Coaching Teachers in Supporting Student Centered Writing

Bobbi Campbell contributed today's post. More of Bobbi's thinking can be found here.

The following resource was created after a discussion with a grade seven team of Language Arts and Social Studies teachers.  The problem they were trying to solve was two-fold:

1. How do I get my students to engage in the revision process?

2. How do we conference with every student in a timely way? 

Because of these issues, I created the following document specific to argument writing. As we engage in student-centered coaching cycles with teachers, we need to remember that the focus must be on student evidence of learning. Student learning includes building choice within parameters (promotes self-efficacy), shifting the cognitive load from teacher to student, and promoting the growth mindset by allowing students to reflect on the process of revision and the direct correlation to writing improvement. 

CLICK HERE to access the complete document 

(which includes differences between revision and editing, an argument criteria checklist, and directions for use).

The beauty about student-centered coaching is that whatever resource you create, the measure of its effectiveness includes feedback from the students themselves as well as teacher reflection on the adult implementation. Implementing this resource to support the revision and editing process is  recursive in nature and may require numerous iterations until success is achieved. The important piece is that we use evidence of student learning to shift our practice, or to problem solve next steps.