Insights from The Writing Road Book Study

Thank you so very, very much for joining us this evening. This is our fourth in a series for the book study for The Writing Road. Tonight we will be focusing on Chapter 9, Critical Thinking, Summary Writing, Chapter 10, Critical Thinking, Writing from Text Sources, and Chapter 11, Putting It All Together. Just a brief reminder, we will be here again next week, December 21st at 7 p.m. for our final book study, Chapters 5 and 6. My name is Dr. Pam Kastner. It is my honor to serve as Patent State Lead for Literacy and to welcome our colleagues from the Patent Literacy team, Amanda Sapola, Kirsten DeRoche, and Nicole Kopko. And of course, to welcome back the amazing Joan Sedita and this wonderful book study of the writing rope. And now I will turn it over to Amanda Sapola, who will share a bit more about Joan Sedita before we start this evening. Good evening, everyone. Joan Sedita is the founder of Keys to Literacy, a literacy professional development organization. Joan has been in the literacy field for over 40 years as a teacher, administrator, and teacher trainer. She has authored multiple literacy professional development programs, including the Key Comprehension Routine, the Key Vocabulary Routine, Keys to Beginning Reading, Keys to Content Writing, Keys to Early Writing, Understanding Dyslexia, and Adolescent Literacy. Beginning in 1975, she worked for 23 years at the Landmark School, a pioneer in the development of literacy intervention programs. As a teacher, principal, and director of the Outreach Teacher Training Program at Landmark, Joan developed expertise, methods, and instructional programs that address the literacy needs of students in grades K-12. Joan was one of the three lead trainers in MA for the Reading First program and was a letters author and trainer. Joan received her M.E.D. in reading from Harvard University and her B.A. from Boston College. So welcome, Joan. And just so you know, my colleague did put or will put a Google Doc in the chat. So if you do have questions throughout the presentation, just put those in there. We will have some time at the end. So welcome, Joan, and we'll kick it off to you. Great. Thank you so much. And for those of you who've been. Tuning in last week, well, the week before that, I lost my voice, and that's why we're doing another session next week to make up chapters five and six. My voice was getting a little better, but now it's back to a little scratchy. So I think it's going to be fine, but hopefully next week it'll be back to normal. Anyway, welcome and thank you for those of you who've been returning. to each of the the nights in the series and to those of you who might just be tuning in for the first time tonight. As was said, we're going to be focusing on the last three chapters. Nine and ten are really about instructional practices. Eleven is more putting it together. So we'll be spending more of our time on nine and ten. Let me just jump here. All right. Again, just want to remind all of you that for those of you that have your book, and I hope you have your books out if you have them, because You know, it's so hard to figure out what to cover in such a short amount of time. And a lot of the slides that I'll be showing you, and I'll say a few words about them, there are page numbers on the bottom. So if you have your book, follow along so that you can see where more information than I'm able to cover tonight is. For those of you that do have the book, within the front, within the first couple of pages, you'll see a box that looks like what we've got here. This is, I'm sorry. Somebody's got their microphone on. There we go. That has a code given by the publisher, Brooks Publishing. They have a website where not only for my book, but on many of the other terrific books that they publish, they have a spot where you can download many electronic versions of what's in the book. So if you have the book, you know that there are an awful lot of templates and checklists and things like that. And while the publisher helped put them in the back, in the appendix for you to copy. It's really awkward to photocopy about a book, right? So if you go to their website, you can access these in electronic format. One thing I wanna point out is that the second letter in the code when you go to use it is a small L, not a capital I. And then finally, this will run, I pretty think it's gonna be over at the end of December. Brooks is also giving a 10% off. the price of the book and free shipping if you order it from their website. So let's begin with chapter nine. And as always, let's bring it back to the strands in the writing rope. We spent the last bunch of weeks hitting a lot of the other strands here. We're going to be living this evening in critical thinking. This is the part of the rope that I think has the greatest connection to teachers of any subject. I do believe that tech structure also is an area that teachers of science, history, math, anything, right? The arts and certainly English language arts. The skills that are needed to write about what we're learning, right? Writing about sources. The skills that students need to apply, many of which actually spill over into the comprehension realm, right? These are all things, and then especially if students are writing in reaction to a source that's either a text or maybe a video, this is really going to take place connected to content that they're learning. And so many of these skills and strategies not only help develop students'writing skills, but it also helps reinforce the learning of content. So if you teach a subject area or you're going to go back and share some ideas with people that do that, I think a lot of what we're going to be covering tonight is connected to that. So within this rope, we have the generating ideas, collecting information. All the skills and strategies, and that's really where we're going to be tonight. But I do want to point out the second subtopic, which is the writing process, the stages of the writing process that have to do with organizing and drafting and writing and revising. And that's one of the chapters we're going to revisit next week. So the first chapter, nine, is under the critical thinking strand, but it's very specific to summarizing. I think out of all of the different skills and strategies that have been identified, not only to support comprehension, summarizing, for example, was one of that handful of comprehension strategies that was identified in the National Reading Panel report way back in 2000. And all kinds of subsequent research just reinforces teaching kids summarizing, right? But it also turns out that... In the research around writing, summarizing keeps coming up over and over again as one of the most highly effective strategies. So think about it. You get a two for one with summarizing. You improve comprehension and you develop writing. So I think one of the first things we have to do, and again, as a reminder, you can see page 114 in the bottom right corner there. This is where we begin at the front of the chapter. where I do review some of the research for you, right? And really try to emphasize making sure that not only students, but even teachers are sure what a summary is. A lot of times we're not clear about that. So what is it? It is shorter. It's always shorter, right? It's a condensed statement. It focuses on the main ideas or the main events. So if you're reading expository text or watching a video, so... or listening to a lecture about informational or argument. It's going to be the main points, the gist, right? The big ideas. If you're writing a summary of a narrative piece of text, it will be the events. Although it is possible to summarize the major elements of narrative text. So you might also write a summary that lets you know what were the main characters, what were the main settings, what were the main... themes, but we tend to, when we do a plot summary for narrative, it's focused on the events. And you'll notice that I said from anything that's read, said, or done. This is kind of a favorite phrase of mine and in the trainings that we do at Keys to Literacy, because so much of what teachers tend to focus on for both reading and writing instruction is related to written text or, you know, summarizing things that are read, but this can apply to anything that the students are learning. So certainly anything that's read, but said by that would mean if there's a discussion in class, or maybe the teacher is presenting something orally, or maybe you're watching a video clip or done. So you might, for example, summarize a science experiment that just happened. What were the, what were the, you know, main materials that were used and summarizing what. The steps in this, in the, in the process and then summarizing the, the effects. It could be, maybe you, maybe you, maybe you just do a quick summary of what did you learn in PE class today? When we work with teachers about this. And we go back and we do coaching with them and, you know, to help them integrate this stuff into their teaching. Sometimes it amazes me what teachers who don't teach the primary subjects, right, your allied arts. We've seen teachers in Vogue Tech high schools, right, who are teaching car mechanics, right, begin to integrate summarizing because they realize what a useful tool it is. Now, one of the things you have to remember is if you're just hitting the main ideas and it's shorter, right, that means you can't bring in all of the details. So what does that mean? And this gets to our fourth bullet here. This is different than a retell. And, you know, as students move through K to three, very often they're not quite developmentally ready to do full blown summaries on their own. And that's why if you look at Common Core standards and state standards that are similar to Common Core. You'll notice that in grades K and 1, they talk about retell. And then in 2 and 3, they'll talk about recounting. But those are both about, can the student give back, in their own words, everything they can remember? So they're giving you back both the big ideas, but also all the details. And for any of you who do assessments using something like DIBLS, right, where after we're searching for the fluency numbers around that. We then often will ask kids, can you retell what you just read as a way to sort of check comprehension? So these students are used to retell. And all of a sudden, when you come to grade four, the expectations and the standards are that students will now be able to summarize. And that's a big leap for a lot of them. And I would say even sometimes for teachers. So teachers, you need to be sure that when you're asking for summarizing, you're not asking for a retell. How is it also different than paraphrasing? Paraphrasing is when you say something back, but in your own words. So paraphrase could be just as long or longer. And of course, if you're paraphrasing the details, that probably wouldn't make sense for a main idea. Summary. What do I mean by it's an important life skill? I want you to think about, I'll throw out some examples here. Let's say I'm thinking about going to see a movie and I call up one of my friends and I say, oh, I'm thinking about... seeing this movie, you know, what, what, what do you think? What could you tell me that? And let's say this first friend goes on and on and on and gives me all the details and tells away the great ending. Right. And after a while I'm like, okay, like, you know, I really don't want to listen to this anymore. I mean, that person will still be my friend. Right. But if I call another friend and I asked the same thing and in about four or five sentences, they gave me the, they give me the gist, you know, sort of what happened. And they say, Hey, on a scale of one to 10, John. I know you, I think I give it an eight. Which friend am I going to call more often, right? Or think about you're on the job and you go to a meeting and maybe your employer isn't able to be at the meeting and you come back and they say, tell me about the meeting. And you go on and on and on and on, right? Okay, what's going to be much more valuable is, A, they covered these three things and our department better start thinking about this, right? Or let's just use tonight, for example. I don't know how many of you, maybe you'll go back tomorrow and you'll be talking to your colleagues about, you know, what you heard tonight. And they might say, can you summarize? Same thing. We want to hit just the big ideas. All right. Let's also talk about the length of a summary. Depending on what the source is that you're summarizing, a summary might be one sentence. If I'm trying to summarize maybe a paragraph's worth of information, really the what often ends up being the topic sentence. We talked about this last week. What happens to be the topic sentence in many respects, it's one sentence, but it's the summary of the paragraph because it's telling you the gist or the main idea. It might be a paragraph. If I'm summarizing text, maybe that has three or four paragraphs within it. I'm going to take a look at the big main ideas from each paragraph. I'm going to pull them all together. I might include a few details, but not a lot. So now my summary might be a paragraph. But I want you to think about if you're looking at, let's say, a chapter in a textbook, and you go to the end of the chapter and they give you a summary, well, the summary might be a whole page. So there's no rules about how long. And then the last thing I want to say about as we hit the mountaintops of summary, right, is it's an amazing tool to use for formative assessment. Once you're sure that you've given enough explicit instruction about what a summary is and how to do one, how to pull one together. If you then begin to ask students, you know, all right, we just finished 15 minutes reading and talking about an article. I'd like you right now