Writing Behind Every Door

Teaching Common Core Writing in the Content Areas

Heather Wolpert-Gawron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317821144
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

For students to become college-ready writers, they must be exposed to writing throughout the school day, not just in English class. This practical book shows teachers in all subject areas how to meet the Common Core State Standards and make writing come alive in the classroom. Award-winning educator Heather Wolpert-Gawron provides effective and exciting ideas for teaching argument writing, informational writing, project-based writing, and writing with technology. Each chapter is filled with strategies, prompts, and rubrics you can use immediately.

Special Features:

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• A variety of writing strategies that work in any subject area

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• Tips for developing meaningful prompts

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• Diagrams and templates that you can use with your students

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• Rubrics for assessing writing, as well as ideas for having students create their own rubrics

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• Samples of student work in different formats

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• Ideas for teaching students to break the Google homepage habit and conduct effective research

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• Cross-curricular writing assignments for science, history, ELA, electives, and PE

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• Suggestions for teaching summary writing, an essential academic skill

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• Ideas for staff professional development on Common Core writing

CHAPTER

1

The Common Core Standards as a Meaningful Guide, Not an Instruction Manual

The common core state standards are a set of learning skills that all American students should achieve, not a federal curriculum. They set the benchmarks and guidelines for what each student should learn, not how or what teachers teach.

(“A Parent’s Guide to the Common Core Standards”)

As I’ve said before, assessments tend to drive instruction. However, as we know, that isn’t the best way to teach. In fact, it turns out, it’s not a particularly good way to assess either.

In the introduction of this book, I listed a few things I like about the Common Core Standards and the assessments to come. I like that the multiple-choice tests are computerized. I like that some of them may be adaptive because then they are more tailored to the individual. I applaud the fact that they include a requirement that is more than just a multiple-choice component in that they are also asking for a performance-based element that reflects the use of skills other than simple information download.

In other words, I believe that while test taking is still its own genre, the powers that be are moving towards a more real-world aligned practice. What is being asked is closer to what students will have to do when they are no longer in our school systems.

So, for that reason, I don’t believe that there is one method or philosophy to achieve these standards. Perhaps this next era will give teachers more flexibility to select the methods they feel would best accomplish the goal. Let’s hope so.

However, regardless of what the Common Core (CC) assessments may ask of us, the fact is that we should have more flexibility in our own classroom assessments. It is our responsibility as teachers to ensure that our classroom or district assessments are meaningful. We can’t wait for state or federal tests to do it for us. It may never happen. Therefore, I’m going to go so far as to say: ditch test stress and don’t worry about it.

Don’t panic. I’m not saying, “don’t care.” I’m saying do the job you know you should do, and I believe that scores will fall into place. Use the Common Core Standards as a guide to what needs to be taught, but use your talents, your experience, and your common sense to get the students there.

Having said that, I wanted to just brush off a couple of old tried and true educative philosophies that relate to writing across the content areas. By doing so, I’m hoping to remind readers of the powerful learning that can happen when engagement is combined with simplicity.

In terms of student engagement, there is nothing more powerful than Project-Based Learning, and for the purposes of this book, project-based writing. In terms of simplicity, especially for those who are unfamiliar with assigning and assessing writing in the classroom, you can’t get more straightforward than using the 6 Traits as a guide for writing quality. These two practices can be used regardless of the content and regardless of the educational movement we are facing. In other words, no matter whether we are facing having to hit a list of specific state standards, national standards, Common Core Standards, 22nd century global standards, or mythical intergalactic standards, good teaching practices work.

Therefore, if we think of the Common Core Standards as a guide, not a manual, it is vital to know that you don’t need to ditch what you know works. In this chapter, I want to remind you of (or perhaps even introduce you to) a few practices that really work.

Therefore, in the spirit of honoring both the old with the new, let’s first do a little review of Project-Based Learning and the 6 Traits.

Welcoming Back an Old Friend: Project-Based Learning (or, in this case, Project-Based Writing)

Recently, I had an awakening of sorts in my own practice: I am NOT going to teach so test-driven, I told myself. I’m tired of the five-paragraph essay! Where does it exist anywhere but in school? Instead, I decided that everything I did from here on in would have some connection to the world outside of school. The plan: to immerse my lessons and my classroom assessments in authenticity. And test scores be darned.

