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(Describe the WHY behind this work)

What challenge or need were you addressing as a Learning Site/Learning Cohort? The challenge I focused on was based around student writing. I wanted to improve student independent writing by removing unnecessary scaffolds to push those who no longer needed them. I also wanted students to be able to review their work using the WIDA writing rubric, so that they could set goals on a specific step to improve their writing.

What specific piece of that challenge were you addressing in your specific context? What made this topic relevant to you? As many of my students are pre-print literate, writing has always been a challenge. The specific piece I wanted to address was for kids to formulate their own sentences without using sentence stems. As an ESL teacher, this is an important step between ELD 1 and ELD 2.

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What I Tried

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I tried these things/steps

Only some students were given sentence stems to focus on. For example, some kids use “they are” instead of “there are”, so that was the sentence stem the student reviewed and focused on.
I adopted the WIDA writing rubric for levels 1-4 so that students could review the criteria against their own writing.
Using a picture dictionary format, students were able to craft their own sentences with pre-taught vocabulary.

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English and Spanish Rubric

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I expected that…

Some students would still use “they are” in place of “there are.”
The rubric would help my ELD level 2s expand their ideas by adding more details.
Students who were only writing one word to finish the sentence frame would add an adjective, particularly focusing on colors and numbers (pretaught).
Students would gain confidence in their own ability to write.

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Early impact

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With my students, I started to notice...

I was really proud and impressed with what they were able to do. When writing in our picture dictionaries, students were able to use the stems "there is/ there are" in combination with words they've learned to form their own sentences. In VTS, we removed the sentences stems for some students while others focused on a specific phrase " I observe that they are."

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Based on what I noticed, one thing that I (adopted / adapted / abandoned) was…

Based on what I observed from this, I continued to have students use their resources to complete their writing tasks. I focused more on ACCESS writing preparation. As students completed assignments, I used the WIDA rubric I adapted to conference with students. I found that this made the biggest difference. We would look at their writing, evaluate where they fell on the rubric, and then rewrote their response with a particular focus (whether it be adding adjectives or using “because”). I found that giving them the rubric was less helpful. I abandoned the sentence frame strips.

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What I Learned

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Key ingredients: what made this work?

# 1 - Being able to review student work, provide some suggestions, and have them rewrite in real time.

#2 - Having students read back their writing to me in a conference and talk about what other words they can use when they get stuck.

#3- Having enough computers so that students could work independently while my co-teacher and I conferenced.

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Next steps...

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I want to keep: Experiment with:

Conferencing I felt was by far the most useful. I think if I were to go back, I would also provide samples of 1, 2, and 3 responses early on before using the rubric against their own writing. I don’t think the sentence stems ended up getting at the skill of differentiating between “they are” and “there are.” I’d like to keep the sentence frames, but roll them out one at a time once students have mastered their meaning. I also want to keep using student friendly rubrics in their native language. Last, I’ve ended the unit with students working on ACCESS writing tasks. Most of what I have used is on paper, but next I want to create more opportunities for writing on the computer that is closer to ACCESS type tasks.

I want to be more explicit in teaching students how to flip the question into a sentence stem. This can be a challenge when students do not have the vocabulary for any of the words, but for my students with higher English content, this would be a good next step in supporting their independent crafting of sentences. I am also interested in teaching some HILT 2 students to use translation dictionaries to become more independent in finding vocabulary. I have done this before, and it can be a challenge, even a barrier, for students sometimes. So, it will be strategic who I teach these skills to.