as a quick write to in four sentences or less. Let's summarize the gist of the article. or it's the end of class and as an exit ticket out, I want you to write a quick summary of the three most important points we learned in history today. And by the way, if it's a quick write, you're not going to worry about the spelling or even if they're writing good sentences, because you're focusing on, can they do that critical thinking to summarize? So now you get that back and think about what a wonderful opportunity is to get the sense of whether the kids understood. what they just read or what they just learned. So let's remember to use it as formative assessment. What I'm going to do here on this next slide, hopefully I think it's going to work here. So this is a quick little video and rather than me trying to just do it, I thought I would show the little video. What I'm talking about here, this is a metaphor. I use a sponge as a metaphor. It'll explain it all once I hit the play button. This is something that I have been using. Gosh, since the late 70s, when I first started teaching, summarizing to students that had difficulty with reading and writing. You'll see why it really emphasizes that point about it really being about the big ideas. And, you know, last week when we were talking about paragraph structure, we focused a lot about how part of the reason some students have difficulty writing paragraphs. is that they don't get that concept of what a main idea or a big idea, right, or a central idea is as compared to all the details that might support it. Because that's what a paragraph is, right? You start a new paragraph when you're about to shift to the next big idea. Well, main idea skulls become very crucial as it relates to summarizing. And you'll see as I explain that. For those of you who like this video and you want to... be able to connect to it. It's available on our YouTube channel, the Keys to Literacy YouTube channel. If you just go to the Keys website, I'll have a link at the end of the slides where we have a lot of free materials that I keep mentioning. There's one that's called Videos and Webinars, and they're very short little clips, but you can access this there. And this sponge metaphor, I don't have it in the writing rope book, but it is in our other books. So Let's play it, and here you go. So, as we've said before, the concept of a summary is difficult for some kids to wrap their head around. They often get it confused with a retail, so they start to write about everything that they can remember. And we're going to use a metaphor. We're going to use a sponge, actually, as a metaphor to help explain the concept of a summary. So, I have right now a sponge. And it's in a bucket of water here, a bowl of water. And so it's pretty heavy with water. In fact, we're watching the water sort of drip out of it. And in this form, the sponge represents whatever I'm going to be summarizing. So maybe I'm going to summarize a movie. The sponge with all the water in it represents everything I saw in the movie. Or maybe I'm going to summarize a meeting I went to. The sponge represents everything that's in the meeting. Or maybe I'm going to summarize an article that I just read. And the sponge represents everything that's in the article. The big ideas, the details, the pictures, everything that's in it. Or maybe I've just read a chapter in a novel. So that's the topic for the summary. But when we summarize, we don't give back everything. We are really just focusing on the main ideas, the most important ideas, or if it's a story, the most important events that happen. And in order to do that, the first thing kids need to be able to do is identify what are the big details, the big ideas, versus what are all the supporting details, and make a distinction between those. So if we were to use the concept of our wet sponge as representing everything that we're going to be summarizing. When we summarize, we literally start to squeeze the sponge, right? It's a metaphor for we start to think about or comprehend what we just saw in the movie or we just read, right? And what we try to do is get rid of all the water, which represents the details. So what's left, the form of the sponge, this is the main ideas. the big events, and we've just hopefully gotten rid of a lot of the details. And so now when we are, we've just squeezed them out, right? We're down to our sort of our bare bones main points. Now when we go to say or write our summary, we have to take those basic ideas and blow them up a little bit. We turn them into full sentences. We usually start by telling somebody what the sponge is about, meaning what's the summary about. And then we proceed to explain the big ideas with not very many details. Now, what's nice about this metaphor is sometimes students, they don't squeeze out enough of the water. And so when they give you a summary and it's too long and they're going on and on and on, right? You can say your sponge still has too much water in it. You need to get rid of some of the details. Okay. The other thing that can happen is sometimes the sponge, they only give us four of the five big ideas. They're missing a few. And so in that case, you can say, you only gave me part of the sponge. Where's the rest of the main ideas? So, and sometimes they can just give you almost like a list of main ideas and they need really need to embellish it a little bit more. And so that's when you might say, you know what, you need to make the sponge a little more moist. You got to put a few details back in there in order for it to, you know, to be a good summary. So that's how we use this metaphor. Sometimes for students, you literally have to model using a sponge. I've been in classrooms where teachers will have small sized sponges and just kind of remind kids and they practice. But eventually you take the visual away and you just use the concept and you say your sponge is a little too moist or you need to add a little bit more water to your sponge or you only got half the sponge. You know, you're missing some of your main ideas. So, you know, it's a it's a very tangible, hands on way to get kids to understand the concept of a summary. All right. So I hope you find that metaphor helpful. Again, having worked with students that struggled, students with dyslexia, the more multisensory you can be sometimes, give them a visual and a concept that can really help. All right. So for those of you who have the book, if we move on a little deeper into the chapter about summary writing, from pages 116 to 122, I give you seven different suggestions for scaffolds for helping kids learn how to write summaries and improve their summaries. We don't have time tonight to go through all of them. So I've highlighted a few that I'm going to address in a little bit more depth. On page, let's see, what page is it? It's figure 9.3. There it is, page 117. You have these same seven steps. And then again, within the chapter, we take each one and give you a little bit more detail. So one of the first is just start with simple, short text. If your focus is to have kids learn how to write summaries, then don't begin by having them write summaries of really complex information that they don't quite own. You can even make it as simple as, hey, we're going to practice the steps. in a summary, including adding transitions. And I'm going to have you summarize three things that you do every morning before you come to school. So really keep it simple. And we're starting. You want to provide a set of steps, which I'm going to show you in a minute. You can scaffold the text. So you might, let's say there's a page of text or maybe a chapter. If you start drawing lines or start putting like a little star next to where the big ideas are in the text. You're scaffolding it so that they can find the main ideas. We've talked a lot about two column notes. I'm going to show you how you could use that. If you've been using it to collect information, how you use especially the left side of the notes. Transitions, we've talked about this a number of times. They're words or phrases that help us make connections. And they're very valuable with summaries because you want kids to be able to make connections as you move from one part of the summary to the next. Writing templates, I shared some of those with you last week, and we'll continue to do that next week, where the students actually are filling in parts of the template. And then finally, I guess I'd say the most intensive scaffold of all is to give a partially completed summary that students fill in. So let's revisit a couple of these. For those of you who have the book, let's turn to page 118. 119. And what I've done for you here is given you a sample piece of text. This is a passage from the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, written by Frederick Douglass. And what we've done in the passage by using underlines and highlights, this is the beauty of Brooks Publishing. They're the people who lay out the pages, right? We've been able to show you one of the scaffolds that has to do with preparing this text. So what we've done is in places where there's something about the main idea, it's a phrase or a sentence that really captures it, we've underlined it, and then... any, a few of the really important details we've highlighted. Now we haven't highlighted all the details, right? Because remember, like with the sponge, we're not, this isn't a retail, but what we're looking for is just one or two really essential details so that when we go to explain that main idea, it might help us by keeping our sponge a little bit moist, right? So what you want to do is follow these steps. that you see in this example. The first step is, right, to read the original passage and identify the main ideas. That's the step one. The second step is to pull out those main ideas, right? Make a list, can be in phrase form. Third, begin the summary with an introduction where you're stating what the summary is about. Fourth step, Turn all those main ideas into sentences. And again, you can bring in a few details, right? You might have to, if you look at step five, begin to combine some of those sentences. That draws on the work from our writing rope, the strand that has to do with syntax and sentence writing. And then make sure that we add a few transitions so that the summary moves slowly. So you can see those steps. There's a handout with those steps that you can literally give kids to remind them. But then again, in the book, pages 118 and 119, you see every step applied to this piece written by Frederick Douglass. Sorry, I keep getting a problem right here. So we've been talking a lot about two column notes. And we. In a minute, I'm going to show you in the next chapter how we use it to gather information about main ideas, but also details from our sources. Two column notes, got the main ideas in the left side, the supporting details on the right. Or if we were using two column notes for a narrative summary, we'd list our big events on the left side, and we would add a couple of key details over on the right. And again, if you have the book, you can see this on figure 9.6. So what happens, let me go back to this a second. So what happens when you've got a set of two column notes? Let's see if you can think about the answer to this question. Are we going to write sentences about everything that's on both sides of the notes, or are we going to focus on the left or the right side more? What do you think your answer is? And I'm going to give you a hint. It's about the main ideas, right? So So the answer is we want to be drawing from the left side, right? If we make sure that we get all of our main ideas, then we're getting the whole sponge in there. We can grab a few details from the right column, right? To embellish the sentence a little. But if we start writing about everything that's on the right side, now it's no longer a summary and it becomes a retell. All right. So another one of the templates that I mentioned is a summary template. And this, you see the example that we give in the book, a full size page of it is available, figure 9.9. And this is one of those things that if you want the electronic version so that you can just give it to your kids, you can download it from the Brooks website. We also have a version of this on the Keys to Literacy free downloads and templates. And that version is a PDF that students can actually type into the PDF. But what do you notice as you look at this template? Remember, what was the first? two steps in the stages of the summarizing. It's identifying the main ideas and then list them, and they can be in phrase form. And there you see the space to list your main ideas. The next step was to write an introductory statement to your summary that tells you what the summary is about. And so the students have some lines to write that. The next step is to take each main idea and develop it into sentences. And that's where you have space. They're under number three. And we've even, as we're not just reminded them to include transitions, but we've taken a really short, simple list of transitions to make it even easier for the kids to grab a few. Now, if you have students who really struggle with writing, maybe they're dysgraphic or they just have a hard time with this summarizing. If they fill this template out, you probably should just accept that as the completed summary. You're not going to ask them to copy it all over again, right? There are some students who may use a summary template just once, and then once they get the gist of it, they get the hang of it. They've internalized the steps to writing a summary. They no longer have to see a template like this. They can just do it on a blank piece of paper. So that's another one of the scaffolds. All right. We keep bringing us back to these connect to the classroom questions or reflections that are interspersed throughout the