6-Traits Resources

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Why email is the perfect way to teach writing.

 

Each year another thirty or so college students, for the most part English majors, stumble onto -- and then take furious advantages of -- an almost impossibly capable machine.

 

It works via e-mail. You send it fragments of your paper, maybe a provisional thesis or a few snippets of exegesis. Moments later it returns a fine-grained commentary: "I think you need to make this 'art' connection more clearly in your first paragraph if you're going to follow it throughout the paper.... Are you maybe a little too black / white here?.... I think it's key that you say both things -- that Stephen achieves a success but it's qualified by the ironies with which Joyce frames it.... I don't think the poem suggests he's in a daze."

Via Susan Bainbridge, Indrit Bulku

Robert Marzano

Educational Leadership

Februrary 2012

 

"Writing to learn focuses on deepening understanding and improving retention of content."

 

Writing Across the Curriculum

 

The concept of writing across the curriculum is commonly credited to James Britton (1970, 1972).

• Writing should be integral to instruction in all subject areas.
• Writing is fundamentally a constructive process of encoding new information.
• The act of translating experience into a personalized account aids and extends learning.
• Writing to learn focuses on deepening understanding and improving retention of content. 

The writing activities, typically:

• are short
• informal
• resemble an advanced form of note taking.

Five Phases for Understanding

• Phase 1: Record - Here, students record their understanding of the content. 
• Phase 2: Compare  - In this phase, students share what they've recorded with a partner, noting what's similar and different between their two recordings. 
• Phase 3: Revise - This phase occurs right after the comparison phase, although a teacher might assign it as homework instead. 
• Phase 4: Combine - Here, students combine the products of the R–C–R cycles they've completed and then generate and defend one or more generalizations. Students must support their generalizations using specific evidence. 
• Phase 5: Review - This last phase always occurs before an assessment, although a teacher could request it at any time. 

 

Defined Instructional Practices Build Collective Capacity

The Common Core State Standards make school wide literacy a must do. School leaders are faced with the challenge of increasing the capacity of their entire instructional staff within a brief period of time. In order to raise the collective capacity of teachers, school must employ a locally agreed upon set of defined instructional practices in which all teachers engage in every classroom every day. Defined practices build collective capacity!

Via Mel Riddile

Whether you're currently enrolled in a language program or not, take advantage of free online instruction from an experienced teacher. The lessons will introduce new content to some and serve as a review for others.

Via Librarian@HOPE

I show my students how to setup Google Docs for our ESL writing class.

Via Jill Bromenschenkel