Language and Literacy: Writing Strand

  In my earlier blog post for language and literacy I brought up the use of role-playing games in the classroom to teach reading skills.  However, a recent reading has come up that has really grabbed my attention as a prospective educator.  This article focuses on the use of persuasive writing in classrooms and how to teach and model persuasive writing to students. The article is called Gradually Releasing Responsibility to Students Writing Persuasive Texts by Sylvia Read, Melanie London-hays and Alicia Martin-Rivas.  This text highlights a couple interesting points for me.  Firstly it states that students in younger grades never learn or practice persuasive writing, instead focusing on narrative writing skills.  Secondly this article displays how teachers can model persuasive writing to a class using a model called IMSCI (Inquiry, Modelling, Shared Writing, Collaborative Writing, and Independent Writing).  I will break down what I believe these two points mean for teaching persuasive writing, but I first thought it would be appropriate to relate these ideas to my own experiences writing persuasive research papers during my undergrad.  I feel like this is a fair comparison because in the article the students are using the skills of writing outside of language arts class (it's in the context of a science class), and even at a university level I still exercised the basic skills highlighted in this form of instruction.

  One resource that I found in my fourth year undergrad as a history major was the Stanford History Education Group, which offers useful intro materials for writing in history and lesson plans.  For this post though I want to focus on their intro material, specifically their historical thinking chart (pictured below).  To me this chart helps to highlight a lot of what the article on persuasive writing touches on.  The article on persuasive writing makes clear that students cannot learn how to write persuasively without first learning how to read persuasive texts.  This chart nicely highlights the skills that students at any level have to exercise when reading persuasive texts under the Close Reading section.  Likewise, these are things that students have to make clear when writing their own persuasive texts.  I also think that teachers can easily use the IMSCI model in a historical writing context by encouraging inquiry and modelling along the lines of close reading, sourcing, contextualization, and corroboration.  Like the article on persuasive writing I do not believe that these skills are too advanced for elementary students, but should be taught early.  The article by Sylvia Read states that they were instructing a fourth grade class how to write persuasively and got surprisingly good results out of it.  I therefore believe that if teachers model how to write persuasively in different contexts (such as science or history as appropriate to the subject) and provide scaffolding with a gradual release of responsibility they can become effective persuasive writers.

Stanford Historical Education Group. Historical Thinking Chart [Online Image].