book. The connect to the classroom around this summarizing chapter is basically asking you to develop a lesson plan that incorporates any aspect of what's in this summary chapter. Maybe you're introducing the students to some of the scaffold, or maybe you're introducing them to the concept of a summary using the sponge. So if any of you did have a chance to try anything from this chapter with your students, if you feel comfortable, we'd love it if you would just jot down over in the chat, maybe a couple of times, just say what you tried, how it worked, how the students reacted. All right, with that now, we're going to move to chapter 10, which is also about critical thinking. It's also about writing from sources, but this is a little bit broader now. It's not that very specific task of summarizing. And once again, we're connecting here to the top strand in the writing rope. One more thing I just wanted to say about summarizing also, you know, if any of you think about taxonomies of thinking, maybe you're familiar with Bloom's taxonomy, right? It really is a critical thinking skill because in order to summarize, you've got to synthesize, right? You've got to evaluate, you've got to evaluate what's important in this, what's the big ideas. And it just really taxes those upper levels of thinking. So a lot of what we're going to be talking about now in chapter 10 is also going to push kids to use their critical thinking skills. This is just a slide. I don't necessarily have this particular thing in the writing wrote book, but it sort of summarizes some of what I have in the introduction of this chapter. I want you to think about writing is thinking, right? When we write, it helps us organize our thoughts. It helps us clarify relationships among ideas that we're thinking about. It solidifies their understanding. Heck, if we can write out something that we're thinking, we're going to remember it. It helps us build relationships, make connections between ideas. It extends our thinking as we start to reflect in our writing, and it certainly engages us. You know, we talked in one of the sessions about quick writes, right? It's as an example of a really simple content writing task. Quick writes happen in like, you know, five to 10 minutes or less. But even doing a short quick write acts as a powerful processing tool. And I want you to think about this example. I might've used it before in one of our, one of our evenings together, but how many of you write out a shopping list before you go food shopping? Right. I do that. And some of us, our shopping lists sort of reflect how organized we might be. You know, some of us, we just start make a list and everything's one just big giant list. Some of us get really anal compulsive, right? And so we start putting all the vegetables in one part of our list in the. frozen food in another, but it doesn't matter, right? The question I have for you is if you get to the store and you realize you forgot your list, how does just the fact that you wrote it help you remember what you need to get, right? And if you were grouping things by items, when you do get to the frozen food aisle, because you went through that trouble of writing it and categorizing those items, you're going to remember them more. And that's what I mean about how powerful writing can be. In this chapter, I mean, I try to make connections to research throughout. I don't want this to be just a research book. So my goal is to make it as practical as possible. But I really feel like in this area of writing from sources, there is such rich research that we can look to. So just to call your attention to this, you can read about the details in these reports. And all you have to do is Google each one of them and then you'll actually get the reports. But there are three in particular that really highlight. the value in improving comprehension as well as improving writing. So writing next, no, let's actually start with reading next. That was one of the first research meta-analyses reports to come out. And that identified what were the most effective things we could do to support students'reading skills, especially comprehension, right? And guess what made the list? Summarizing and Any kind of writing about what you're reading kind of task. So writing about what you're learning, and that is true across all subjects. Another report that came out was Writing Next, where Graham and colleagues did a review of all the research to date about what things teachers could do that would improve the writing of grades three and up. And guess what shows up? Summarizing. Also shows up that. any tasks we have students do that has to do with writing about a source. If you're, and that includes everything from, I mentioned summarizing, right? But it also includes things like writing personal reflections, especially to narrative text. So if you think about those tasks where, you know, teachers ask students to maybe read a chapter in the story, in the novel, and then write a one or two paragraph reflection, how did you feel about the character? How did the setting? connect to something you know. It's that journal writing in reaction that has shown to be so powerful in improving not only writing, but also comprehension of narrative text. They even found that even if you don't do full-blown writing around the three types of text, but even just writing notes about what you're reading improves comprehension and also grows your writing skill. And then any of the writing tasks that involve, you know, maybe you're writing a research paper or you're writing a response to a prompt. The last one was writing to read. And that also found the same findings that I just summarized in writing next. But that focused on it in particular about how writing supports reading. And by the way, there are sections in that that informed us about how writing also improves. decoding skills and fluency and spelling. All right. So I started to mention this piece about responding to narrative text using personal narrative. In pages 128 to 129, we get into this a little bit more deeply. You'll see I've got a little tiny version of figure 10.3, which for those of you that have the book, um, You know, I suggest you, if you can take a look at it now, even if you don't have the book and you can get that little code that I showed earlier, you could go to the Brooks downloadable hub and grab this. Right. So what figure 10.3 has for you is I've put together, I've done this before for some of the other trainings I do for writing, but it's a list of guiding questions that you could give your students. If you're getting them to respond to text in, especially if it's in a journal format. Now, let me caution you. There are a lot of questions. You can see how many there are just on that little thumbnail sketch, right? Don't hit the kids with all of these at once. So you could do a couple of things. You could take one of the sections, like maybe the response to theme and give the students just those three questions and say, use these questions to help you write about your response to the theme of the text. That's one way you can narrow this down. The other way is you can take maybe one question from every one of the categories, right? So overall personal response, response to the theme, response to the characters, the setting, or response to the author. So now you're only giving them five or six questions. The reason these are really important and helpful as a scaffold is for many students, especially those who don't feel comfortable about writing. If you say... Write a response to what you just read. They don't know where to begin. They don't know how to center their thinking, right? By posing a question, it helps them make a connection to what they're thinking and it can get them started. The other thing that I have in this chapter in figure 10-4 is an example of it. And we talked about this last time when we were talking about the three types of writing. You may remember that at the end of that chapter, I had some samples of teacher feedback checklists that are specific to informational or argument writing. Well, and what I said was, certainly, if you want to take them and use them as they are, please do. But what I really would like you to do is use it as a model, but then modify these checklists so that the things you're looking to give feedback on are tied directly to what your writing assignment is. So here you see an example of a modified feedback checklist that's designed specifically for doing a personal response to narrative text. All right. So that was one of the types of responding or writing about sources in this chapter. This is a little kind of visual that we also have in the book here. And it's what I've been saying from the start, right? That this is really the nexus of where we combine comprehension skills and strategies with writing skills and strategies. It's why I called this strand in the rope, the critical thinking strand. So if students are going to give you a response, maybe it's a task, maybe you've given them a prompt of the type that you see often in high stakes state assessments, or maybe the social studies teacher is giving students a question that's pushing them to think about everything that they learned in class discussion and everything they read about in the chapter, right? And sort of critically think and pull that all together. When we give them those kinds of tasks and we don't get a quality response back, we have to ask ourselves, is the problem that they didn't even understand the source? So was the issue with comprehension skills or was it that they didn't have proficient writing skills? So maybe they understood the source. Maybe if they could just talk about it, they'd be able to give you a great response. But their sentence writing is. difficult. Their paragraph writing is not quality, right? They don't use transitions. To me, it's a little bit like, you know, those of you who are familiar with the simple view of reading, right? You've got your sort of decoding here and you've got your language skills. And we say, you know, the product of being able to really comprehend what we read is a product of both sides of that equation. Well, that's how I kind of feel this is all about. And unfortunately, a lot of students who struggle, it's not one or the other, it's problems in both parts of the equation, right? Now, we did not have a chance to go into more depth about the stages of the writing process, which was in one of the chapters we did not get to, but that I will next week. But, you know, that chapter talks about the stages of the writing process. And I have this little sort of mnemonic to help kids. The... process, writing, routine, which stands for T, think, right? Plan is process, write is writing, and then revise is what's represented in the routine, right? So think, plan, write, revise. It's just a more simplistic way to help kids remember the stages. Well, if you think about it, thinking and planning before you actually start writing a response to sources, is. That is really about the comprehension side of this, whereas the writing and revision stages of the writing process kick in all of our proficient writing skills. What I want to do in the remaining time we have and what I do in the rest of this chapter is to dig down a little bit more about teaching students to respond to prompts. Now on page 130. And you can see a copy of it here. One of the things that I've done is because when my trainers or I do training around this for teachers, we often find that like if all we do is just kind of talk about it, but we don't give you examples and we don't make you try to come up with a prompt, it usually doesn't get carried over into your teaching. So what I've done in this chapter is say, all right, whatever grade you teach. I've got a couple of examples across grades four to eight. And by the way, if you do grades three or you're in high school, you can do this as well. So what I'd like you to do is, we won't do it now, but pick one or two of these examples of prompts. And then I want you to think about a subject area you're teaching. You know, maybe it's history, maybe it's a novel in literature, whatever it is. And I want you to use these sample prompts. almost as sample model text, right? We talked about how helpful that is for kids when we share mentor texts because they're emulating it. Well, I want you to emulate. what these prompts look like. And create a prompt, make it simple at first, and I would at first choose just one source, maybe one short text. So the students have to practice those note-taking skills, first of all that searching and finding that relevant information, then that skill of taking two column notes on it, then that skill of taking each part of their notes and developing them into full sentences, combining some sentences. making sure they chunk things into good paragraphs, then making sure they add transitions. So you're going to walk them through every step, which in many respects is kind of like the culmination of all the previous chapters of all the other strands in the writing rope. This is where kids have to integrate all of this at the same time to come up with a quality piece of writing. All right, so... So... So let's take a look at the connect to the classroom piece that I had at the end of this chapter. What I encouraged you to do is write at least one writing prompt. Again, use that, emulate, use that, emulate the ones I gave you, right? That's connected to something. And then walk the students each step through each step. You have to be explicit. You have to model it. And you're going to have to use ThinkLab. So same thing. If any of you did have a chance. to come up with a prompt and start to introduce your students to the skills and strategies that I gave you in this chapter, we'd love to see it in the chat. All right. So as we're coming to a close, now what we want to do is focus on