After looking through some of the research, I tried to figure out what I was doing already reasonably well and how I could improve my teaching to encourage my 7th graders to develop their writing skills around using evidence. Here's what I came up with. Existing Strengths
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- Some annotations - In our first unit on Judaism, we had done one more extensive guided annotation or note-taking session as we looked at sources about the Assyrian attack on Jerusalem (from Reading Like a Historian). I guided students through one reading, and then they had to do another one on their own or with a partner.
- More annotations & feedback - I need to be more focused on helping my students go through a process of "talking to the text" when we have sources, pushing through their moans and groans about it and really guiding them. So, I plan to have some activities where: 1) I can model an example; 2) They work in partners to figure out what needs to happen in a second source; and 3) I give them feedback on those annotations specifically as well as their overall writing.
- Building assessments - The steps identified above sort of help build some assessments, but I also want to make sure that I have even more informal writing assignments, maybe some that are even just to annotate something without worrying about the more academic writing. I'm thinking that in practicing and reviewing for their assessment on India, I'll have my students look at a lot of texts, annotate them, and give each other feedback on those notes. Then in the formal, summative assessment they'll compare some of those texts to each other (i.e. Hinduism and Buddhism) as well as to Judaism, building on what they hopefully remember from our first unit.