Supporting our high school students to write – something, then more!

Are your teenage students struggling to write a cohesive paragraph in class and exams, staring at a blank piece of paper? Does your class spend the period “writing” and end up with only a few lines, or way too many lines that have very little structure?

We measure our students’ performance after 13 years of formal schooling with an array of written formal exams. This is a lot of writing!

To write an essay or extended response, your students need to write a collection of paragraphs (well sequenced) and those paragraphs need to include well-constructed sentences. For many high school, the challenges can be traced back to the single sentence level – but there are so many ways you can support them to experience success. When your students struggle to write extended responses or essays they are unable to show you what they have learnt in your class. There’s got to be a better way for them.

In this seminar Sam will provide information and strategies to:

• identify the sub-skills needed for writing in the Simple and Not-So Simple Views of Writing for high school students
• pinpoint where your older students will likely experience difficulties
• include short writing tasks into the school day to build a writing habit
• develop writing scaffolds for all subjects to facilitate independent writing, and incorporate technological supports to facilitate writing where needed.