some of what was in the chapter that connects some of the things that I shared with you last week, right? So what do we want to be sure we do? We want to be explicit. about all the skills and strategies that come into play at each of the stages of the writing process. Here are some examples of two column notes. Let's say the student was writing a research piece or an article, informational piece about killer whales. You see how the main ideas are in the left. The details are on the right. If this student were to turn this into a response, they'd start with. maybe a sentence or two with an intro. They'd end with a one or two sentence conclusion. But how many paragraphs do you think their body might have? Probably five because there's five big ideas. Remember, I also shared with you top-down topic webs, how those could be used. So in this case, the student, this is going to guide them to write their intro and their conclusion. And again, it's going to remind them of five main parts to their body organization. Here you have some two column notes that the student's writing about the themes in The Old Man and the Sea. So probably going to be three main sections to this written piece, one for each one of the themes. The details are over on the right. Or if you had a top down web, same thing. What you'll notice, what's the difference? In the notes, you get all the details. In the topic webs, you just get the big ideas. All right. So. Oh, the last thing I wanted to remind you of is a WAG. We explain what these are. We give you lots of examples. I've been using these WAGs, one version over another, for at least 10 years now. When we do training in schools, even if we only have maybe an hour and all we do is encourage teachers to use these, we find that they take them and they start using them and it's helpful right away. So when you have a chance to unpack. this and read more about it in this chapter. But you can also just see quickly the pieces to a wag here. At the top, you let the students know the writing task. Is it answering a prompt? Are you writing a narrative? What is the actual task? Audience and purpose. Remember, we've talked about that. That if students, if it's clear that they're writing to a real audience or they at least can. focus on who their audience is. That's going to help make their writing, you know, be more centered, but also sharing the purpose. Is it to convince me of something? Is it to tell a story? The rest of the WAG gives very clear cut directions to students about what's expected. You know, one of the findings in that Writing Next report that I mentioned, one of the other 11 items that they addressed that they found were statistically significant, was when we gave very specific and detailed. information about what we require in a writing assignment. A lot of times, the reason we don't get back from students what we expect or what we want is because they aren't clear about what we need. Teachers who just give these very general, I want you to write a composition tonight, or I'd like you to write a research report, and you don't get very specific, they really don't know what to do. It sets very clear expectations. It also ends up being a great tool for any interventionists or parents or caretakers who are helping students with their writing tasks, because now they know exactly what's expected. It also makes it a whole lot easier to grade these things, because you've been very clear about what's expected, and you're able to then turn it into a scoring rubric to give kids feedback and to actually give them a grade. So if you look at the number of examples that I've given from lots of different subjects, I really think looking at others'examples is going to help you create these for yourself, right? But what you'll see is around length, you don't just say three paragraphs. You always give a range. So you might say three to five paragraphs. You might say 200 to 300 words. You might say one to two pages. Under directions and requirements, this is where you're very specific. You might say to students... Make sure there's an introduction. And because this is an opinion piece, you must state your opinion or your claim right within the introduction. You might say, have something very specific about content. Maybe you're explaining the three causes of the civil, the causes of the civil war. So one of your directions or requirements might be, make sure you include at least three causes. This is where you would put things like. You must include transitions. I want to see at least three. Circle them within your written piece. This is also where you might have requirements for things like the sources. You've been given three sources. You must use information from two out of the three. Now, supports, what goes here? Again, you'll see lots of examples in the book. This is where you might say, use your transition list. Refer to your transition list. list. And if you're giving this WAG to students electronically, that's where you can put a link directly to the transition list that maybe you're storing in your Google Drive for students, right? Writing supports might be use the summary writing template or any of the other templates that we've been talking about. So this is where you also think about scaffolds. This initially is a tool for the teachers. But then you can make copies of it, give it to the students, and now it becomes a set of expectations for when they're doing the assignment. All right. The other thing that I've given you is a set of guiding questions that you can give students to help them follow along. Or you can use these guiding questions to help cue you to what should go into the WAG. All right. We're sort of running out of time here. So I'm just going to go over the sort of big, big tasks that are in this last section. This last chapter is meant to get you to really reflect on things. It is organized the reflection part into two major sections. Right. So the the reflection questions that we provided for you that are on pages 164 to 174. Those are questions that make you think about the strands of the rope, right? So think about those five strands, what's in each one, you know, what skills and strategies are there? The second part of this reflection activity is a set of questions we've given you. And you'll see in the book, we have the topic on the left in the middle column is your question. And then we've given you space to write your responses. These are questions about the seven teaching principles that we introduced at the beginning of the book that we want you to make sure you walk away with these. And that includes everything from an IWU gradual release. It also includes things like the value of using mentor model text that you share with kids so that they can emulate it. All right. So I'm going to end by just highlighting for me, what are the biggest ideas in this book? Number one, content writing is a way to promote and deepen learning, and all teachers can play a role. And I think the stuff we covered tonight really gets at that, right? It can promote content learning. That writing proficiency for the three types. of writing. Informational opinion argument narrative is absolutely essential, and there are some very detailed requirements around things like and body development and conclusion that you'll find in many of the state standards. Third, writing is a complex task that requires the integration of many skills and strategies. That's where all these strands of the rope come together and they start intertwining. Let's not forget those teaching principles, right? The gradual release, explicit instruction, differentiate and scaffold. And I hope you'll use a lot of the scaffolds I've given you. Remember the importance of finding opportunities for students to collaborate using the mentor text and just increasing the amount of kids, right? And also let's keep in mind that last strand that if kids are having difficulty with spelling and handwriting, the transcription skills, that is gonna impede. A few more big ideas. Remember to have kids always be aware of TAP, the task, audience, and purpose. Let's make sure they're aware of the stages of the writing process, that they don't skip them, that they don't just go right to write, right? That they do the thinking and planning. Remember that sentences and paragraphs are the building blocks of writing. And if kids don't have those down, they're never going to be able to produce quality writing. Remember that kids benefit from analyzing sample text structure. that they then can copy in their own writing. And then finally, writing to learn tasks, such as summarizing, responding to narrative text, and writing from sources supports content. All right, so last, putting it together, writing instruction should address all components in the rope, all teachers play a role, make it explicit, and avoid a sumicide. What I mean by that is, don't assume that kids... even your oldest students have some of these very basic skills. You want to always go back in and figure out where the holes are in their Swiss cheese. All right. So with that, I am going to, oh, I just wanted to tell you. So for those of you who maybe you want to do some book studies with some of your colleagues and do like what's a real book study, not where you're just listening to me, but where you're getting to talk about the book. I have a guide I put together that's free. So that you can download it if you want. It's almost like, you know, when you read a famous novel and at the end they have questions if you want to do a book study. That's what this is. So that's the link to get that. All right. So do we have any questions, guys, for me? We do. I only saw one. But it is someone who is looking for any suggestions or advice on what to start with or how to start regarding making a shift within their school or district with the colleagues that they work with at the middle school level. I think many teachers believe the majority of students should have the majority of skills that they need for writing, like main idea, and often feel overwhelmed on how to get through the curriculum and or the standards in addition to going back and filling in those gaps. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's like a suicide. That's what I was just saying, right? We assume our students have this. And if this person's in middle school and he or she is saying with a colleague. Well, usually in middle school, there's their teams of teachers. There's probably four core teachers, right? ELA, social studies, history, math, and then maybe some, you know, some other. So you got half of a team right there. That's really cool. I would say grab another one and maybe all four people on your team. And all right, what's the first thing you could do? Just have kids start writing more. I mean, that in itself, right? Think about one of the early chapters when we talk about content writing. And I talked about three types of writing, quick writes, content writing tasks. So like writing summaries would be an example of that. And then more formal writing tasks, like something you do once a semester, right? Right. Just start with quick writes. If you have four teachers and if every one of those four teachers once a week gave a quick write, you're doing four quick writes every week. And if they did it twice a week, you're doing eight. So that's the other simple place to start, quick writes. The other thing I would do is I think I'd start with the three types of writing because they're so essential to everything. So make sure every one of your classrooms has got a poster. I gave examples of them in the book, right, where you just show the three types of writing and what's their purpose. And then whenever kids are reading something, take a minute and say, which type of writing did that author use or which combination? And then flip it. When you're giving them a writing task, always start with which type of writing would be best for this. That's another thing. And then I think since she's probably, or he is probably a content teacher, I would do some of the things that we talked about. Create a writing prompt that's related to what you're teaching. and start to show the kids how they could go into the source, find the information, put it into column notes, and then write a response. Now, if that was really the only question, that's good, because I think we're at eight o'clock, but is there one last one that I, there is one last one, I was going to say, thank you, those are really nice, like ways, places to start, like as an honor. And the one question that just came in is, what do you suggest that a teacher would use as a baseline to engage student writing? To engage student writing? Or to gauge. Oh, to gauge. I don't, maybe I said the wrong thing. Yeah, yeah. So I think I would go to the chapter where we have the three types of writing, right? And in there, I identify the elements that must be around intros and conclusions and body organization or development, right? And what I do in there is I highlight what the common core standards for those first three. standards expect, I think that's a great place to start because if you're gauging students a writing sample, oh, and then the other thing I wanted to say was at the end of that chapter, remember I said I have those checklists? So those checklists are organized around intro, body development, and conclusion. Use that to start looking at a student's piece of writing and determining, do they have an intro? Is it good? Do they have a conclusion? Is it good? Have they... develop their body in an organized way have they clearly stated their main idea for each paragraph have they included some transitions those are the simple things that you want to do when you analyze a student's piece of writing that's where i'd start great well all right we're out of time yes we are i'd like to share my screen if possible there we go yep and here we go

