The Common Core of State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy (CCSS for ELA), a nationwide effort to ensure that “all students are college and career ready in literacy no later than the end of high school”, defines what skills every student in America is expected to master at the end of each grade level.   In the area of writing, students need to

·         learn to communicate their “understanding of the subjects they are studying”

·         express their thoughts, imagined or real, clearly

·         develop the ability to build knowledge through research

·         accurately convey their responses to that information or literature through their writing

According to the CCSS document, “to meet these goals, students must devote significant time and effort to writing, producing numerous pieces over short and extended time frames throughout the year.”

The writing skills our students should master by the end each grade are based on four broad anchor standards/goals.  Those anchor standards are:

·         Text Types and Purposes—These goals include writing arguments to support analysis of a topic, explain or inform about a topic, or relate experiences or events.

·         Production and Distribution of Writing – These standards address the skills that develop clear and coherent writing by planning, revising, editing, rewriting and using technology to produce and publish themselves or collaborate with others.

·         Research to Build and Present Knowledge – These goals ask students to find information from literary texts, multiple print and/or digital sources, and then analyze the credibility of these sources.  This creditable information must then be used to write short or extensive research projects while avoiding plagiarism.

·         Range of Writing – This standard requires students to demonstrate that they can write over immediate or extended time on a “range of tasks, purposes, and research”.

The Writing Next report by Steve Graham and Delores Perin, identifies eleven elements of current writing instruction found to be most effective in helping adolescents (grades 4-12) learn to write well and use writing as a tool for learning.  The elements identified to be most effective presented  in the order of greatest to least impact on writing proficiency are listed below.  For more information about each element and page references within Writing Next, click here.

1.       Writing strategies involve "explicitly teaching adolescents strategies for planning, revising, and/or editing, which has a strong impact on the quality of their writing.

2.       Summarization "involves explicitly and systematically teaching students how to summarize texts”.

3.       Collaborative writing where students work together and help each other.

4.       Specific product goals that target the type of writing and the intended audience.

5.       Utilization of  Word processing.

6.       Sentence Combining involves teaching students to combine simple sentences into more complex and sophisticated sentences.

7.       Prewriting activities that help generate and organize ideas.

8.       Inquiry activities help students analyze information.

9.       Process writing approach

10.    Study of models  of each type of writing (expository,  persuasive, compare, compare/contrast) , including poetry where student analyze the features of good writing  before the students attempting on their own.

11.    Writing for content learning  addresses writing in a particular subject area (ELA, Math, Electives, Science, etc.).