Juli Kendall's Weekly
Writing Workshop Journal
A MiddleWeb Listserv Project
Members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List and other interested teachers
are joining together to explore the Writing Workshop and other ideas about
supporting young adolescent writers and readers. Juli Kendall, a reading-writing
teacher/coach in Long Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion.
Last year, Juli kept a weekly journal from her Reading Workshop.
This year, Juli is continuing her journals, but this time she's focusing
on her Writing Workshop. Find out more about our project at our Reading/Writing
Workshop homepage. You'll find Juli's background article here.
Links to many of the tools created by Juli and her colleagues are embedded
in these journals. Most often, when you click on them, a PDF file will begin
to download. You'll find a list of the downloads here.
If you'd like to join the daily discussion that parallels Juli's Journals,
find out how here.
Writing Workshop
Week #20:
Persuasive Writing:
Building Test Prep into Literacy Learning
Call it what you will -- "expanding the envelope," "working
outside the box," or even, "changing the way we do business."
Whatever we call it, the task before us is to find a way, through the Writing
Workshop, to teach kids what they need "to know and be able to do"
on district and state writing assessments. Our approach is to create a unit
of study on "Writing a Persuasive Essay" that anticipates the
need for test prep.
Judith Langer's new book, Effective
Literacy Instruction, Building Successful Reading and Writing Programs
(2002, NCTE), spells out how effective schools integrate test
preparation.
In effective schools, test preparation does not mean mere practice
of test-related items. Rather, the focus is on the underlying knowledge
and skills needed to do well in coursework and in life, as well as on the
tests, and these become part of the ongoing English language arts learning
goals and the students' ongoing received curriculum. In contrast, in the
typical schools, test prep means test practice. It is allocated its own
space in class time, often before testing begins, apart from the rest of
the year's work and goals. (p. 17)
Langer directs the National Research Center on English Learning & Achievement
(CELA). Last year I used the CELA booklet Guidelines
for Teaching Middle and High School Students to Read and Write Well: Six
Features of Effective Instruction to integrate test preparation into
reading instruction. (Journal #24).
Langer's new book offers an expanded version of the Guidelines booklet and
a multitude of classroom examples. It's helping me think through an effective
way to help students improve on writing assessments.
"In our study," Langer writes, "we found that while some
test practice and test-taking hints were offered in both the effective and
typical schools, reformulation of both curriculum and instructional practice
was a pervasive feature only in the effective schools." With this finding
in mind, I decided to plan "Writing a Persuasive Essay" not as
a separate activity but as one of the Units of Study in our Writing Workshop.
We'll spend three to four weeks learning how to write persuasive essays.
Our District's Writing Instruction Teacher's Guide defines persuasive
writing this way:
The purpose of persuasive writing is to convince. In
this genre, "the writer skillfully defends a position about a topic
and supports it with relevant evidence to provide the reader with a convincing
argument about the topic." Support is given for each claim to persuade
the reader of the validity of the writer's position on the topic. (Capital
Region Professional Development Center, 2000)
I'm planning and organizing a string of mini lessons using the "Persuasive
Writing Skills" from the District Guide. Based on the assessments we
have for persuasive writing, these mini lessons teach what the kids need
to know and be able to do in writing their essays.
Mini lessons About the Topic
Writers of persuasive essays:
-- choose a position or opinion.
-- locate and gather facts, statistics, and examples in texts which defend
the position.
Mini lessons About the Introduction
Writers of persuasive essays:
-- state the position.
-- write a strong lead that engages the writer
* A story
* An interesting fact
* "What if" questions
-- appeal to reader's interest.
Mini lessons About the Evidence
Writers of persuasive essays:
-- distinguish between fact and opinion.
-- use precise, relevant, convincing evidence.
-- use logical order; organization to convince
* Strongest evidence in the beginning
* Transition words
-- support position with examples, statistics, and evidence.
-- consider the audience - what facts would convince them?
-- address reader concerns.
-- choose words and phrases that are convincing.
Mini lessons About the Conclusion
Writers of persuasive essays:
-- summarize the position or argument.
-- use convincing vocabulary to persuade the audience.
I'll use the touchstone texts I've chosen for this unit of study to immerse
kids in the genre during the mini lessons. As strong examples and touchstones,
I'm using student written persuasive essays, my own essay, and published
essays. Before we begin to write our own essays, we'll spend lots of time
reading and talking about persuasive writing.
After we finish the immersion in reading, the kids will write a persuasive
essay on their personal topics. I'll model my own essay first, about why
dogs need to be on a leash. Then, when they have written an essay on their
own topic, I'll help them learn how to respond in a "test situation"
using some of the district's writing prompts. In addition, I've adapted
a Checklist for Persuasive Writing
from our District writing guide. Using this checklist as they write their
persuasive essays scaffolds the writing task for our kids. It also gives
us a common language and clear, explicit expectations.
During the unit of study about persuasive writing, I want to keep in mind
that even though we are preparing to do the district writing assessment,
our focus is on students' literacy learning. Here's how Judith Langer explains
it:
Overall, effective schools seemed to focus on students' learning
using the tests to be certain that the skills and knowledge tested were
being learned within the framework of improved language arts instruction,
while the typical schools seemed to focus on the test themselves, with raising
test scores, rather than students' literacy learning, as the primary goal.
(p. 23)
We want our students to be able to sustain and build upon their new skills
and knowledge long after the testing date has passed and they are called
upon to write persuasively in the real world.
Download Juli's Curricular
Calendar #6 (persuasive writing) for Writing Workshop
Download a comparison of Juli's Reading
and Writing Workshop plans
Read next week's journal
Read last week's journal
Read Juli's backgrounder about her work
Back to Juli's journal index
Back to the Writing/Reading Workshop Index Page