Just a brief reminder, we will be here again next week, December 21st at 7 p.m. for our final book study, Chapters 5 and 6. My name is Dr. Pam Kastner. It is my honor to serve as Patent State Lead for Literacy and to welcome our colleagues from the Patent Literacy team, Amanda Sapola, Kirsten DeRoche, and Nicole Kopko. And of course, to welcome back the amazing Joan Sedita and this wonderful book study of the writing rope. And now I will turn it over to Amanda Sapola, who will share a bit more about Joan Sedita before we start this evening.

Good evening, everyone. Joan Sedita is the founder of Keys to Literacy, a literacy professional development organization. Joan has been in the literacy field for over 40 years as a teacher, administrator, and teacher trainer. She has authored multiple literacy professional development programs, including the Key Comprehension Routine, the Key Vocabulary Routine, Keys to Beginning Reading, Keys to Content Writing, Keys to Early Writing, Understanding Dyslexia, and Adolescent Literacy.

Beginning in 1975, she worked for 23 years at the Landmark School, a pioneer in the development of literacy intervention programs. As a teacher, principal, and director of the Outreach Teacher Training Program at Landmark, Joan developed expertise, methods, and instructional programs that address the literacy needs of students in grades K-12. Joan was one of the three lead trainers in MA for the Reading First program and was a letters author and trainer. Joan received her M.E.D. in reading from Harvard University and her B.A. from Boston College.

So welcome, Joan. And just so you know, my colleague did put or will put a Google Doc in the chat. So if you do have questions throughout the presentation, just put those in there. We will have some time at the end. So welcome, Joan, and we'll kick it off to you.

Great. Thank you so much. And for those of you who've been.

Tuning in last week, well, the week before that, I lost my voice, and that's why we're doing another session next week to make up chapters five and six. My voice was getting a little better, but now it's back to a little scratchy. So I think it's going to be fine, but hopefully next week it'll be back to normal. Anyway, welcome and thank you for those of you who've been returning. to each of the the nights in the series and to those of you who might just be tuning in for the first time tonight.

As was said, we're going to be focusing on the last three chapters. Nine and ten are really about instructional practices. Eleven is more putting it together.

So we'll be spending more of our time on nine and ten. Let me just jump here. All right. Again, just want to remind all of you that for those of you that have your book, and I hope you have your books out if you have them, because You know, it's so hard to figure out what to cover in such a short amount of time.

And a lot of the slides that I'll be showing you, and I'll say a few words about them, there are page numbers on the bottom. So if you have your book, follow along so that you can see where more information than I'm able to cover tonight is. For those of you that do have the book, within the front, within the first couple of pages, you'll see a box that looks like what we've got here.

This is, I'm sorry. Somebody's got their microphone on. There we go.

That has a code given by the publisher, Brooks Publishing. They have a website where not only for my book, but on many of the other terrific books that they publish, they have a spot where you can download many electronic versions of what's in the book. So if you have the book, you know that there are an awful lot of templates and checklists and things like that. And while the publisher helped put them in the back, in the appendix for you to copy.

It's really awkward to photocopy about a book, right? So if you go to their website, you can access these in electronic format. One thing I wanna point out is that the second letter in the code when you go to use it is a small L, not a capital I.

And then finally, this will run, I pretty think it's gonna be over at the end of December. Brooks is also giving a 10% off. the price of the book and free shipping if you order it from their website. So let's begin with chapter nine. And as always, let's bring it back to the strands in the writing rope.

We spent the last bunch of weeks hitting a lot of the other strands here. We're going to be living this evening in critical thinking. This is the part of the rope that I think has the greatest connection to teachers of any subject. I do believe that tech structure also is an area that teachers of science, history, math, anything, right? The arts and certainly English language arts.

The skills that are needed to write about what we're learning, right? Writing about sources. The skills that students need to apply, many of which actually spill over into the comprehension realm, right?

These are all things, and then especially if students are writing in reaction to a source that's either a text or maybe a video, this is really going to take place connected to content that they're learning. And so many of these skills and strategies not only help develop students'writing skills, but it also helps reinforce the learning of content. So if you teach a subject area or you're going to go back and share some ideas with people that do that, I think a lot of what we're going to be covering tonight is connected to that.

So within this rope, we have the generating ideas, collecting information. All the skills and strategies, and that's really where we're going to be tonight. But I do want to point out the second subtopic, which is the writing process, the stages of the writing process that have to do with organizing and drafting and writing and revising. And that's one of the chapters we're going to revisit next week.

So the first chapter, nine, is under the critical thinking strand, but it's very specific to summarizing. I think out of all of the different skills and strategies that have been identified, not only to support comprehension, summarizing, for example, was one of that handful of comprehension strategies that was identified in the National Reading Panel report way back in 2000. And all kinds of subsequent research just reinforces teaching kids summarizing, right? But it also turns out that...

In the research around writing, summarizing keeps coming up over and over again as one of the most highly effective strategies. So think about it. You get a two for one with summarizing. You improve comprehension and you develop writing.

So I think one of the first things we have to do, and again, as a reminder, you can see page 114 in the bottom right corner there. This is where we begin at the front of the chapter. where I do review some of the research for you, right? And really try to emphasize making sure that not only students, but even teachers are sure what a summary is.

A lot of times we're not clear about that. So what is it? It is shorter.

It's always shorter, right? It's a condensed statement. It focuses on the main ideas or the main events. So if you're reading expository text or watching a video, so...

or listening to a lecture about informational or argument. It's going to be the main points, the gist, right? The big ideas. If you're writing a summary of a narrative piece of text, it will be the events. Although it is possible to summarize the major elements of narrative text.

So you might also write a summary that lets you know what were the main characters, what were the main settings, what were the main... themes, but we tend to, when we do a plot summary for narrative, it's focused on the events. And you'll notice that I said from anything that's read, said, or done.

This is kind of a favorite phrase of mine and in the trainings that we do at Keys to Literacy, because so much of what teachers tend to focus on for both reading and writing instruction is related to written text or, you know, summarizing things that are read, but this can apply to anything that the students are learning. So certainly anything that's read, but said by that would mean if there's a discussion in class, or maybe the teacher is presenting something orally, or maybe you're watching a video clip or done. So you might, for example, summarize a science experiment that just happened.

What were the, what were the, you know, main materials that were used and summarizing what. The steps in this, in the, in the process and then summarizing the, the effects. It could be, maybe you, maybe you, maybe you just do a quick summary of what did you learn in PE class today?

When we work with teachers about this. And we go back and we do coaching with them and, you know, to help them integrate this stuff into their teaching. Sometimes it amazes me what teachers who don't teach the primary subjects, right, your allied arts.

We've seen teachers in Vogue Tech high schools, right, who are teaching car mechanics, right, begin to integrate summarizing because they realize what a useful tool it is. Now, one of the things you have to remember is if you're just hitting the main ideas and it's shorter, right, that means you can't bring in all of the details. So what does that mean?

And this gets to our fourth bullet here. This is different than a retell. And, you know, as students move through K to three, very often they're not quite developmentally ready to do full blown summaries on their own.

And that's why if you look at Common Core standards and state standards that are similar to Common Core. You'll notice that in grades K and 1, they talk about retell. And then in 2 and 3, they'll talk about recounting.

But those are both about, can the student give back, in their own words, everything they can remember? So they're giving you back both the big ideas, but also all the details. And for any of you who do assessments using something like DIBLS, right, where after we're searching for the fluency numbers around that. We then often will ask kids, can you retell what you just read as a way to sort of check comprehension?

So these students are used to retell. And all of a sudden, when you come to grade four, the expectations and the standards are that students will now be able to summarize. And that's a big leap for a lot of them. And I would say even sometimes for teachers.

So teachers, you need to be sure that when you're asking for summarizing, you're not asking for a retell. How is it also different than paraphrasing? Paraphrasing is when you say something back, but in your own words. So paraphrase could be just as long or longer.

And of course, if you're paraphrasing the details, that probably wouldn't make sense for a main idea. Summary. What do I mean by it's an important life skill?

I want you to think about, I'll throw out some examples here. Let's say I'm thinking about going to see a movie and I call up one of my friends and I say, oh, I'm thinking about... seeing this movie, you know, what, what, what do you think?

What could you tell me that? And let's say this first friend goes on and on and on and gives me all the details and tells away the great ending. Right. And after a while I'm like, okay, like, you know, I really don't want to listen to this anymore. I mean, that person will still be my friend.

Right. But if I call another friend and I asked the same thing and in about four or five sentences, they gave me the, they give me the gist, you know, sort of what happened. And they say, Hey, on a scale of one to 10, John.

I know you, I think I give it an eight. Which friend am I going to call more often, right? Or think about you're on the job and you go to a meeting and maybe your employer isn't able to be at the meeting and you come back and they say, tell me about the meeting.

And you go on and on and on and on, right? Okay, what's going to be much more valuable is, A, they covered these three things and our department better start thinking about this, right? Or let's just use tonight, for example. I don't know how many of you, maybe you'll go back tomorrow and you'll be talking to your colleagues about, you know, what you heard tonight.

And they might say, can you summarize? Same thing. We want to hit just the big ideas.

All right. Let's also talk about the length of a summary. Depending on what the source is that you're summarizing, a summary might be one sentence. If I'm trying to summarize maybe a paragraph's worth of information, really the what often ends up being the topic sentence.

We talked about this last week. What happens to be the topic sentence in many respects, it's one sentence, but it's the summary of the paragraph because it's telling you the gist or the main idea. It might be a paragraph. If I'm summarizing text, maybe that has three or four paragraphs within it. I'm going to take a look at the big main ideas from each paragraph.

I'm going to pull them all together. I might include a few details, but not a lot. So now my summary might be a paragraph.

But I want you to think about if you're looking at, let's say, a chapter in a textbook, and you go to the end of the chapter and they give you a summary, well, the summary might be a whole page. So there's no rules about how long. And then the last thing I want to say about as we hit the mountaintops of summary, right, is it's an amazing tool to use for formative assessment.

