AYA/ELA-: Exercise 6- Teaching Writing
Directions Introduction In this exercise, you will use your knowledge of English language arts to analyze student writing and discuss strategies to improve writing skills. You will be asked to respond to three prompts. Criteria for Scoring To satisfy the highest level of the scoring rubric, your response must provide clear, consistent, and convincing evidence of the following: - an in-depth description of patterns of writing and writing conventions; and - a thorough understanding of the recursive nature of the writing process. Stimulus Carefully read the following scenario, student prompt, and student response: A tenth-grade class was asked to write a compare and contrast essay using the text and the movie of Romeo and Juliet. Student Prompt We have read Romeo and Juliet and watched the film directed by Baz Luhrman. Compare and contrast the two using examples from both works. What follows is an actual student response to the prompt. It is a final draft. I liked Romeo and Juliet, but I liked the movie much better then the play. When the movie’s setting was changed to today, the meaning becomes much more clearer. When we read the play, the words are very hard to understand. When Romeo talked to Mercutio and he gives his speech about the queen and everything, it was hard to understand what he’s talking about. In the movie, it was easy to see that Mercutio is really cool and crazy and fun and the party was wild and Juliet’s parents don’t really love themselves. The guys really like the girl who plays Juliet. She was pretty and enthusiastic and you could tell she really loved Romeo because she fought with her father, her mother fights with her too, Paris is just a creep. So you can see, I liked the movie. We spend so much time on the book and they’re hard to understand. So the movie is so much better. It’s easier to understand when you can see the people talking and hear what they say. I like seeing it in today’s world even if we really don’t know where it is.
Prompts After reading the stimulus material, respond to the following prompts: 1. Identify two significant areas of weakness in the conventions. 2. Identify and analyze one significant weakness in organization or content. Provide support from the student’s response. 3. When this student writes a similar piece, what are two strategies you would use to address the weakness identified in organization or content? At what stage in the writing process would you apply each strategy? Provide a rationale for each of your choices.
Created by
Patrick Ledesma
, 2007
Prompts from
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards
Website