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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Example of Feedback Provided
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