Once you're sure that you've given enough explicit instruction about what a summary is and how to do one, how to pull one together. If you then begin to ask students, you know, all right, we just finished 15 minutes reading and talking about an article. I'd like you right now as a quick write to in four sentences or less.

Let's summarize the gist of the article. or it's the end of class and as an exit ticket out, I want you to write a quick summary of the three most important points we learned in history today. And by the way, if it's a quick write, you're not going to worry about the spelling or even if they're writing good sentences, because you're focusing on, can they do that critical thinking to summarize? So now you get that back and think about what a wonderful opportunity is to get the sense of whether the kids understood. what they just read or what they just learned.

So let's remember to use it as formative assessment. What I'm going to do here on this next slide, hopefully I think it's going to work here. So this is a quick little video and rather than me trying to just do it, I thought I would show the little video.

What I'm talking about here, this is a metaphor. I use a sponge as a metaphor. It'll explain it all once I hit the play button.

This is something that I have been using. Gosh, since the late 70s, when I first started teaching, summarizing to students that had difficulty with reading and writing. You'll see why it really emphasizes that point about it really being about the big ideas. And, you know, last week when we were talking about paragraph structure, we focused a lot about how part of the reason some students have difficulty writing paragraphs. is that they don't get that concept of what a main idea or a big idea, right, or a central idea is as compared to all the details that might support it.

Because that's what a paragraph is, right? You start a new paragraph when you're about to shift to the next big idea. Well, main idea skulls become very crucial as it relates to summarizing.

And you'll see as I explain that. For those of you who like this video and you want to... be able to connect to it. It's available on our YouTube channel, the Keys to Literacy YouTube channel.

If you just go to the Keys website, I'll have a link at the end of the slides where we have a lot of free materials that I keep mentioning. There's one that's called Videos and Webinars, and they're very short little clips, but you can access this there. And this sponge metaphor, I don't have it in the writing rope book, but it is in our other books.

So Let's play it, and here you go. So, as we've said before, the concept of a summary is difficult for some kids to wrap their head around. They often get it confused with a retail, so they start to write about everything that they can remember.

And we're going to use a metaphor. We're going to use a sponge, actually, as a metaphor to help explain the concept of a summary. So, I have right now a sponge.

And it's in a bucket of water here, a bowl of water. And so it's pretty heavy with water. In fact, we're watching the water sort of drip out of it. And in this form, the sponge represents whatever I'm going to be summarizing. So maybe I'm going to summarize a movie.

The sponge with all the water in it represents everything I saw in the movie. Or maybe I'm going to summarize a meeting I went to. The sponge represents everything that's in the meeting.

Or maybe I'm going to summarize an article that I just read. And the sponge represents everything that's in the article. The big ideas, the details, the pictures, everything that's in it. Or maybe I've just read a chapter in a novel. So that's the topic for the summary.

But when we summarize, we don't give back everything. We are really just focusing on the main ideas, the most important ideas, or if it's a story, the most important events that happen. And in order to do that, the first thing kids need to be able to do is identify what are the big details, the big ideas, versus what are all the supporting details, and make a distinction between those. So if we were to use the concept of our wet sponge as representing everything that we're going to be summarizing. When we summarize, we literally start to squeeze the sponge, right?

It's a metaphor for we start to think about or comprehend what we just saw in the movie or we just read, right? And what we try to do is get rid of all the water, which represents the details. So what's left, the form of the sponge, this is the main ideas.

the big events, and we've just hopefully gotten rid of a lot of the details. And so now when we are, we've just squeezed them out, right? We're down to our sort of our bare bones main points.

Now when we go to say or write our summary, we have to take those basic ideas and blow them up a little bit. We turn them into full sentences. We usually start by telling somebody what the sponge is about, meaning what's the summary about.

And then we proceed to explain the big ideas with not very many details. Now, what's nice about this metaphor is sometimes students, they don't squeeze out enough of the water. And so when they give you a summary and it's too long and they're going on and on and on, right? You can say your sponge still has too much water in it.

You need to get rid of some of the details. Okay. The other thing that can happen is sometimes the sponge, they only give us four of the five big ideas.

They're missing a few. And so in that case, you can say, you only gave me part of the sponge. Where's the rest of the main ideas?

So, and sometimes they can just give you almost like a list of main ideas and they need really need to embellish it a little bit more. And so that's when you might say, you know what, you need to make the sponge a little more moist. You got to put a few details back in there in order for it to, you know, to be a good summary.

So that's how we use this metaphor. Sometimes for students, you literally have to model using a sponge. I've been in classrooms where teachers will have small sized sponges and just kind of remind kids and they practice. But eventually you take the visual away and you just use the concept and you say your sponge is a little too moist or you need to add a little bit more water to your sponge or you only got half the sponge.

You know, you're missing some of your main ideas. So, you know, it's a it's a very tangible, hands on way to get kids to understand the concept of a summary. All right. So I hope you find that metaphor helpful. Again, having worked with students that struggled, students with dyslexia, the more multisensory you can be sometimes, give them a visual and a concept that can really help.

All right. So for those of you who have the book, if we move on a little deeper into the chapter about summary writing, from pages 116 to 122, I give you seven different suggestions for scaffolds for helping kids learn how to write summaries and improve their summaries. We don't have time tonight to go through all of them.

So I've highlighted a few that I'm going to address in a little bit more depth. On page, let's see, what page is it? It's figure 9.3.

There it is, page 117. You have these same seven steps. And then again, within the chapter, we take each one and give you a little bit more detail. So one of the first is just start with simple, short text. If your focus is to have kids learn how to write summaries, then don't begin by having them write summaries of really complex information that they don't quite own.

You can even make it as simple as, hey, we're going to practice the steps. in a summary, including adding transitions. And I'm going to have you summarize three things that you do every morning before you come to school. So really keep it simple. And we're starting.

You want to provide a set of steps, which I'm going to show you in a minute. You can scaffold the text. So you might, let's say there's a page of text or maybe a chapter. If you start drawing lines or start putting like a little star next to where the big ideas are in the text.

You're scaffolding it so that they can find the main ideas. We've talked a lot about two column notes. I'm going to show you how you could use that.

If you've been using it to collect information, how you use especially the left side of the notes. Transitions, we've talked about this a number of times. They're words or phrases that help us make connections. And they're very valuable with summaries because you want kids to be able to make connections as you move from one part of the summary to the next.

Writing templates, I shared some of those with you last week, and we'll continue to do that next week, where the students actually are filling in parts of the template. And then finally, I guess I'd say the most intensive scaffold of all is to give a partially completed summary that students fill in. So let's revisit a couple of these. For those of you who have the book, let's turn to page 118. 119. And what I've done for you here is given you a sample piece of text. This is a passage from the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, written by Frederick Douglass.

And what we've done in the passage by using underlines and highlights, this is the beauty of Brooks Publishing. They're the people who lay out the pages, right? We've been able to show you one of the scaffolds that has to do with preparing this text.

So what we've done is in places where there's something about the main idea, it's a phrase or a sentence that really captures it, we've underlined it, and then... any, a few of the really important details we've highlighted. Now we haven't highlighted all the details, right? Because remember, like with the sponge, we're not, this isn't a retail, but what we're looking for is just one or two really essential details so that when we go to explain that main idea, it might help us by keeping our sponge a little bit moist, right? So what you want to do is follow these steps.

that you see in this example. The first step is, right, to read the original passage and identify the main ideas. That's the step one.

The second step is to pull out those main ideas, right? Make a list, can be in phrase form. Third, begin the summary with an introduction where you're stating what the summary is about.

Fourth step, Turn all those main ideas into sentences. And again, you can bring in a few details, right? You might have to, if you look at step five, begin to combine some of those sentences.

That draws on the work from our writing rope, the strand that has to do with syntax and sentence writing. And then make sure that we add a few transitions so that the summary moves slowly. So you can see those steps.

There's a handout with those steps that you can literally give kids to remind them. But then again, in the book, pages 118 and 119, you see every step applied to this piece written by Frederick Douglass. Sorry, I keep getting a problem right here. So we've been talking a lot about two column notes. And we.

In a minute, I'm going to show you in the next chapter how we use it to gather information about main ideas, but also details from our sources. Two column notes, got the main ideas in the left side, the supporting details on the right. Or if we were using two column notes for a narrative summary, we'd list our big events on the left side, and we would add a couple of key details over on the right.

And again, if you have the book, you can see this on figure 9.6. So what happens, let me go back to this a second. So what happens when you've got a set of two column notes? Let's see if you can think about the answer to this question. Are we going to write sentences about everything that's on both sides of the notes, or are we going to focus on the left or the right side more?

What do you think your answer is? And I'm going to give you a hint. It's about the main ideas, right?

So So the answer is we want to be drawing from the left side, right? If we make sure that we get all of our main ideas, then we're getting the whole sponge in there. We can grab a few details from the right column, right? To embellish the sentence a little. But if we start writing about everything that's on the right side, now it's no longer a summary and it becomes a retell.

All right. So another one of the templates that I mentioned is a summary template. And this, you see the example that we give in the book, a full size page of it is available, figure 9.9. And this is one of those things that if you want the electronic version so that you can just give it to your kids, you can download it from the Brooks website. We also have a version of this on the Keys to Literacy free downloads and templates.

And that version is a PDF that students can actually type into the PDF. But what do you notice as you look at this template? Remember, what was the first?

two steps in the stages of the summarizing. It's identifying the main ideas and then list them, and they can be in phrase form. And there you see the space to list your main ideas.

The next step was to write an introductory statement to your summary that tells you what the summary is about. And so the students have some lines to write that. The next step is to take each main idea and develop it into sentences.

And that's where you have space. They're under number three. And we've even, as we're not just reminded them to include transitions, but we've taken a really short, simple list of transitions to make it even easier for the kids to grab a few.

Now, if you have students who really struggle with writing, maybe they're dysgraphic or they just have a hard time with this summarizing. If they fill this template out, you probably should just accept that as the completed summary. You're not going to ask them to copy it all over again, right?

