Student Error in Writing

"[S]tudents write the way they do, not because they are slow or non-verbal, indifferent to or incapable of academic excellence, but because they are beginners and must, like all beginners, learn by making mistakes.  These they make aplenty for such a variety of reasons that the inexperienced teacher is almost certain to see nothing but a chaos of error when encounter[ing] their papers.  Yet a closer look will reveal very little that is random or “illogical” in what they have written.  And the keys to their development as writers often lie hidden in the very features of their writing that English teachers have been trained to brush aside with a marginal code letter or a scribbled injunction to “Proofread!”  Such strategies ram at the doors of their incompetence while the keys that would open them lie in view."

from Errors and Expectations by Mina Shaugnessy

Pursuing the Depths of Knowledge

Good teachers resist the idea of “teaching to the test.” But aligning literacy instruction with assessment isn’t teaching to the test if that assessment is a valid measure of our students’ performance. If the test is rigorous—if it demands deep levels of knowledge—then alignment means asking ourselves, “How can we plan for this rigor in our instruction?”
Boyles (2016) Pursuing the Depths of Knowledge

Some good resources

Articles Kaitlin Nardi is having her students read...
Why are Stories so important?
"Once the necessities for survival are taken care of, we humans spend more of our free time immersed in story than doing anything else. Stories about things that aren’t true and people that don’t exist, for the most part. Think about it. We watch movies and television; play video games; read books, comics and cartoons; listen to songs; look at art; see performances of plays, dance and operas; and tell each other stories around the dinner table or the campfire. And we have always done this, since we learned to communicate with one another and figured out how to scratch drawings on a cave wall."

Everybody Is a Story: Exploring the Role Story and Narrative Play in Real Life
"Life is a series of moments strung together over time. A scientist might call these moments a “cognitive event.” I call them stories. We compress thousands of stories/moments/events into a meta narrative that defines who we are. The most meaningful, memorable moments are packaged into self-contained stories that give shape to our personal story arc and mark plot points along life’s journey. We use these moments, these stories, as a way to understand and make sense of world around us. "

A resource to which I often refer teachers...
Bloom's Taxonomy of Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

Plot Diagram Images

Hello everyone!

I thought I would take this opportunity to use this blog and share a resource with everyone that I created today. These jpeg images are going to be used with my plot structure and diagram lesson this week. Students are creating an interactive notebook in my class this year, so these images were used in a PPT during a stage of the notebook entry for plot structure and plot diagrams.

They are super basic, but just something I never found that looked how I wanted them to look. The images use color to highlight a portion of the diagram with a set that include and don't include labels. I was thinking (and will be doing myself) of then using the non-labeled images as a quick assessment at the start or end of a class one day this or next week to assess their knowledge of the five basic elements of plot.

Hope this is useful for someone now or at some point down the line! I also wanted to try out our new blog and contribute something.

Cheers!

- Keith

Welcome!

Welcome to our internal Everett English Language Arts blog!
This blog can only be read by and contributed to by ELA teachers at Everett.
I have created several pages that I think may be useful, like Resources, Forms, PD, Problems of Practice, etc.
Please let me know if you have any suggestions of what else we can include here!
Favorite blogs? Useful sites? Send me a link and I'll post it!
Looking for some best practices? Have questions about how to handle something in your class? Ask away! We'll crowd source the solutions!