Supporting Literacy in the Content Areas:

1. Supporting Literacy in the Content Areas: Science, Math, & Social Studies

2. Five Characteristics common to all 90/90/90 Schools • A focus on academic achievement • Clear curriculum choices • Frequent assessment of student progress and multiple opportunities for improvement • An emphasis on non-fiction writing • Collaborative scoring of student work

3. Writing in the content areas: • Writing focuses on challenging students with the kind of writing they will be required to do in the real world. • Provides a way to assess student understanding and recognize misconceptions. • Allows students to discover or recognize their own thought processes through their writing • Is a way to move toward higher-order thinking in the subject areas

4. Content area writing • Science: hypotheses, procedures to answer questions, research findings, conclusions, next steps all summarized in lab reports, T-charts (graphic organizers), labeling diagrams • Math: tables, story problems, graphs, descriptions of patterns and problem solving techniques, writing new problems, graphic organizers • Social Studies: descriptions of primary sources (photos, journals, newspapers, maps, documents, photographs, etc), generating first person accounts, research findings, arguments for deliberations

5. Moving toward cross-curricular “higher-order thinking” with writing tasks • Remembering—Retrieving relevant knowledge from long-term memory • Understanding—Constructing meaning from instructional messages, including oral, written, and graphic communications • Applying—Carrying out or using a procedure in a given situation • Analyzing—Breaking material into its constituent parts and determining how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose • Evaluating—Making judgments based on criteria and standards • Creating—Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole, reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure (p. 31) • Being metacognitive—Being aware of one's own comprehension and being able and willing to repair comprehension breakdowns when they occur

6. Model “understanding performances” with writing tasks • 3-week nutrition unit for 4th-graders • Performances ~ students demonstrate: • Understanding of 6 types of food in the food pyramid by classifying food from commercials in pyramid schematic (science/math/writing) • Understanding of food labeling by making tables out of food information (math) • Practical understanding of nutrition by developing nutritious menus (writing) • Journaling food intake (science/writing/math with caloric tabulations) • Writing letters to consumers (writing/social studies) • Dramatizing grocery store experiences (arts/writing) • Writing commercials focusing on nutritional values

7. Writing in the Middle School • Writing Rubric • Student-Teacher Conference Worksheet • Writing Prompts • The Writing Process

8. WRITING TO IMPROVE THINKING • Students have to process what they know, in any given subject, on any given topic; no matter what the subject of writing. • Purpose at the High School is to improve thinking in every subject- inevitably yielding better results for all students in all subjects and on written performance assessments. • Writing prompts are developed by content area teachers in collaboration with English teachers. • Writing Day!- One hour writing delay schedule. • Drafts submitted to content area teachers to edit for content, improve thinking and encourage students to expand ideas.

9. High School continued… • Students develop final copies based on the VC K-12 rubric and comments specific to rubric areas. • Final copies, along with rough drafts, are handed in to English/ Social Studies teachers for evaluation in improvement of ideas and expanded thinking. • Writing counts as 10% of English/ Social Studies grade. • Our goal at the High School is to develop a community of thinkers and writers, as well as to promote conversations about writing among students, faculty and administrators.

10. Incorporating Writing Into Content Area Instruction • Topic: __________________ • Examples of Writing Assignments:__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

11. What Are Rubrics? • According to Heidi Goodrich Andrade: A rubric is a scoring tool that lists the criteria for a piece of work. • It determines what counts within a piece of writing. • Furthermore, it conveys the degree of quality for each specified criterion from excellent to poor. • Andrade, H. “Understanding Rubrics.” Educational Leadership (1997): 54(4).

12. Why Use Rubrics? • Rubrics can be powerful tools for both teaching and assessment. • Rubrics help students become more thoughtful judges of quality writing. • Rubrics reduce the amount of time teachers spend evaluating work. • Rubrics help teachers accommodate different learning abilities. • Rubrics can be easy to use and explain to students if the correct approach and vernacular is used.

13. VCSD Rubric

14. How Is The Rubric Incorporated Within Each Grade Level? • Grading – refer to color codes rubrics • Grade Level Tasks – see handout

15. Questions