There are some students who may use a summary template just once, and then once they get the gist of it, they get the hang of it. They've internalized the steps to writing a summary. They no longer have to see a template like this. They can just do it on a blank piece of paper. So that's another one of the scaffolds.

All right. We keep bringing us back to these connect to the classroom questions or reflections that are interspersed throughout the book. The connect to the classroom around this summarizing chapter is basically asking you to develop a lesson plan that incorporates any aspect of what's in this summary chapter. Maybe you're introducing the students to some of the scaffold, or maybe you're introducing them to the concept of a summary using the sponge.

So if any of you did have a chance to try anything from this chapter with your students, if you feel comfortable, we'd love it if you would just jot down over in the chat, maybe a couple of times, just say what you tried, how it worked, how the students reacted. All right, with that now, we're going to move to chapter 10, which is also about critical thinking. It's also about writing from sources, but this is a little bit broader now.

It's not that very specific task of summarizing. And once again, we're connecting here to the top strand in the writing rope. One more thing I just wanted to say about summarizing also, you know, if any of you think about taxonomies of thinking, maybe you're familiar with Bloom's taxonomy, right?

It really is a critical thinking skill because in order to summarize, you've got to synthesize, right? You've got to evaluate, you've got to evaluate what's important in this, what's the big ideas. And it just really taxes those upper levels of thinking. So a lot of what we're going to be talking about now in chapter 10 is also going to push kids to use their critical thinking skills. This is just a slide.

I don't necessarily have this particular thing in the writing wrote book, but it sort of summarizes some of what I have in the introduction of this chapter. I want you to think about writing is thinking, right? When we write, it helps us organize our thoughts.

It helps us clarify relationships among ideas that we're thinking about. It solidifies their understanding. Heck, if we can write out something that we're thinking, we're going to remember it.

It helps us build relationships, make connections between ideas. It extends our thinking as we start to reflect in our writing, and it certainly engages us. You know, we talked in one of the sessions about quick writes, right? It's as an example of a really simple content writing task.

Quick writes happen in like, you know, five to 10 minutes or less. But even doing a short quick write acts as a powerful processing tool. And I want you to think about this example.

I might've used it before in one of our, one of our evenings together, but how many of you write out a shopping list before you go food shopping? Right. I do that. And some of us, our shopping lists sort of reflect how organized we might be. You know, some of us, we just start make a list and everything's one just big giant list.

Some of us get really anal compulsive, right? And so we start putting all the vegetables in one part of our list in the. frozen food in another, but it doesn't matter, right? The question I have for you is if you get to the store and you realize you forgot your list, how does just the fact that you wrote it help you remember what you need to get, right? And if you were grouping things by items, when you do get to the frozen food aisle, because you went through that trouble of writing it and categorizing those items, you're going to remember them more.

And that's what I mean about how powerful writing can be. In this chapter, I mean, I try to make connections to research throughout. I don't want this to be just a research book.

So my goal is to make it as practical as possible. But I really feel like in this area of writing from sources, there is such rich research that we can look to. So just to call your attention to this, you can read about the details in these reports. And all you have to do is Google each one of them and then you'll actually get the reports.

But there are three in particular that really highlight. the value in improving comprehension as well as improving writing. So writing next, no, let's actually start with reading next. That was one of the first research meta-analyses reports to come out.

And that identified what were the most effective things we could do to support students'reading skills, especially comprehension, right? And guess what made the list? Summarizing and Any kind of writing about what you're reading kind of task. So writing about what you're learning, and that is true across all subjects.

Another report that came out was Writing Next, where Graham and colleagues did a review of all the research to date about what things teachers could do that would improve the writing of grades three and up. And guess what shows up? Summarizing.

Also shows up that. any tasks we have students do that has to do with writing about a source. If you're, and that includes everything from, I mentioned summarizing, right? But it also includes things like writing personal reflections, especially to narrative text.

So if you think about those tasks where, you know, teachers ask students to maybe read a chapter in the story, in the novel, and then write a one or two paragraph reflection, how did you feel about the character? How did the setting? connect to something you know.

It's that journal writing in reaction that has shown to be so powerful in improving not only writing, but also comprehension of narrative text. They even found that even if you don't do full-blown writing around the three types of text, but even just writing notes about what you're reading improves comprehension and also grows your writing skill. And then any of the writing tasks that involve, you know, maybe you're writing a research paper or you're writing a response to a prompt. The last one was writing to read.

And that also found the same findings that I just summarized in writing next. But that focused on it in particular about how writing supports reading. And by the way, there are sections in that that informed us about how writing also improves.

decoding skills and fluency and spelling. All right. So I started to mention this piece about responding to narrative text using personal narrative.

In pages 128 to 129, we get into this a little bit more deeply. You'll see I've got a little tiny version of figure 10.3, which for those of you that have the book, um, You know, I suggest you, if you can take a look at it now, even if you don't have the book and you can get that little code that I showed earlier, you could go to the Brooks downloadable hub and grab this. Right.

So what figure 10.3 has for you is I've put together, I've done this before for some of the other trainings I do for writing, but it's a list of guiding questions that you could give your students. If you're getting them to respond to text in, especially if it's in a journal format. Now, let me caution you.

There are a lot of questions. You can see how many there are just on that little thumbnail sketch, right? Don't hit the kids with all of these at once.

So you could do a couple of things. You could take one of the sections, like maybe the response to theme and give the students just those three questions and say, use these questions to help you write about your response to the theme of the text. That's one way you can narrow this down.

The other way is you can take maybe one question from every one of the categories, right? So overall personal response, response to the theme, response to the characters, the setting, or response to the author. So now you're only giving them five or six questions.

The reason these are really important and helpful as a scaffold is for many students, especially those who don't feel comfortable about writing. If you say... Write a response to what you just read.

They don't know where to begin. They don't know how to center their thinking, right? By posing a question, it helps them make a connection to what they're thinking and it can get them started.

The other thing that I have in this chapter in figure 10-4 is an example of it. And we talked about this last time when we were talking about the three types of writing. You may remember that at the end of that chapter, I had some samples of teacher feedback checklists that are specific to informational or argument writing. Well, and what I said was, certainly, if you want to take them and use them as they are, please do.

But what I really would like you to do is use it as a model, but then modify these checklists so that the things you're looking to give feedback on are tied directly to what your writing assignment is. So here you see an example of a modified feedback checklist that's designed specifically for doing a personal response to narrative text. All right. So that was one of the types of responding or writing about sources in this chapter. This is a little kind of visual that we also have in the book here.

And it's what I've been saying from the start, right? That this is really the nexus of where we combine comprehension skills and strategies with writing skills and strategies. It's why I called this strand in the rope, the critical thinking strand.

So if students are going to give you a response, maybe it's a task, maybe you've given them a prompt of the type that you see often in high stakes state assessments, or maybe the social studies teacher is giving students a question that's pushing them to think about everything that they learned in class discussion and everything they read about in the chapter, right? And sort of critically think and pull that all together. When we give them those kinds of tasks and we don't get a quality response back, we have to ask ourselves, is the problem that they didn't even understand the source?

So was the issue with comprehension skills or was it that they didn't have proficient writing skills? So maybe they understood the source. Maybe if they could just talk about it, they'd be able to give you a great response.

But their sentence writing is. difficult. Their paragraph writing is not quality, right? They don't use transitions.

To me, it's a little bit like, you know, those of you who are familiar with the simple view of reading, right? You've got your sort of decoding here and you've got your language skills. And we say, you know, the product of being able to really comprehend what we read is a product of both sides of that equation.

Well, that's how I kind of feel this is all about. And unfortunately, a lot of students who struggle, it's not one or the other, it's problems in both parts of the equation, right? Now, we did not have a chance to go into more depth about the stages of the writing process, which was in one of the chapters we did not get to, but that I will next week. But, you know, that chapter talks about the stages of the writing process.

And I have this little sort of mnemonic to help kids. The... process, writing, routine, which stands for T, think, right?

Plan is process, write is writing, and then revise is what's represented in the routine, right? So think, plan, write, revise. It's just a more simplistic way to help kids remember the stages. Well, if you think about it, thinking and planning before you actually start writing a response to sources, is. That is really about the comprehension side of this, whereas the writing and revision stages of the writing process kick in all of our proficient writing skills.

What I want to do in the remaining time we have and what I do in the rest of this chapter is to dig down a little bit more about teaching students to respond to prompts. Now on page 130. And you can see a copy of it here. One of the things that I've done is because when my trainers or I do training around this for teachers, we often find that like if all we do is just kind of talk about it, but we don't give you examples and we don't make you try to come up with a prompt, it usually doesn't get carried over into your teaching. So what I've done in this chapter is say, all right, whatever grade you teach.

I've got a couple of examples across grades four to eight. And by the way, if you do grades three or you're in high school, you can do this as well. So what I'd like you to do is, we won't do it now, but pick one or two of these examples of prompts. And then I want you to think about a subject area you're teaching.

You know, maybe it's history, maybe it's a novel in literature, whatever it is. And I want you to use these sample prompts. almost as sample model text, right?

We talked about how helpful that is for kids when we share mentor texts because they're emulating it. Well, I want you to emulate. what these prompts look like. And create a prompt, make it simple at first, and I would at first choose just one source, maybe one short text.

So the students have to practice those note-taking skills, first of all that searching and finding that relevant information, then that skill of taking two column notes on it, then that skill of taking each part of their notes and developing them into full sentences, combining some sentences. making sure they chunk things into good paragraphs, then making sure they add transitions. So you're going to walk them through every step, which in many respects is kind of like the culmination of all the previous chapters of all the other strands in the writing rope. This is where kids have to integrate all of this at the same time to come up with a quality piece of writing.

All right, so... So... So let's take a look at the connect to the classroom piece that I had at the end of this chapter. What I encouraged you to do is write at least one writing prompt. Again, use that, emulate, use that, emulate the ones I gave you, right?

That's connected to something. And then walk the students each step through each step. You have to be explicit.

You have to model it. And you're going to have to use ThinkLab. So same thing. If any of you did have a chance. to come up with a prompt and start to introduce your students to the skills and strategies that I gave you in this chapter, we'd love to see it in the chat.

