home

=Welcome to the "Choices in Little Rock - Common Writing Assignment" Wikispace=

This site contains documents you can download and adapt. This is your site. We welcome you to use it to post your work, your students' work, your questions and ideas, etc. Note: Work posted on this site is in draft form and cannot be distributed without the permission of the author.Students' names should be removed from all work.

** // Dear teachers in the Choices in Little Rock (CILR) CWA pilot group,  // ** Thank you for agreeing to participate in piloting these materials designed for BPS civics teachers. The purpose of this partnership between Facing History and Ourselves and Boston Public Schools is to strengthen students’ writing and critical thinking skills, in particular the writing skills outlined in the Common Core standards. To this end, we have developed the following new resources designed to accompany the Choices in Little Rock unit:  1) ** CWA Writing Prompts  ** : We have developed three writing prompts that allow students to use the historical evidence in the Choices unit to write an argumentative essay. These prompts represent three different ways to approach a similar question. Prompt #1 asks students to connect the ideas in Choices to a general theme of how society changes. Prompt #2 is framed tightly around the history of “// Choices in Little Rock //” and may be most appropriate for inexperienced or struggling writers. Prompt #3 asks students to present an argument in the form of a formal proposal to an outside audience, exemplifying a real-world application of persuasive writing.   2) **  CWA Writing Journals:  ** For each prompt, an accompanying writing journal has been developed as a tool for teachers. Designed with “backwards planning” in mind, the activities in the writing journals can be used throughout the CILR unit to help students build ideas and evidence for their essay. In the writing journals, we suggest when an activity could be implemented within the context of the // Choices in Little Rock // unit. We have provided sample handouts for you to adapt for your own classroom context. Students can also complete this work in their interactive notebooks.  3) ** CWA Supplemental Teaching Strategies:  ** We have suggested teaching strategies to support the stages of the writing process:     Prewriting (Gathering evidence, developing arguments, writing a thesis statement)    Writing (introductions, body paragraphs, and conclusions)    Revising and editing    Sharing     These teaching strategies can be used to help students complete the tasks outlined in the writing journal as well as other writing tasks you might develop. We are counting on members of the pilot team to give us feedback on these materials and to contribute new ideas (i.e. teaching strategies, handout examples, writing prompts) to the final draft. With your help, by next school year we hope to offer all BPS civics teachers three CWA writing prompts and supporting materials. Thank you, Facing History and Ourselves