Resources and Highlights
Strategies by Patrice Ball District Curriculum Specialist in English Language Arts

A p p r o a c h
Strategies
Activities

Obermeyer, Mark, 2005. When Writing Workshop Isn’t Working , Stenhouse Publishers -Chapter 10 How Do I Plan for Writing Instruction?

Notes: Start by planning for the entire year, making sure all important standards, genres etc. are covered. Next plan units or months at a time. Now we are down to the weeks at a time and the daily adaptation and revisiting of the plan to see what we have done, what we can eliminate, and what do we need to add to assure student learning.

www.all4ed.org
Graham, Steve and Dolores Perin, 2007 Writing Next : Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High Schools, Alliance for Excellent Education.

“ The Optimal Mix: In the medical profession, treatment is tailored ot individual patient needs; at times, more than one intervention is needed to effectively treat a patient. Similarly, educators need to test mixes of intervention elements to find the ones that work best for students with different needs. Researchers do not know what combination of how much of each of the recommended activities is needed to maximize writing instruction for adolescents in general or low-achieving writers in particular. Nor do they yet know what combination of elements works for which types of writers.” P.12

“A Note about Grammar Instruction
Grammar instruction in the studies reviewed involved the explicit and systematic teaching of the parts of speech and structure of sentences. The meta-analysis found an effect for this type of instruction for students across the full range of ability, but surprisingly, this effect was negative. This negative effect was small, but it was statistically significant, indicating that traditional grammar instruction is unlikely to help improve the quality of students’ writing.” P. 21

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, Strategic Learning in the Content Areas 1999.

p. 39 Supplementary Reading Materials
p.53 A Model for Strategic Teaching and Learning

Other helps on the MPS Portal available to MPS teachers are
Instructional Strategies for Writing
BP Writing Tool for MPS
Writing Next

MediaSite the ELA 3rd session ( the last half).

Be a collector of words – these are the bricks of language communication.
Kids can get sick of an activity, but that is not a strategy.

Approach is the goal
Strategy is the map
Activities are the specific mode of transportation

Need to be flexible, adapt, abandon, or modify as one uses a strategy for individual students.

The Education Plan has the strategies and teachers do the activities to support the strategy.

Target (Standard)
Approach
Strategy
Activity
Assessment

wordsetc.edublogs.org
blog for teachers
mathnut.podbean.com for the podcast
podcast hosting site