All right. So as we're coming to a close, now what we want to do is focus on some of what was in the chapter that connects some of the things that I shared with you last week, right? So what do we want to be sure we do? We want to be explicit.

about all the skills and strategies that come into play at each of the stages of the writing process. Here are some examples of two column notes. Let's say the student was writing a research piece or an article, informational piece about killer whales.

You see how the main ideas are in the left. The details are on the right. If this student were to turn this into a response, they'd start with.

maybe a sentence or two with an intro. They'd end with a one or two sentence conclusion. But how many paragraphs do you think their body might have?

Probably five because there's five big ideas. Remember, I also shared with you top-down topic webs, how those could be used. So in this case, the student, this is going to guide them to write their intro and their conclusion.

And again, it's going to remind them of five main parts to their body organization. Here you have some two column notes that the student's writing about the themes in The Old Man and the Sea. So probably going to be three main sections to this written piece, one for each one of the themes.

The details are over on the right. Or if you had a top down web, same thing. What you'll notice, what's the difference?

In the notes, you get all the details. In the topic webs, you just get the big ideas. All right.

So. Oh, the last thing I wanted to remind you of is a WAG. We explain what these are.

We give you lots of examples. I've been using these WAGs, one version over another, for at least 10 years now. When we do training in schools, even if we only have maybe an hour and all we do is encourage teachers to use these, we find that they take them and they start using them and it's helpful right away.

So when you have a chance to unpack. this and read more about it in this chapter. But you can also just see quickly the pieces to a wag here.

At the top, you let the students know the writing task. Is it answering a prompt? Are you writing a narrative?

What is the actual task? Audience and purpose. Remember, we've talked about that.

That if students, if it's clear that they're writing to a real audience or they at least can. focus on who their audience is. That's going to help make their writing, you know, be more centered, but also sharing the purpose. Is it to convince me of something?

Is it to tell a story? The rest of the WAG gives very clear cut directions to students about what's expected. You know, one of the findings in that Writing Next report that I mentioned, one of the other 11 items that they addressed that they found were statistically significant, was when we gave very specific and detailed. information about what we require in a writing assignment. A lot of times, the reason we don't get back from students what we expect or what we want is because they aren't clear about what we need.

Teachers who just give these very general, I want you to write a composition tonight, or I'd like you to write a research report, and you don't get very specific, they really don't know what to do. It sets very clear expectations. It also ends up being a great tool for any interventionists or parents or caretakers who are helping students with their writing tasks, because now they know exactly what's expected.

It also makes it a whole lot easier to grade these things, because you've been very clear about what's expected, and you're able to then turn it into a scoring rubric to give kids feedback and to actually give them a grade. So if you look at the number of examples that I've given from lots of different subjects, I really think looking at others'examples is going to help you create these for yourself, right? But what you'll see is around length, you don't just say three paragraphs.

You always give a range. So you might say three to five paragraphs. You might say 200 to 300 words. You might say one to two pages. Under directions and requirements, this is where you're very specific.

You might say to students... Make sure there's an introduction. And because this is an opinion piece, you must state your opinion or your claim right within the introduction. You might say, have something very specific about content.

Maybe you're explaining the three causes of the civil, the causes of the civil war. So one of your directions or requirements might be, make sure you include at least three causes. This is where you would put things like. You must include transitions. I want to see at least three.

Circle them within your written piece. This is also where you might have requirements for things like the sources. You've been given three sources.

You must use information from two out of the three. Now, supports, what goes here? Again, you'll see lots of examples in the book. This is where you might say, use your transition list.

Refer to your transition list. list. And if you're giving this WAG to students electronically, that's where you can put a link directly to the transition list that maybe you're storing in your Google Drive for students, right? Writing supports might be use the summary writing template or any of the other templates that we've been talking about.

So this is where you also think about scaffolds. This initially is a tool for the teachers. But then you can make copies of it, give it to the students, and now it becomes a set of expectations for when they're doing the assignment. All right. The other thing that I've given you is a set of guiding questions that you can give students to help them follow along.

Or you can use these guiding questions to help cue you to what should go into the WAG. All right. We're sort of running out of time here.

So I'm just going to go over the sort of big, big tasks that are in this last section. This last chapter is meant to get you to really reflect on things. It is organized the reflection part into two major sections. Right. So the the reflection questions that we provided for you that are on pages 164 to 174. Those are questions that make you think about the strands of the rope, right?

So think about those five strands, what's in each one, you know, what skills and strategies are there? The second part of this reflection activity is a set of questions we've given you. And you'll see in the book, we have the topic on the left in the middle column is your question.

And then we've given you space to write your responses. These are questions about the seven teaching principles that we introduced at the beginning of the book that we want you to make sure you walk away with these. And that includes everything from an IWU gradual release. It also includes things like the value of using mentor model text that you share with kids so that they can emulate it.

All right. So I'm going to end by just highlighting for me, what are the biggest ideas in this book? Number one, content writing is a way to promote and deepen learning, and all teachers can play a role. And I think the stuff we covered tonight really gets at that, right? It can promote content learning.

That writing proficiency for the three types. of writing. Informational opinion argument narrative is absolutely essential, and there are some very detailed requirements around things like and body development and conclusion that you'll find in many of the state standards. Third, writing is a complex task that requires the integration of many skills and strategies.

That's where all these strands of the rope come together and they start intertwining. Let's not forget those teaching principles, right? The gradual release, explicit instruction, differentiate and scaffold. And I hope you'll use a lot of the scaffolds I've given you.

Remember the importance of finding opportunities for students to collaborate using the mentor text and just increasing the amount of kids, right? And also let's keep in mind that last strand that if kids are having difficulty with spelling and handwriting, the transcription skills, that is gonna impede. A few more big ideas.

Remember to have kids always be aware of TAP, the task, audience, and purpose. Let's make sure they're aware of the stages of the writing process, that they don't skip them, that they don't just go right to write, right? That they do the thinking and planning.

Remember that sentences and paragraphs are the building blocks of writing. And if kids don't have those down, they're never going to be able to produce quality writing. Remember that kids benefit from analyzing sample text structure.

that they then can copy in their own writing. And then finally, writing to learn tasks, such as summarizing, responding to narrative text, and writing from sources supports content. All right, so last, putting it together, writing instruction should address all components in the rope, all teachers play a role, make it explicit, and avoid a sumicide.

What I mean by that is, don't assume that kids... even your oldest students have some of these very basic skills. You want to always go back in and figure out where the holes are in their Swiss cheese.

All right. So with that, I am going to, oh, I just wanted to tell you. So for those of you who maybe you want to do some book studies with some of your colleagues and do like what's a real book study, not where you're just listening to me, but where you're getting to talk about the book. I have a guide I put together that's free.

So that you can download it if you want. It's almost like, you know, when you read a famous novel and at the end they have questions if you want to do a book study. That's what this is.

So that's the link to get that. All right. So do we have any questions, guys, for me?

We do. I only saw one. But it is someone who is looking for any suggestions or advice on what to start with or how to start regarding making a shift within their school or district with the colleagues that they work with at the middle school level. I think many teachers believe the majority of students should have the majority of skills that they need for writing, like main idea, and often feel overwhelmed on how to get through the curriculum and or the standards in addition to going back and filling in those gaps.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's like a suicide. That's what I was just saying, right?

We assume our students have this. And if this person's in middle school and he or she is saying with a colleague. Well, usually in middle school, there's their teams of teachers. There's probably four core teachers, right? ELA, social studies, history, math, and then maybe some, you know, some other.

So you got half of a team right there. That's really cool. I would say grab another one and maybe all four people on your team. And all right, what's the first thing you could do?

Just have kids start writing more. I mean, that in itself, right? Think about one of the early chapters when we talk about content writing. And I talked about three types of writing, quick writes, content writing tasks.

So like writing summaries would be an example of that. And then more formal writing tasks, like something you do once a semester, right? Right. Just start with quick writes.

If you have four teachers and if every one of those four teachers once a week gave a quick write, you're doing four quick writes every week. And if they did it twice a week, you're doing eight. So that's the other simple place to start, quick writes.

The other thing I would do is I think I'd start with the three types of writing because they're so essential to everything. So make sure every one of your classrooms has got a poster. I gave examples of them in the book, right, where you just show the three types of writing and what's their purpose.

And then whenever kids are reading something, take a minute and say, which type of writing did that author use or which combination? And then flip it. When you're giving them a writing task, always start with which type of writing would be best for this.

That's another thing. And then I think since she's probably, or he is probably a content teacher, I would do some of the things that we talked about. Create a writing prompt that's related to what you're teaching. and start to show the kids how they could go into the source, find the information, put it into column notes, and then write a response. Now, if that was really the only question, that's good, because I think we're at eight o'clock, but is there one last one that I, there is one last one, I was going to say, thank you, those are really nice, like ways, places to start, like as an honor.

And the one question that just came in is, what do you suggest that a teacher would use as a baseline to engage student writing? To engage student writing? Or to gauge.

Oh, to gauge. I don't, maybe I said the wrong thing. Yeah, yeah. So I think I would go to the chapter where we have the three types of writing, right? And in there, I identify the elements that must be around intros and conclusions and body organization or development, right?

And what I do in there is I highlight what the common core standards for those first three. standards expect, I think that's a great place to start because if you're gauging students a writing sample, oh, and then the other thing I wanted to say was at the end of that chapter, remember I said I have those checklists? So those checklists are organized around intro, body development, and conclusion.

Use that to start looking at a student's piece of writing and determining, do they have an intro? Is it good? Do they have a conclusion? Is it good?

Have they... develop their body in an organized way have they clearly stated their main idea for each paragraph have they included some transitions those are the simple things that you want to do when you analyze a student's piece of writing that's where i'd start great well all right we're out of time yes we are i'd like to share my screen if possible there we go yep and here we go

Transcript for:Insights from The Writing Road Book Study

Transcript for:
Insights from The Writing Road Book Study