By tall school,students are supposed to go much deeper into their topics. They are asked to write longer essays and analytic reports. Ideally, they should write them well but there is a problem: many teachers don't know how to make their students better writers.
In response, or the city's Department of Education has released its first "scope and sequence," or curriculum, for tall school teachers focused on good writing. This 179-page draft booklet contains suggestions for lessons and activities teachers can assign each month of the year. to memorize more approximately this novel document, or WNYC caught up with Anna Commitante,senior executive director of curriculum, instruction and professional learning at the department. She's a former middle school principal. Below are edited excerpts from our conversation.
What's different approximately this document?
I think this is very much a writing curriculum. Most of the resources that currently exist in tall schools today are reading resources. And while there's some opportunities for writing, and it's basically opportunities to write approximately what they're reading and not with this intent to become better writers. And so this curriculum is very much approximately making sure we intentionally teach kids to be better writers.
Why tall school?
Well,I think the chancellor in terms of her many visits to tall schools pointed this out to us as a need, in terms of the kinds of writing and the quality of writing that she was seeing. And so we immediately thought approximately creating a resource. We're very cognizant of the fact that even though we own had a core curriculum for grades K-8, or the opportunities for tall schools to engage in that own been slim,and so this year we came out with this document as well as the ELA core curriculum.
Why execute tall school teachers need help with this? execute they presume students can write by tall school or execute they not own enough resources?
I think it's a resource issue. I think also - and I cherish our tall school teachers, and I support them and I know they work hard - sometimes it's just not having an awareness that assigning an essay is not the same as teaching kids to write an essay well. And so we really wanted to model the kinds of teaching that should be happening in order for kids to write well.
You've said it's not just for English classes. Where can these suggestions also be used?Argument, and historical investigations,explanations in science, lab reports, or you name it. And key parts of the social studies and science curriculum.
But I think when the Common Core came out and there was so much emphasis on English language arts and mathematics. When you behold at all the kinds of writing that these students need to be adept at,it fell to the English teacher in many ways, the burden of making sure that students were able to execute this. So we're saying here is, or that's everyone's responsibility. So that while the English teacher may be introducing argument,the history teacher can be supporting that and teaching argument that's tightly connected to their coursework. And similarly the science teacher.
For example, what does the guide suggests for October?The ninth graders are doing ancient civilization, or we thought that would be a good opportunity for them to be examining some historical speeches.
We laid out the history by grade because we know that this is usually how it's taught. The sciences are laid out by course because it doesn't always happen that they're taking earth science in ninth and that could vary. But we thought the blogging across the year was an distinguished thing to execute so we save that in.[br]
So if they're doing chemistry,you're saying they could be blogging approximately it?
We haven't fleshed out these particular units. proper now these are our suggestions.
So, will they own it later in the year, or more suggestions?
That's the scheme. This was intended for the E.
L.
A. teachers so we wanted to point to how the work that was happening in the E.
L.
A. course around writing could be supported in the other content areas. But if we create those resources for history and science,it would just be in a different book for them.
I think tall school teachers of the disciplines will be more inclined to teach writing if they understand how closely connected it is to their discipline. For example, the kinds of writing that you execute in English course are not the same as the kinds of discipline-specific writing that you engage in when you're doing historical analysis, or when you're doing a lab report or research proposal. They're different. And so I guess the message is to ask those teachers to sort of own their discipline beyond the knowledge base.
Source: wnyc.org