Writers' Craft Part Deux

During each PD Cycle this year, our team has drawn up a document that articulates our shared beliefs and agreements about what these beliefs look like in practice.  These documents, known collectively as our "we believes," ensure that our practices are always connected to our philosophy and that our philosophy is always explicit, rather than assumed.  We use these living documents to guide classroom walkthroughs, feedback from visitors, and conversations about teacher growth.

One particular statement in our current "we believe" document -- the one focusing on Writers' Craft -- stands out to me as worth coming back to over and over again:

"Teachers have a range of teaching strategies that are focused on the manipulation and application of clear, sophisticated, and beautiful sentences."  

"Manipulation" and "application" are bolded because they describe actions that are contrary to the traditional teaching of grammar, teaching that typically focuses on correcting errors in isolated sentences and teaching that has, incidentally, been proven ineffective (see Carnegie's Writing Next).  The verbs in our document describe a different sort of work with sentences in which students intentionally move or combine parts of sentences to create the effects they desire, using grammar as a tool to help them reach a desired communication end.  As teachers, we're working to develop our repertoire of instructional strategies that engage students in this work.  So far, we've looked at sentence patterning, sentence expanding/combining, sentence unscrambling, and the use of mentor sentences.  As I do walkthroughs in our classrooms during this cycle, I'm looking for examples of teachers exploiting these strategies in authentic, context-embedded ways.  

Check out what I noticed in Ms. Florita's classroom last Wednesday.

First, she used an anchor chart to introduce the concept of subordinate clauses.

Then, she used sentence patterning to play with these clauses, modeling for students several ways in which she could manipulate sentence parts.

Note how she's teaching subordination using vocabulary and concepts that apply to the current class context of persuasive writing.

The subordinating conjunctions poster can move, depending on how she wants the sentence to sound.







After this "I Do" level instruction, Ms. Florita transfered the responsibility to the students, giving them their own sentence parts to play around with.  Check out Esmerelda and Mercedes explaining their sentence possibilities:

This is still in the Guided Practice, or "We Do," portion of the gradual release; the ultimate test is whether Esmerelda and Mercedes can apply this learning to use subordination in their own writing.  Ms. Florita, send us examples as you find them!