone puts it in every book ever written. What we repeatedly do in our ELA class is refine our writing process. We become VERY good at writing. The way we get better at writing is using Amund Ericsson's concept of purposeful practice. We use a side dish of Timothy Ferriss's "what get's measured, gets managed," with a heaping load of evidence-based education practice as dessert.
8SL1C, 8R9, 8W5, 8W6, 8W7,
The best writing starts with the most meaningful reading. The most meaningful reading answers a meaningful, authentic question. The best questions are student created. Step one, before we start reading, is to ask a meaningful question. As our units progress, we practice a gradual release of control over the questioning process. In our first unit, I give students a meaningful question. From there, our second unit begins with a process through which students create and vote upon the essential question that will drive our learning. In our final unit, students independently create their own question, based on a self-selected topic.
8R1, 8R2, 8R3, 8R4, 8R5, 8R6, 8R8, 8W2c, 8W5, 8W7
Ironically, the second step in our writing process also has nothing to do with writing. Until students have read meaningful texts that offer answers to their essential question, writing cannot happen. As such, I work with my students to select a variety of engaging, accessible, and rigorous texts. We emphasize the importance of reading from diverse sources so that the claims we write are the most universal and well researched possible.
8R1, 8R3, 8R6, 8R8, 8W1, 8W2, 8W5, 8W6, 8W7
Before jumping to making a claim to answer an essential question, it is necessary to review what the texts offer as possible answers. Before making a claim, students complete an evidence accrual protocol. In the classroom, it is set up as a station activity, and at each station students read a meaningful selection from the hundreds, if not thousands of pages of text we read each unit. At this point students find evidence that could support multiple answers to the essential question. All that evidence is dropped into an easily searchable, well-cited spreadsheet.
The evidence accrual protocol to the left was my prior method of organizing writing. It works amazingly well. On a whim, my co-teacher and I tried to improve it during the 2018-2019 school year with what we called "The Connection Tool," during the Unconscious Bias unit. Essentially, as students read, they're continually tracking their learning in a way that serves both as an immediate check for understanding, and as a graphic organizer that they can use to create brilliant paragraphs each week that both stand alone, to assess the week's learning, and easily fit together as the body paragraphs of a summative essay at the end of the unit.
8R1, 8R3, 8R6, 8R8, 8W1, 8W2, 8W5, 8W6, 8W7
Once students have asked a question, read meaningful texts, and accrued their mine of data, they are finally able to create a claim to answer the question. In a claim, we emphasize grade-level, domain-specific vocabulary. As the unit develops and we read more text and refine our thinking, we also refine our claims. Eventually, students take evidence from their evidence mine, explain how their evidence supports their claim, and link everything together with beautiful transitions.
8R1, 8R2, 8R3, 8R5, 8R6, 8R7, 8R8, 8R9, 8W1, 8W4, 8W5, 8W6, 8W8, 8W10, 8SL5,
We devote A LOT of school days to structured writing. Good writing reflects deep thought, and deep thought, and the understanding generated by deep thought, is the most important goal to which a classroom can aspire. To the right are some tools that we use to help create the best possible writing.
8R8, 8R9, 8SL3
Our peer-review process begins with, essentially a lecture. I might lecture 1% of the school year, and I spend that 1% to contribute meaningfully to our peer-review process. I start by reading and projecting above grade level writing, and pointing out the key features that define it as above grade level. Then we move down the rubric to grade level, below grade level, and very confused, or hardly attempted. The goal is to celebrate amazing work, and learn from mistakes, so we enforce a strict rule: Evaluate writing, never judge writers. Once I've explained the rubric points, we move into a whole-group, response-card activity (usually augmented by Peardeck or Plickers software for consistency assurance data tracking) and allow students to turn and talk between exemplars, justifying the score points they offer, before I share the correct score point.
Now that you've seen our writing process, check out our reading process, reading tools, or writing tools to further explore the methods we use to learn!