Lindsey Hancock Warden
Writing Strategies
In every subject that I teach, writing is a critical skill which students must apply to a variety of informal and formal performance tasks. Writing is a major way that students demonstrate deep understanding of content, make connections, and apply their knowledge meaningfully. In my classroom, I assess writing tasks both on their own merit, but also for evidence of connections between content areas and application of reading skills. Through performance writing tasks, I gain important insights into my students' mastery of a variety of learning material.
Table of Contents
Informal Writing
As a passionate writer myself, I recognize the need for frequent, informal writing opportunities that allow the writer to practice his or her craft in a nonthreatening atmosphere. I engage my students with a variety of informal writing tasks during our daily classroom activities that allow room for creativity and critical thinking as students hone and build their skills.
These artifacts demonstrate that promoting informal writing as an instructional strategy is an effective way to allow students to demonstrate their knowledge meaningfully. Moreover, informal writing provides opportunities for students to demonstrate their deep understanding of multiple content areas while simultaneously writing about connections across different areas of study. Please click on the slideshow below to view the images and my interpretation in full-screen mode.
Narrative Writing
The teaching of narrative writing is critical to developing writing skills overall in my students. Narrative writing is typically the first type of formal writing we work on in the fall semester. This is due to the fact that students normally enjoy narrative writing more than other forms because they get to exercise their own creativity in coming up with a story or responding to a prompt with a story, thus encouraging deep understanding of writing by investing them in the task at hand.
Please click on the slideshow to expand the images of a sample of this process from a tenth grade student.
Often, I assign narrative writing tasks in tandem with another unit of study. In the samples adjacent, two eighth grade students respond to a performance writing task after reading a legend called "The Bear Boy" by Joseph Bruchac. They read the legend, learned about the components of American legends, and wrote their own legends in the form of narratives.
These artifacts serve as additional evidence of students' ability to understand multiple content areas and their connections, while applying this understanding to meaningful written tasks.
Argumentative Writing
Argumentative writing is important for my students because it pushes them to read and think critically. At a stage in life when my students are finding their individual voices for the first time, argumentative writing helps them to form opinions and defend those opinions with facts and analysis. This is just one example of a way in which my students learn to build skills and apply knowledge in meaningful ways.
When argumentative writing is first taught, we read the performance task and accompanying articles together, and then I model writing a body paragraph in response to the performance task. As we practice this skill together over the course of the academic year, my students build independence in argumentative writing until they can complete a cold read of a set of texts, and write their own argumentative essay without coaching.
Literary Analysis
Literary analysis is one of the most important forms of essay writing that I teach. The ability to write proficient literary analyses will serve my students in their college English classes and beyond, and also push my students to think deeply about literary texts, make connections between literary elements, and form and defend their own opinions on literary theme, author's purpose, and other topics relevant to literature.
That said, very few students have ever been exposed to this type of writing before entering my class. At my first placement school, literary analysis was tested on the state achievement test for the first time in my first year there. At my current placement school, students do not begin literary analysis writing at this time until they reach my class in the seventh grade. Therefore, I must teach literary analysis methodically and provide several scaffolding techniques such as graphic organizers in order to help my students form deep understandings of literary analysis. Please click on the video below to expand it and view my literary analysis instructional strategies in action.
The writing samples adjacent demonstrate the literary analysis work that results from the direct instruction in the video above. In these samples, my seventh grade students fill in graphic organizers designed to help them write a thesis, support their thesis with three reasons (which will become topic sentences), prove those reasons with concrete examples (evidence), and expound on concrete examples with their own explanations. This graphic organizer is another way of thinking about the EAA chunks I describe under argumentative essays above.
After students plan their essay in the graphic organizer, they move on to write their initial drafts, which are also pictured in the PDF adjacent. Students demonstrate good essay organization in the drafts, and most also organize their paragraphs correctly based on the information in their graphic organizers. I feel confident in my instructional strategies in writing when I see that my students are able to take skills and knowledge from direct instruction and classroom practice and apply them to a meaningful, complex task. Through these activities, my students deepen their understanding of content and show that they are well on their way to mastery.