This rubric delineates specific expectations about an essay assignment to students and provides a means of assessing completed student essays.
Essay Rubric
Essay Map
Use this graphic organizer to develop an outline for an essay that includes an introductory statement, main ideas, supporting details, and a conclusion.
Write Alouds
This strategy guide explains how to use write-aloud (also known as modeled writing) to teach effective writing strategies and improve students' independent writing ability.
Shared Writing
This strategy guide explains how to use shared writing to teach students effective strategies that will improve their own independent writing ability.
Using the RAFT Writing Strategy
This strategy guide introduces the RAFT technique and offers practical ideas for using this technique to teach students to experiment with various perspectives in their writing.
Supporting Student Comprehension in Content Area Reading
In this strategy guide, you'll learn a few simple, yet powerful, techniques to encourage students to use peer talk and writing to enhance their understanding of content area texts.
Facilitating Participation with Silent Conversations
This guide introduces silent conversations, a collaborative learning technique that has students
thinking, sharing, and reflecting about important questions—but through writing rather than talk.
The Art of the Doodle: Writing with Imagination
Use independent, imaginative artwork and varied writing prompts to assess understanding of a given topic for a student body with differentiated needs.
ICED: The Key to Elaboration
Most students struggle when adding detail to their body paragraphs. This guide serves as a means of instruction and provides models for the students to master development.
Developing Evidence-Based Arguments from Texts
This strategy guide clarifies the difference between persuasion and argumentation, stressing the connection between close reading of text to gather evidence and formation of a strong argumentative claim about text.
Promoting Student-Directed Inquiry with the I-Search Paper
The sense of curiosity behind research writing gets lost in some school-based assignments. This Strategy Guide provides the foundation for cultivating interest and authority through I-Search writing, including publishing online.
Inquiry Charts (I-Charts)
This guide introduces I-Charts, a strategy that enables students to generate meaningful questions about a topic and organize their writing.
Power Notes
The strategy examined in this Strategy Guide teaches students an outlining technique to help them differentiate between main ideas and details in their reading and writing.
Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing
With full recognition that writing is an increasingly multifaceted activity, we offer several principles that should guide effective teaching practice.
Designing Writing Assignments
Traci Gardner offers practical tips, starting points, and a companion website to help secondary and college teachers design effective writing assignments.
Talking in Class: Using Discussion to Enhance Teaching and Learning
The authors guide high school teachers in developing skills in promoting and facilitating authentic discussion in the English language arts classroom.
Writing at the Threshold: Featuring 56 Ways to Prepare High School and College Students to Think and Write at the College Level
This book offers both an eloquent philosophy of composition instruction and a useful set of classroom-tested teaching ideas distilled from the author's 28 years of teaching writing.
What Is "College-Level" Writing?
Just what defines "college-level" writing? This collection seeks to engage this essential question with care, patience, and pragmatism.
Lesson Plans for Teaching Writing
This collection of lesson plans will help prepare high school and college students for college-level writing.