OK, so maybe I wasn’t that confident. Nevertheless, I went ahead with my plans and devised units based on project-based writing. I want to take a moment to review this concept with readers because I think that, while it is old news to many, we tend to lose perspective about the basic principles of PBL when we are faced with what we believe to be a strict checklist, an instruction manual, of standards. We look at the checklist and start to organize our practice around test prep rather than around real-world application. However, I think if one were to reexamine PBL through the lens of Common Core, you’ll see that you don’t need to sacrifice quality teaching practices to achieve these newer standards.

Now, I’m lucky. I work in a district and, more specifically, in a school, that permits me to develop units and lessons that align to our tests. They also allow me my better judgment in how to prepare for them so that I am not lock step with other teachers. We are all allowed our own style, and thus appeal to a wider variety of learners.

I have to also give credit where credit is due: the past era of economic depression and budget cuts actually had a lot to do with the freedom I was permitted as a creative teacher; with no textbook adoptions in sight and antiquated textbooks falling apart on our shelves, this also became an era of opportunity for teacher-supported supplementation of the curriculum. As a result, I have been able to choose authentic lessons and authentic classroom assessments. At the start of this more meaningful educative journey, I hoped that our more traditional district assessments scores would reflect that deeper learning. In the end, I was right.

However, my luck is not the norm. Too many teachers are told that the classroom tests, the district tests, the state tests, and the federal tests are the driving force of the curriculum. They are not permitted the freedom to use their own training, their own expertise, and their own instinct to look beyond the test prep lessons.

Additionally, not all teachers are eager to start trusting themselves to develop materials. So many have been brainwashed. Yep, I said it. Brainwashed. I think some teachers have actually started to believe what the media, politicos, and textbook companies would have us think: that we aren’t capable of creating. That all we can do to prepare for standardized tests is regurgitate the canned lessons from the textbook and test prep companies. But I believe that once teachers rediscover some of the benefits of project-based learning, and more specifically for the purposes of this book, project-based writing, it’s hard to go back to a canned program. See, one size does not fit all when it comes to engaging students.

If our country wants to cultivate innovative students, it needs to allow for innovation in our classroom. Innovation in our students begins with innovative teachers; and innovative teachers cannot thrive in a standardized environment.

Project-based learning allows for innovation. For those who perhaps have heard the term but who aren’t fully clear what it means in the classroom, it is a way of teaching that is more guidance than authority. In project-based learning, students jump into learning content by engaging in rigorous projects as an end result to their efforts. Many practitioners of project-based learning also use problem-based learning wherein the students discover issues or problems that need to be solved and learning happens throughout the process of solving the issue.

Now, while I know it’s not kosher to use the terms interchangeably, I do believe, however, that they are related, and I teach now using both: problems designated by students for solution and projects designed to communicate the best way in which to solve them. Writing is always interwoven throughout both the lessons and the assessments. After all, a student must be able to use writing to communicate his or her findings or solutions.

In other words, rather than the daily use of worksheets or the routine of daily whole classroom instruction, the teacher hands over the badge of being the only content-area expert, and allows students to build up their own knowledge with more authentic goals to reach in order to prove their learning.

Project-based learning is how teachers who cannot control the content they teach can at least control the way in which they teach it. PBL stresses communication over content.

And it’s vital for middle and secondary students. In fact, the New York Department of Education’s white paper, “Project Based Learning: Inspiring Middle School Students to Engage in Deep and Active Learning,” states that,

The middle school years are challenging. We struggle with keeping students academically engaged during these years of tremendous change. Because projects build on authentic learning tasks that engage and motivate students, middle school is an ideal time to integrate project-based learning. Projects encourage students to encounter, and struggle with, important and “big” ideas. Project-based learning in all content areas (e.g., language arts, social studies, math, science, visual and performing arts, health) shifts the focus of teaching and learning from a set of known facts to a process modeled on the ways that experts in the field think and work.

Project-based learning is about role-play. It is about authenticity. And it is about application. Good teaching, meaningful teaching, project-based teaching, therefore, hits the new standards.

For example, the new expectation of collaboration appears in the Speaking and Listening section of the standards:

Speaking and Listening: flexible communication and collaboration

Including but not limited to skills necessary for formal presentations, the Speaking and Listening standards require students to develop a range of broadly useful oral communication ...