There’s nothing more disheartening than administering a writing diagnostic to your students and watching them struggle. Maybe their responses are only a sentence or two long. Maybe what they write barely qualifies as a sentence at all. Or perhaps they simply copy directly from the text—or repeat…
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After 30 years in the classroom, I’ve learned that teaching middle school ELA is anything but one-size-fits-all. Every year, my students come in with wildly different needs. Some need to review sentence basics. Others are ready to debate the development of a theme across chapters. And I’m sure you …
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📌 The Overwhelming Baseline Essay Every year, our school wanted all students to complete a baseline essay writing assessment . I remember sitting there, grading 120 essays, determined to create a table marking every single writing skill gap at once. As you can imagine, I was quickly overwhelmed…
I don't know about you, but when I hear the word "rigor", I think about the level of complexity. That is to say, the content has to be up to the grade level's complexity. But what does that really mean? I'll give you a hint... This chart shows Bloom's Taxonomy, and a…