GRADE 7 – OVERVIEW (Writing)

The increasing demands of the Common Core State Standards for students in grade 7 reflect students’ growing maturity as readers and writers.

WRITING INSTRUCTION
At this level, students are learning to approach a piece by determining the nature of the task, its purpose and intended audience. Students must
be able to precisely determine about what it is they are writing. They must also be able to determine the reason for writing. For example, the reason or purpose
of the task may be to inform, to persuade, or to describe. Students will also practice developing a writing style. In order to do so, students may imitate the style of
a familiar author or genre and in effect, develop/create their own. Lastly, students learn to activate prior knowledge and recall the various organizational formats in which a text may be presented, in order to support their own writing.

Students will need to spend significant amounts of time planning, drafting, editing and revising in order to build a clear, coherent composition and become familiar with the overall process of writing. They must learn how to accept guidance, support and constructive criticism from both peers and adults when planning, revising, editing or rewriting a composition. For example, students may peer-edit based upon a list of constructive commentary provided by the teacher and be instructed to focus on purpose and audience. With guidance and support, students learn how to provide useful feedback to their peers with the necessary scaffolding from adults. In essence, peers may search for particular elements to comment on within the piece, such as organization and/or clarity.

During writing instruction, teachers will...

• Provide multiple opportunities for writing practice through informal and formal pieces, short and extended time frames.
• Model the writing process with students.
• Introduce mentor texts for students to emulate.
• Incorporate real world writing purposes often.
• Provide many mentor texts; model how to write from various styles, and coach students during the writing process.
• Teach the research process: making a claim, gathering credible data, citing sources, etc.

Writing about Texts:

The balance of student writing at this level is 70 percent analytical (35 percent argument and 35 percent to explain/inform) and 30 percent narrative with a mix of on-demand and review-and-revision writing assignments (building student competence and confidence with technology should be part of instruction).

Routine writing: Routine writing is for building content knowledge about a topic or reflection on a specific aspect of a text or texts (including short constructed-response answers to focused questions that require textual evidence and help lead to informed discussions). Routine written responses to such text-dependent questions allow students to build sophisticated understandings of vocabulary, text structure, and content and to develop needed proficiencies in analysis.

Four to six analyses: All analytic writing should put a premium on using evidence, as well as on crafting works that display a high degree of logical integration and coherence. As students will be assessed on their ability to draw sufficient evidence from the text (RL/RI.7.1 and W.7.9) and to write clearly and coherently (W.7.4, W.7.5, and L.7.1–3), these elements should be part of instruction. Analytic writing should include at least one comparative analysis and one paper incorporating research that focuses on texts that students have read closely.

Research Project:

Each module includes the opportunity for students to produce one research project. This entails gathering and synthesizing relevant information from several additional literary or informational texts in various media or formats on a particular topic or question drawn from one or more texts from the module. Students are expected at this stage to have performed research using a standard citation format. Students can present their findings in a variety of informal and more formal argumentative or explanatory contexts, either in writing or orally. (Research aligned with the standards could take one to two weeks of instruction.)

Narrative Writing:

Students are expected to write one or two narratives per module that reflect real or imagined experiences or events. Narrative writing offers students opportunities to express personal ideas and experiences, author literature, and deepen understanding of literary concepts, structures, and genres (e.g., short stories, anecdotes, poetry, drama, etc.) through purposeful imitation.

For Reading and Writing in Each Module:

In each module, students are expected to take a close look at the texts they encounter through the lenses of these skills rooted in the standards.

• Cite evidence: The goal of close reading is for students to be able to discern and cite evidence from the text to support their assertions when analyzing a text. In grade 7, students should cite multiple pieces of evidence when both explicitly explaining the text and making inferences based upon it (RL/RI.7.1).
• Analyze content: The content of each text should determine which standards (RL/RI.7.2–9 and SL.7.2–3) to target, allowing teachers to focus instruction and ensure that all the standards have been taught by the end of the year.
• Study and apply grammar: While grammar is meant to be a normal, everyday part of what students do, students should be taught particular lessons in grammar as they write and speak, guided by L.7.1–3.
• Study and apply vocabulary: To focus vocabulary instruction on words that students would be encouraged to use in writing and speaking, students should be given 5–10 Tier 2 academic words per week for each text (10–15 words for the extended text) (L.7.4–6).
• Conduct discussions: Students should engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one on one, small group, teacher led) building on others’ ideas and clearly expressing their own based on evidence. They should ask and respond to specific questions as well as acknowledge new information and modify their understanding as warranted (SL.7.1).
• Report findings: Using appropriate eye contact, adequate volume, and clear pronunciation, students should orally present claims, sequencing ideas in a logical, coherent manner to accentuate main ideas or themes (SL.7.4–6).