Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively

E X A M P L E   3.4.

Recommendation 3 

(continued)

Math teachers in different grades collaborate on assessment 

1. Middle school math teachers (6th, 7th, and 8th grade) meet and decide on three writing 

prompts to be used during the academic year: one at the beginning of the year, one in the 

middle of the year, and one at the end of the year.

2. The teachers choose the following prompt: “Please read the following math problem, solve 

it, and write your answer in the blank provided. Then write an instructive essay to me [your 

teacher], explaining the steps that are necessary to arriving at the correct answer.” The topics 

for the problems are identified using the school’s curriculum guide.

3. The teachers agree on a rubric to evaluate the instructive essay and a scoring approach.  

 

They also agree on a template for recording student responses. The template has a column 

for students’ names and two columns for each time period (one for whether the student 

achieved the correct mathematical solution and one for the final overall rubric score for the 

instructive essay).

4. The teachers decide on the weeks of the year when the informal assessments will be adminis-

tered, and they carry out the assessments.

5. After each informal assessment is conducted, each math teacher scores his or her students’ 

writing and fills out the record template. Each teacher also computes for the class as a whole, 

the percentage of students who achieved the correct solution and the average, median, stan-

dard deviation, and range for overall rubric score.

6. The teachers meet and aggregate the results across all of their students to achieve a school-  

or group-level percentage of students who attained the correct solution as well as the sum-

mary statistics for the writing score.

7. At the end of the year, the math teachers compare the summary figures across the three infor-

mal assessments and analyze their own students’ progress as well as the progress of students 

in the school as a whole. They use the summary information to guide a discussion of possible 

changes in their instruction for the following year. (See Step 2.)

2.  Analyze student writing to tailor instruction and target feedback.

 

Use assessment data to tailor instruction to 

students’ skills and needs. Analyzing data 

enables teachers to identify areas where 

students need instruction, without making 

assumptions about student needs. Create 

lessons and choose learning objectives that 

challenge students to the limits of their abil-

ity, encouraging them to develop. For exam-

ple, when assessments show students have 

mastered command of subject-verb-object 

sentence structure and are ready to learn to 

write with more sentence variety, a teacher 

could introduce participial phrases. Tailor 

instruction for individual students, small 

groups, classrooms, or the whole grades, as 

appropriate (Figure 3.2).

If the assessments show that the whole class 

needs additional instruction on a topic, teach-

ers can present the material in a different way. 

For example, if a teacher modeled a skill when 

introducing it to the class, she could use exem-

plar texts when re-teaching the skill. Alterna-

tively, teaching another lesson on the topic can 

help reinforce the skill for students. Suppose, 

in response to the prompt in Example 3.2, a 

number of students began their essays, “In 

the article, ‘Sometimes, the Earth Is Cruel’ by 

Leonard Pitts is about the Haiti earthquake.” 

In this situation, a teacher can design a mini-

lesson on how to write a TAG (title, author, 

genre) statement or prepare a mini-lesson to 

teach students that the subject of the sentence 

cannot be in a prepositional phrase.

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