Final Reflection

After writing several blog posts over the past few months, I realized that traditional writing as well as archaic material may not be the best way to get students to write.  It's important to give young adolescents the opportunities to explore topics that relevant to them and provide writing activities that are engaging.  I've learned that digital writing can be a helpful tool in education; blogging has allowed me to express myself in a risk-free environment, and I felt that I had a lot of freedom to write about anything that was on my mind or at least choose something that I wanted to research within the assigned posts.  One lesson that I can take into my classroom and advise other teachers is that blog writing is easy for teachers who may be uncomfortable for teachers who do not incorporate a lot of technology into their curriculum, and routine blog writing coincides with the Common Core standard that requires students to write continuously over the course of a year.  For many teachers, it is hard to implement writing during in-class instruction, so assigning online writing activities could make up for the lack of written work in school.  Although I didn't think I faced a lot of issues with digital writing, but one issue that I may come across came from the technology post.  After researching several websites that can be used to enhance the classroom, I found that most of them require subscriptions and payment, and that would make it hard to access these wonderful resources.

Tabatha Kless

Teaching Argument Writing, Grades 6-12 Review

In George Hillocks Jr.'s book Teaching Argument Writing, Grades 6-12, Hillocks Jr. emphasizes the need to strengthen argumentative writing by establishing criteria and implementing strong reasoning to support claims in student's compositions.  This book provides excerpts of classroom discussion in which students actively participate in identifying quality arguments of fact, judgement, and policy.  The book begins with addressing simple arguments such as what constitutes a good school mascot, and then progresses to more complex discourses such as what defines murder.  Although the topics become more complicated, the process of creating criteria does not change.  When creating arguments, students need logical reasoning to support their claim, and Hillocks Jr. illustrates several strategies to support effective argumentative writing.  Once Hillocks Jr. explains who students can make arguments of fact, judgement, and policy, he expands on the topic of making judgement through criteria, supporting criteria, interpreting information.



The three arguments that Hillocks Jr. reinforces:

1. Arguments of Fact: Hillocks Jr. introduces a forensic argument in which students try to solve a a crime.  The strategies that students learn to use in this unit include:
• analyzing evidence critically in light of existing knowledge.
• interpreting the evidence to explain what it shows.
• developing warrants that show why the evidence is relevant.
• using the evidence and the explanations to solve the problem.
2. Arguments of Judgement: Hillocks Jr. asks the question, what makes a good leader, to have students understand how to write an argumentative essay through judgement.  This process has several steps :
1. Introducing the activity
2. Assessing prior knowledge
3. Ask students to evaluate merits of the topic
4. Ask students to create a list of criteria 
5. Have a whole-class discussion
6. Divide students into groups to propose warrants
7. Have students report their rules and then have the class agree on a common set of criteria
8. Use a model to illustrate the process of writing an argument of judgement
9. Have students compose their own argument of judgement
3.  Arguments of Policy: Students are given researchable and meaningful problems that gives students an opportunities to be active researchers and participants in their next writing assignment.  Hillocks explains what occurs when students write an argument of policy:
1. Identify and clarify the problem
2. Plan an investigation
3. Conduct the investigation
4. Introduce argument of policy in interpretation of results/findings
5. Conclusions and recommendations.