How Will Teaching Writing Differ with the New Common Core Curriculum?

As teachers prepare students for performance based tasks that include the interpretation, analysis, and application of data, the amount of writing they assign in class will increase; however, due to the lack of time teachers have to grade long writing assignments, students will begin taking a much more active role in revising their own work as well as the work of their peers.

Teachers will may scan all papers quickly and assign them in order from best to worst and put them into three piles: average, below average, and above average.

She/he may then identify some general themes and categories of weakness to address and teach a mini lesson on and create a self-analysis checklist. She would then hand the papers back with no grade or teacher comments, but instead with the self-analysis sheet that contains the common errors and problems she identified earlier. Students would review their own papers first and do peer review to learn from their mistakes. Students would then revise their paper based on their self-analysis sheet. Finally, students would then hand in a final paper of high quality that the teacher would review to verify the quality and commend students with comments of encouragement but not a detailed mark- up.

             This process would prepare students to be more independent when they get to college and have to write papers. It would also help them take ownership of and responsibility for producing quality writing.

The information from this blog can be found in Getting Ready for College, Careers, and the Common Core by David T. Conley. 

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