Iowa ASCD: The Source - Special Edition - Writing at the Secondary Level

Special Edition: Writing at Secondary Level The Source

March 28, 2012

Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High Schools

Along with reading comprehension, writing skill is a predictor of academic success and a basic requirement for participation in civic life and in the global economy. Yet every year in the United States, large numbers of adolescents graduate from high school unable to write at the basic levels required by colleges and employers. Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High Schools, commissioned by Carnegie Corporation of New York and published by the Alliance for Excellent Education, discusses eleven specific teaching techniques that research suggests will help improve the writing abilities of the country's 4th- to 12th-grade students.

Teachers Are the Center of Education: Writing, Learning, and Leading in the Digital Age Teachers are the Center - Report

In partnership with Phi Delta Kappa International and the National Writing Project, this new report profiles nine exemplary teachers using technology to teach writing across diverse subject and content areas. Writing, Learning and Leading in the Digital Age provides insight into the successes and challenges of integrating digital tools into the classroom. This report is the second in a series dedicated to bringing teacher voices into the debate on American education reform.

ASCD Provides Several Resources in Writing

ASCD offers several resources to promote writing in middle and high schools.

Using Writing to Learn across the Content Areas: One way to help students learn new content is to get them to write about it. But not just any writing activity will do. Use the 81 tools in this action tool kit to engage students in every grade and subject in writing activities that help them
- Review their background knowledge of subject matter
- Organize their thinking about new facts and concepts
- Evaluate their own understanding of material they've just been taught
Each tool includes complete how-to-use instructions, teacher materials for classroom use, classroom examples, and a template for student assignments. This resource includes a CD-ROM.

Strategies for Teaching Writing: This tool helps teachers coach students through five stages of a writing assignment: prewrite, write, revise, edit, and publish. Access research-based Writing Tools that quickly get teachers up to speed on effective writing strategies and provide all the materials they need to teach and assess the writing process. The tools include complete how-to-use instructions, teaching suggestions, classroom examples, and cross-curricular activities.

Teaching Writing in the Content Areas: included in this book are 35 classroom strategies that help you
- Guide students through the steps of preparing for writing assignments, getting their thoughts down, and revising their work
- Use writing assignments to assess your students' knowledge of content
- Assist students in evaluating their own writing and responding to other students' writing
- Integrate technology into writing assignments with e-journals, e-portfolios, and WebQuests
- Help students learn good writing habits through examples of good writing, writing conferences, and other feedback devices
- Both sample chapters and a study guide are available for this book.

Writing in Your Science Class

Check out this blog about writing in your science class, provided by the National Science Teachers Association. Specific examples are given that can be implemented immediately in your science classes. Scientist

Strive to make those opportunities for your students authentic, modeling the work of a scientist, focusing on taking notes, writing reports, preparing presentations, writing articles for "publication," writing brief updates for funding agencies, writing and answering e-mails and letters, conversing with others online, and writing entries in a daily log/blog. In addition to lab reports, you could reframe other writing assignments in your class as letters, fact sheets, position statements, or presentations.

National Writing Project Provides Resources to Teachers and Students

Student Publishing: Students Write Novels in 30 Days

The National Novel Writing Month's Young Writers Program makes writing fun for students because of, not despite, its audacious goal: kids must pen a novel in a month.

Spotlight on Teen Ink: A Magazine for Teens

Teen Ink, called "The New Yorker for Teens," is the nation's largest publisher of teen work in print and online. Writing Project teachers and their students have been involved in Teen Ink for years. Students can submit fiction, nonfiction, poetry, book, movie and music reviews, and more. There is no charge to submit or to be published.

Figment Provides Space for Students to Share Writing

Katie Robbins, director of educational programming at Figment, an online community where young adults and teens come together to create, discover, and share their own writing and discuss their favorite works, discusses how Figment can be used in the classroom.

Teacher Writing

The National Writing Project provides teachers with writing sources from "audience" to "writing processes." This site is a must for teachers. Helping Children Learn to Write provides unique tools and approaches to increase students writing. Writing Together increases students' skills in writing through collaboration. 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing are shared by experienced teachers of writing.

Iowa Core: College and Career Anchor Standards for Writing

These standards for grades 6-12 define what students should understand and be able to do by the end of each grade span in the area of writing. These College and Career Readiness (CCR) standards are necessary complements - providing broad standards and additional specificity that together define the skills and understandings that all students must demonstrate.

The standards address the following:

Text types and purposes
Production and distribution of writing
Research to build and present knowledge
Range of writing.

Twitter in the Classroom?

And what about the use of social media in the classroom? High schoolers at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, Minn. are being engaged in the classroom in a whole new way. By using social media tools and giving them access to the Internet, students are able to learn and communicate in different ways. Having discussions about their English class online has increased their level of attention and engagement in their studies - and their writing skills. Check out this YouTube from the University of Minnesota.

Iowa ASCD is the source for developing instructional leadership. Serving more than 775 educators - teachers, principals, superintendents, directors of curriculum, technology specialists, college professors, AEA staff - Iowa ASCD strives to develop the collaborative capacity to impact the learning of each and every student in Iowa.

In This Issue

Writing Next

Teachers are the Center

ASCD Writing Resources

Writing in Science

National Writing Project

Iowa Core

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