www.sharemylesson.com, the website created by the American Federation of Teachers, has enlisted the aide of a number of distinguished academics to assist with the implementation of the Common Core. Dr. Louisa Moats, a contributing writer of the Common Core State Standards, is one of these academics and she has shared a webinar to help teachers address the Common Core writing standards. Moats notes that writing is the most difficult of all language skills to develop and takes the longest time to develop. She adds, it is the skill that the fewest number of students will gain proficiently with.
At minute 12:00, we learn that some of the models of teaching writing in K-12 came from studies of college students and then applied it to elementary schools–we should be skeptical about some of these writing processes or schemes. Moats gets very specific about planning at minute (13:25) noting that students need to write with source material; absent a common classroom experience, children will unnecessarily struggle. Translating—generation of text—(minute 15:20) and Review and Revision at minute 16:50 describe the last two parts of the writing process many of us are familiar with. Moats, however, cautions that revision requires a level of perspective taking, affective intelligence and pragmatic skills that many children may lack—especially struggling students.
At minute 43:00, Moats outlines how she would take students through the writing process. It starts with 1) picking a topic from a shared experience 2) setting a goal and making sure that students have generated a word bank and 3) assistance with organization so that students have an acute sense of what the final product will look like.
The webinar is well-worth watching and can be viewed here. The PowerPoint can be downloaded here.
Core Task Project 