In the second semester of this year, I picked up an additional course of 7th grade world studies (2 sections). I was thrilled by the opportunity to teach more, develop new curricula, and be full time, but I quickly realized that my middle schoolers needed a lot of work in writing and using evidence. When we talked about sources in class, they could figure out the message and point to one or two things that helped them identify that message. When they wrote, however, their best effort was alluding to some vague thing that might have informed their opinion or decision. Most of my 7th graders could not (and cannot) make the jump to explicitly referencing something from the document to use as support or evidence in their argument. |
Because supporting arguments is so crucial for history or social studies and for life more generally, I decided to focus my first set of improvements in this area. I wanted to figure out: What are effective strategies to teach beginning middle and high school writers to identify, use, and explain evidence to support their written arguments or ideas?