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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.
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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.
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Step Three: Evidence AccrualBefore 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.
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...or Step Three: Connection ToolThe 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
Inquiry-Based Research Connection Tool
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Step Four: Evidence-Based Claim Graphic OrganizerOnce 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.
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Step Four became obsolete when I switched to the Connection Tool method. I decided to "simplify, and added lightness," as Colin Chapman would recommend. |
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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