Colleen Appel, Teacher-Consultant of the Ozarks Writing Project, describes professional development and student writing activities to teach on demand writing.

Teachers across the disciplines are increasingly seeing themselves as teachers of literacy and understand the literacy practices in the content areas are distinct but overlap in a student’s daily literacy learning experience–”a key reason why time for joint planning is critical (NCLE).” This post discusses background and activities that teachers can do with students and with other teachers related to writing on demand.

Monett Middle School teachers, having already established an environment for collaboration in grade level content area teams, are moving forward in school-wide collaborative efforts. The focus of January’s professional development session will be helping teachers understand the rhetorical moves of testing prompts in order to design assignments with greater rigor and prepare students for summative assessments.

The National Center for Literacy Education, an alliance of 29 leading education organizations, has studied “what works” in capacity building for literacy. Their key findings are as follows:

• Literacy is not just the English teacher’s job anymore.
• Working together is working smarter.
• But schools aren’t structured to facilitate educators working together.
• Many of the building blocks for remodeling literacy learning are in place.
• Effective collaboration needs systemic support.

The authors of Writing on Demand for the Common Core State Standards Assessments, Kelly Sassi and Anne Gere, offer professional learning activities based on the following classroom-tested assumptions:

1. Changes in assessment help shape instruction.
2. Writing prompts employ rhetorically shaped language.
3. Writing skills should be developed by content area teachers as well as language arts teachers.
4. A vertical approach fosters writing improvement.
5. Text-dependent writing requires focused instruction.
6. Criteria for evaluation belong in the classroom.

Activity One – Surveying the Shifts

1. List the kinds of writing your students currently do in your class.
2. Compare the kinds of writing you currently do with the kinds of writing emphasized in “Pedagogical Shifts.”
3. Share as a group with one person tabulating the results.
4. Ask the group: What kinds of literacy needs are we successfully meeting? Is there any kind of literacy we should be spending more time on? For example, should students be reading more informational texts? If so, which course(s) can meet this need?

Activity Two – Inventory of Literacy Skills

Select an item from the CCSS assessments. Write a detailed explanation of how you arrived at an answer. (Also a classroom move.) Working together, make a list of all the literacy skills students will need to succeed on this item. Brainstorm ideas for instruction that will address the items on the list. (Page 40 of Writing on Demand offers a sample list.)

Classroom Moves – Understanding the Language of Assessment

Students can use the following form when called to read complex text:

• In three sentences summarize the main points of the passage.
• What was confusing or difficult to understand?
• What words are unfamiliar?

Activity Three – Developing Curriculum

One curriculum change teachers can make on their own is to simply increase the amount of writing that students do. The majority of writing should take place at Level 1 – personal, informal and ungraded. Level 2 writing is for an audience, more formal, and graded. Writing skills are best developed at these two levels. Level 3 writing is public, formal, and high stakes. “Maxwell’s Levels of Writing”

Brainstorm Level 1 writing activities for one of the units of study you have developed. Discuss how the writing activities can both help students increase the amount of writing they do and learn content material. Remember that Level 1 writing is ungraded.

(Processes supporting curriculum development: checking for text complexity, considering big ideas and essential questions, aligning with standards)

Activity Four – Internalizing the Writing Process

“For writing transfer to take place, students need to be in charge of and to manipulate their own process.” Students who do well on writing-on-demand tests can easily describe their thinking process. To initiate a conversation about writing process, start by writing. Each teacher, picking the last piece he or she wrote, does a quick-write describing his or her own writing process. Share with a small group. It is likely no two people share the same process. Share the kinds of process strategies that work well for the grade level and subject taught.

Classroom Moves – The Writing Process

Sassi and Gere offer ideas for prewriting, drafting, and revising. They also state that “Motivation is key when it comes to starting the writing process,” and offer some ideas to motivate students.

Activity Five – The Performance Task

Teachers will examine in depth an 8th grade performance task. With reading selections from their subject areas, members of content area teams can work together to develop questions that will help students identify the key points in each selection, comparing how this process differs across the disciplines. Teachers can refer to “Bloom’s Taxonomy Applied to CCSS” to prepare questions.

Teachers will use “Prompt Analysis Questions” to address the rhetorical features of the prompt. “Rhetorical Strategies” further explains Question 4. Teachers will apply these questions to prompts and assignments in their own disciplines; they are a lens through which assignments can be examined in order to diminish student confusion. “Prompt Analysis Questions for Creating Rhetorically Based Assignments”

Activity Six – Criteria for Evaluation

Examine a generic rubric and describe what would be different between a piece of writing that receives all 4’s and one that receives all 1’s. Then examine an assignment-specific rubric and compare it to the generic one. Creating a rubric that either students help write or that they can view while they are writing helps them understand the assignment more clearly.

See the article “Using the Rhetorical Situation to Inform Literacy Instruction and Assessment across the Disciplines” for more information. The authors describe

a framework for approaching how teachers across the disciplines discuss what students are expected to know and how students are assessed.

(An additional chapter in Writing on Demand focuses on the demands of a timed assessment.)

Sassi, Kelly and Anne Ruggles Gere. 2014. Writing on Demand for the Common Core State Standards Assessments. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.