CRWP Success Story by Kim Rensch
Leave
it to the National Writing Project to create yet another tremendous learning
opportunity for teachers and students. The College-Ready Writers Program (CRWP) has provided us participants
with a vast array of text sets, ideas, lesson plans, and support to teach
argumentative writing with intentionality.
My
co-participant Ann and I have been working together with our Gifted Services
team to bring these learning experiences to our district’s gifted student
population. Even though the CRWP was geared toward students at the secondary
level, there is much that applies to gifted upper elementary students. And
because these students often end up in college, it stands to reason that we
should prepare them for the academic learning they’ll do there.
It was
a slow start to bring our entire team on board with this endeavor. There is
such precious little time for our Gifted Services team to work with students,
and, frankly, argumentative writing has not been made a priority over the
years, so all this was new to many of the teachers. We reached a turning point
in our October team meeting, where we analyzed some student writing generated
during the “Jumpstart Argumentative Writing” mini-unit. The conversation was
spirited as we came to a common understanding of argumentative writing
expectations as they relate to our state standards, spelled out by a writing
rubric. We discovered that students need a lot more practice with argumentative
writing, especially with organizing their thoughts. Teachers left that meeting
and carved time in an already-full schedule for students to dig more deeply
into argumentative writing. One teacher integrated writing with speaking &
listening; her students’ writing was much-improved after holding debates on
their topics. Other teachers discovered that topic selection plays a large role
in engaging their students in the argumentative writing exercises. We have
begun the process of collecting a folder of text sets so teachers have lots of
topic options for engaging students.
Our biggest success so far is a collage of many
things: common writing tasks that we can analyze together; an emphasis on
critical thinking (one of our 21st Century “4 C’s”) through examination of
argumentative texts; overcoming our initial reservations to come together in a
common task; and sharing suggestions and resources in order to grow as a team.
I am looking forward to gaining momentum and seeing what kind of writing is
generated by our students at our next checkpoint.
Stay tuned for more from this series!
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