Formative Assessment Tool
The C3WP Using Sources Tool (UST) is a formative assessment tool used to help develop students’ argument writing (NWP, n.d.-d). The tool is designed to be used multiple times during the school year to identify the argument writing skills the students are using and to identify next steps for teaching. The last step on the UST assessment asks teachers to identify “What do you see as next steps for this student?” (NWP, n.d.-d). This prompt encourages teachers to choose which instructional resource would be helpful to teach next. The UST is different from traditional rubrics in that it is designed to be used as a tool to plan instruction rather than as a summative assessment (NWP, n.d.-d). The UST is available on the C3WP website for any teacher to use.
C3WP in the Classroom
The data for this study came from interviews with teachers who participated in the C3WP professional development. The research question guiding the study was: In what ways did participating in the C3WP professional development impact secondary teachers’ argument writing teaching practices? For this manuscript, I have focused on two teachers as representative samples of the data, and their stories are highlighted below. These stories illustrate how secondary teachers used C3WP professional development and resources to teach argument writing. Pseudonyms were used for all participants.
Rebecca
Rebecca is a middle school social studies teacher with over 15 years of teaching experience. She explained her goals in teaching argument writing: “I really believe that we need to teach kids how to respectfully disagree with each other. […] Argument writing helps them learn how to organize their thoughts and therefore develop their own ideas about how the world works.” After attending the C3WP professional development, the first thing Rebecca did for her classroom was purchase notebooks for her students. Every day students would come in and pick up their notebooks before class started, “And then they write—every single day.”
Rebecca appreciated C3WP’s “Writing into the Day” lesson resources. The “Writing into the Day” instructional resource is designed to give students the opportunity to start each class period with a short daily warm up activity. The students begin by reading an argumentative text from a themed text set and identify the main claim of the article. They then write informally for 5-7 minutes about what they want to know more about and where they stand on this issue today. The next day the students respond to a new article from the text set on the same general topic (NWP, n.d.-f). These activities support students in writing a short argument from informational texts, and they build students’ writing fluency over time. The focus is on making a claim from texts with multiple points of view (NWP, n.d.-f). Rebecca explained:
I really like the “Writing into the Day” concept. My students have taken to it and have gotten used to it and I think this is what I’ll hang onto. I’ve found it to be a great way to get kids writing. Thinking about writing and getting ideas on paper. I’ve also found that it was a great way for them to wonder, recap, express their thoughts without judgment and also to learn how to take notes and use all kinds of different styles of writing in one place.
For Rebecca, the “Writing into the Day” concept helped to build her students’ writing fluency by building the habit of writing each day. The students started saying, “We write more in social studies than we do in English language arts!” This made Rebecca feel like she was “doing it right,” and what Rebecca appreciated about the notebooks was that before meeting with students, she could “grab [their] notebook and look at what they’ve been writing about.” She could identify students’ interests and informally assess what to teach next. By using the notebooks, Rebecca was able to “see growth in [the students’] writing” from the beginning of the year.
Using the “Writing into the Day” C3WP mini-unit, Rebecca’s social studies students read three to four articles about school shootings and gun control. She then asked students to build their daily writings into a larger essay by writing their claim on the topic and use evidence to back it up. Before she began the argumentative writing project with her class, Rebecca had contacted her local newspaper to suggest they have a contest for her students. The newspaper editor initially agreed to publish one essay that he would pick from Rebecca’s students’ submissions, though after reading all of the submissions, he published five of the students’ essays, which were about preventing school shootings, enforcing stricter gun control, and student protesting during the school day. Publishing the essays in the local newspaper gave students a purpose and authentic audience for their work. Overall, Rebecca found her C3WP approach to teaching to be successful in encouraging her students to write more, and she saw growth in the students’ writing as a result.
Ingrid
Ingrid, a high school English teacher with over 10 years of teaching experience, came into C3WP with a philosophy of teaching writing that included having the students write every day, allowing choice in their writing, and using mentor texts. In the C3WP professional development she attended, Ingrid appreciated how each teacher taught a demonstration lesson for the other teacher participants that showed how they taught (or would teach) the C3WP mini-unit in their 6-12 classrooms.
Ingrid used C3WP to inspire the mini-units she taught on writing claims and providing evidence. She explained, “[C3WP] gave me a lot of different ways to look at breaking down teaching a claim and breaking down [teaching] evidence. I tried in the past to [teach these concepts] in broad strokes.” Ingrid found that C3WP gave her “a better way to focus in on the little details of argument writing.” She especially appreciated C3WP’s concept of the nuanced claim. Ingrid explained, “What I liked about C3WP was [the concept of] the nuanced claim. I hadn’t used that language or thought about that before. I always wanted kids to have the more specific, precise claim, but [C3WP’s concept of the nuanced claim] became a different way of looking at it.” Ingrid used the C3WP terminology to work toward an understanding of establishing nuanced rather than binary arguments with her students (Olsen, 2018, p. 93).
Ingrid also “loved all of the text sets” provided in the C3WP instructional materials. The text sets are sets of articles that represent multiple perspectives on a topic that go beyond pro and con to provide a more nuanced representation of each topic. Teachers are encouraged to draw from the text sets already provided in C3WP and to find their own text sets related to their students’ interests. (Friedrich, et al., 2018). Ingrid explained that the text sets “were such great resources” because “it takes so much time to put together a text set yourself.” She also sometimes added to the existing C3WP text sets or created her own text sets by pulling articles from Newsela and EBSCOhost.
At the beginning of the year, Ingrid had wanted to see where the students’ writing was before she began C3WP instruction. In the pre-assessment, she noticed, “the writing was just all over the board and a lot of it was very much stream of consciousness.” After C3WP instruction, Ingrid noticed “clear thinking in [the students’] writing, […] really strong organization and structure, and […] direct quotes for evidence and just all those things that we look for in good writing. It was a huge, huge improvement from what they did at the beginning of the year.”
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