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Karpie's Writing Process

**Page under construction. Pardon my mess.**

"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.

Essay Writing Process


Description

Resources

Step One: Questioning

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.
Essential Question Stems
Example Wordle
Past, Student-Created Essential Questions - Equality
Past Student-Created Inquiry-Based Research Questions

Step Two: Meaningful Reading

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. 
Close Read Lesson Plan
Close-Read Tools
Group-Read Protocol
Independent-Reading Protocol
Behavior Lock Down, Silent-Reading Protocol

Step Three: Evidence Accrual

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.
Evidence Accrual Lesson Plan
Exemplar Evidence Accrual Form
Exemplar Evidence Mine

...or Step Three: Connection Tool

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.
Student Data Supporting Connection Tool
Refugee Connection Tool
Unconscious Bias Connection Tool
Food Chains Connection Tool
Inquiry-Based Research Connection Tool

Step Four: Evidence-Based Claim Graphic Organizer

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.
Graphic Organizer Lesson Plan
Evidence-Based Claim Graphic Organizer
"Claim"-Refining Protocol
Writing Level Four Explanations
The Three Levels of Transitions

Step Four became obsolete when I switched to the Connection Tool method. I decided to "simplify, and added lightness," as Colin Chapman would recommend.

Step Five: Write an Excellent Essay

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.
Writing Day Lesson Plan
Writing Tools

Step Six: Peer-Review Process

The longer I teach, the more I realize that students don't learn when teachers evaluate their work. Students learn the most when they learn to evaluate their own work, and the work of their peers. Our peer-review protocol emphasizes evidence from student writing and linking it to language from the four-point rubric. I've utilized the whole "warm & cool" method in the past and it ends up emphasizing feelings, not writing. My evidence-based method grounds all actionable feedback in evidence accrued from the writing itself.

Step 6A: Exemplar explanation and response-card consistency.
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.
QuickWrite Exemplars and Gallery Walk Materials
4-Point Rubric

Step 6B: Gallery Walk peer evaluation of exemplar essays.
The second day of our peer-review process involves students walking to 12-14 stations around the classroom and closely reading and evaluating their peer's work based on the same rubric Ms. Davis and I use to evaluate them, Students are expected to use a Google Form to assign a score, justify it using evidence from both the rubric and the writing itself, and then to offer some form of constructive criticism (usually based in the rubric language of the score point one higher than the student achieved.)  You'd be AMAZED how accurate the aggregate data is when students base their peer evaluation in evidence and text, instead of warm and cool feelings.
The images above show my real students, really engaged in the peer-review process. It also shows a single station before students ruin everything. The reason for two rubrics is to include both Ingles y Español. 
Peer-Review Form
...in Spanish

Step 6C: Self evaluation using rubric.
The end of our peer-review process is actually a self-evaluation during which students evaluate their own writing. At this point, they've seen what the best, the average, and the worst students produced on the assignment, so they read their own writing from a new, broader perspective. At this point, they haven't seen my grade of their writing. I've found that after this three-day process, they're usually more critical of their own writing than I would ever be, so instead of "Mister?!?! Why would you give me a _?!?!" What I usually hear is, "Wow, Mister, I  thought I was below grade level, but I was at grade level? Am I really as smart as Genesis?"  Needless to say, it is a transformative, evidence-based process.
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  • Home
  • Curriculum
    • Digital Team Resources
    • Zen Classroom
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    • Free-Verse Poetry
    • Transition Week
    • Unconscious Bias
    • Short Story 1
    • Food Chains
    • Short Story 2
    • Murder Mystery
    • Wrapup
    • Extra Units >
      • 10:00 ELA Activities
      • COVID-19 Journal Project
      • Inquiry-Based Research
      • Short Story 3
      • TED Talk Extra Credit
    • Professional Development >
      • Co-Teaching Seminar
      • ORID Data Protocol
      • FSU CCLS / Next Gen
      • Google PD
      • UnSelfie: Book Study >
        • Empathy Lessons
      • Teaching in a Middle School
      • Backwards Design
  • Skills
    • Write >
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      • Writing Process >
        • Informational Writing Process
        • Creative Writing Process
      • Differentiation
    • Read >
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    • Web Design >
      • Google Sites Tutorials
  • Assess
    • Learning Standards >
      • Common Core Learning Standards
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      • 4-Point Essay Rubric >
        • 4-Point Rubric Grade Converter
        • 4-Point Peer Evaluation
      • Short Story Rubric
      • Poetry Rubric
      • 2-Point, Short-Answer Question Rubric
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      • Web-Design Rubric >
        • Web Design Peer Evaluation Form
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