Disciplinary Literacy With Muscle
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

Physical education is one of the first content areas required by the CCSS to embed literacy within the course. Embracing these new expectations, high school P.E. teachers from Adams Central (Monroe, IN) assigned their weight-lifting students the following prompt: [read more...]

Constructed Responses Require Textual Evidence
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

Constructed response questions in standardized testing require students to draw conclusions and support those inferences with evidence from the text. However, flipping back to the passage is not a habit most students have built; they would prefer to simply generalize their reasons. [read more...]

Writing Simple Summaries and Determining Main Idea
Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

Some students struggle to summarize what they've read. They can tell you lots of specific details that were within the reading, but they can't explain the big idea, what the reading was all about. To work on summarization with her students, Kate Bieker has developed two fantastic ideas. [read more...]

Continue Teaching Math Extended-Response Writing Skills
Monday, October 25th, 2010

Take stock of what students have learned and what they need more exposure to. One area of weakness may still be your students’ explanation of their math problem solving. Additional instruction on how to write a strong math extended response is a great topic for any time of year! [read more...]

Applying Principles of Question-Answer Relationship (QAR)
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Because question types vary, students need to learn the different kinds of questions and how each requires different kinds of answers. For many students it never occurred to them that there was anything other than an obvious, right-there question to ask. [read more...]

Point of View Letter Writing
Friday, January 15th, 2010

After studying a concept or event for several days/weeks, a fun way to assess students' understanding is to have them write letters from a different perspective. West Vigo Middle School teacher Melanie Beaver had great success with this in her language arts classroom. She loved having students [read more...]

Spice Up Subject-Area Writing with "Point of View"
Thursday, November 5th, 2009

To add a little life into your content-area writings, students may appreciate playing with voice. Beyond just writing explanatory pieces to the teacher, develop a writing task that allows students to use their content knowledge by writing as if they were a particular object [read more...]

Create Simple Summaries with Pyramids
Friday, April 24th, 2009

I’ve shared the idea of Information Pyramids previously. It’s one of my favorite strategies for getting students to summarize a main idea and to include some specific supporting details. Since sharing it, many teachers have told me of their successes with it. So I am referencing [read more...]

Writing from a Different Perspective
Friday, January 9th, 2009

Looking for a creative way to have students write about a content-area topic? Fourth grade teachers Josh Richardson and Claudia Jackson are having their students write letters during the study of U.S. History. One class is designated the “colonists”; the other class represents the Native Americans. [read more...]

Writing Test Questions that Parallel the State Assessment
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

Instead of having an exact answer within the multiple choice possibilities, you might be less definitive. Standardized tests often ask a “most likely” question. For example, Which of these words MOST LIKELY reflects the author’s general attitude toward life on [read more...]

Strategies for Short-Answer Responses in the Content Areas
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

You can encourage students to write stronger, more thorough responses to content area questions with the Invisible Questions strategy.For every short-answer question you ask, consider assessing it on a 6-point system, broken down as follows: [read more...]

Paralleling In-Class Assessments with the State Exam
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

Consider including 1-2 short essay questions (a paragraph response or more) on assessments in grades 3 and up. Look for responses that include an introduction, body, and conclusion. And require students to provide reasons, evidence, examples, or support for their ideas. Don’t let them [read more...]

Lift, Whisper, & Track
Monday, May 19th, 2008

When students write in the content areas, their “hurry-up and finish” attitude often prevails. They often slap it together to be “done.” One way to slow students down after they are finished writing, and before they turn it in is to expect a 3-step rereading process [read more...]