Our vision at Georgia Middle School is that all of our students will be able to communicate their ideas and thinking through their writing. Students are being asked to write regularly in EVERY class! We have used writing assignments in the first weeks to get to know our students and support their belief that we are all writers.
Collectively teachers are working together on introducing and supporting students to be proficient with the ‘steal and slide’ strategy. Teachers have been working together to look at how to be consistent in supporting students and providing targeted feedback to our students about parts of this strategy.
The first two areas of focus are:
- “Eye test”: The “eye test” is helping students remember that every response has a beginning (claim), middle (evidence or insight), and an end (conclusion).
- Writing a claim. Writing a claim can be a challenge, so we are encouraging students to learn how to ‘steal’ the language of the question and ‘slide’ it into their claim so that they have a strong statement to defend or explain further in the rest of their writing.
We are encouraged to see such strong evidence beginning to pop in each class from art class to science class. We look forward to continuing to learn more about each of our amazing students from their writing throughout the year.
Julie Conrad is currently Principal of Georgia Middle School and is a regular contributor to THE FWSU STORY. You can follow her on Twitter @JulieConradVT
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