Cadi Olson is a special education teacher at Moorhead High School. She is always looking for new ways to improve her students' learning. This year she's learning how to better prepare her students' writing by collaborating with area teachers and sharing some mini lessons with her students from the College-Ready Writers Program.
CRWP Success Story
My first mini-unit is where my success story begins. I started the
school year with the Writing into the Day mini-unit. I had picked
three articles with a hero theme. The students read each article and
focused on hero characteristics, which they journaled about and shared
with the class. From this discussion, the students picked the three
characteristics they felt were the most necessary for all heroes as the
topic for an essay. They included textual evidence while writing their essays.
The students I work with are seniors in a pull-out special
education English course. Their exposure to making a claim, supporting a
claim, and using textual evidence is limited to none, and my experience
teaching students to write an argumentative essay using text evidence
was also limited, as I’m generally teaching basic writing skills. I knew I
had to break the process down and use graphic organizers to help
students through the process, but knowing where to start or what to
focus on first was a bit more difficult. Just like my students, I was
feeling a bit overwhelmed.
When we finished the essay, I was pleasantly surprised. My
students were able to make a claim and were able to use text evidence to
illustrate their points quite well. It also gave me a direction to go
when teaching argumentative writing. My biggest takeaway was that my
students completed their writing and felt pride in what they had
accomplished and enjoyed the discussion. I also felt more confident in
my teaching this style of writing.
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