FCAT WRITING

Students need

• frequent modeling of good writing and strategies

• constant feedback from teachers and peers about what they are doing well and how to improve

• instruction and practice evaluating and revising their own writing for focus, organization, support, and conventions

A good instructional practice includes all of the following AND the teacher provides individual feedback as often as possible:

• the teacher models the strategy for the whole class

• students practice in small groups guided by the teacher

• students practice in pairs

• students independently apply the instructional strategy

Students must be taught

• how to interpret prompts

• how to use the prewriting information in the actual draft

• how to show, not tell

• how to use sentence variety

• how to use appropriate, logical transitions

• how to use literary devices correctly

• to identify a beginning, a middle, and an end

• how to elaborate (quality of support depends on word choice, specific details, and a sense of completeness)

• to relate a topic to what they know

Teachers should

• instruct, not assign

• use anonymous student samples for teaching strategies (2, 3, and 4 papers have room for improvement)

• use word walls for good examples of vocabulary, literary devices, sophisticated sentence structure/variety

• reinforce good writing strategies whenever literature is taught (How is the passage organized? What is the focus? What details support the focus? Why are certain marks of punctuation used? What role does sentence variety play? What transitions are used?)

• show students a variety of transitional devices (such as questions, cause‑effect relationship, a recurring theme, compare/contrast relationship, degrees of importance, and repetition)

• use poetry to teach word choice and economy of words