Like most of us, Christina Schneider didn’t find teaching writing one bit easy at first. Despite her background as a journalist, putting all the puzzle pieces together in the classroom to help her students understand how to build a thesis, introduce and analyze evidence, and express their ideas felt like a pretty tough task.
But over time she had one breakthrough after another with her high school students in California. She figured out how to meet them where they are and guide them through the process of building their academic writing skills day by day throughout the school year.
Now she steps up to the plate each August with her new students feeling confident that she can take them where they need to go. She’s recently written a new book, Building Strong Writers, where she shares everything she’s learned in step-by-step walkthroughs to make it easy for you to try it too.
Today on the pod, we’ll be exploring three of her top writing scaffolds, and how you can get started with them tomorrow to make argument writing instruction simpler and more successful in your classroom.
Writing Scaffold: Sentence Frames and Sentence Starters
One of Christina’s favorite strategies, sentence frames, can help students learn to write academically. They help kids take what they think and jump past the hurdle of the blank page to get their ideas onto the paper.
A sentence frame provides a fill-in-the-blank support for students, with the academic language and structure already in place. Students simply fill in the blanks with their thoughts.
Here’s a quick example of a sentence frame: In the short story, X, by X, _______________, which enhances the author’s _______________.
Once you get started, it’s easy to brainstorm this type of scaffold for your students.
In her novel Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko repeatedly ___________________________, highlighting the importance of _______________.
In his short story, “The Paper Menagerie,” Ken Liu ____________________, strengthening the theme of ___________________.
After a while, as students become more adept, you can just give them sentence starters (also called sentence stems), instead of the full frame.
Let’s say, for example, that you’re trying to help them with their analysis following a piece of text while you’re studying Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah. You might share sentence starters like…
Here Noah demonstrates…
Noah draws attention to…
In this passage, Noah’s language…
Christina also suggests having students brainstorm their own sentence starters that match the idea of one you provide, so they’re beginning to make the transfer to their own language. Students can keep lists of possible frames and starters in their notes, so they always have options to look back on if they’re feeling stuck.
Eventually, the goal is for students to build confidence in their own ability to use academic language, having gone from the full frame, to some use of starters, to being able to write academic argument in their own words. They can always look back on the scaffolds for a boost if they need it.
Writing Scaffold: Color Coding Writing
Another of Christina’s stop strategies for building academic writing skills is color coding – the process of having students highlight key required elements of their writing in different colors.
One of the biggest benefits of color coding, she says, is that it slows students down so they have to focus on their intention with each part of their writing. The need to code different parts of their writing pushes them to focus on exactly what they’re working to improve.
It can be a helpful strategy for the overall structure of a paper, where students color code the parts of their argument connecting to the same colors, in order, in the paragraphs of the paper.
It can also be helpful in building specific types of sentences in argument writing (ones that students tend to struggle with). Take a look at the example below, in which Christina provides a color-coded guide to her students in how to introduce and quote from a piece of text in their papers.
By having her students complete practice with these sentences in class, using the color coding system, she can easily check in with her students as she circles the room to quickly see if they’ve got each part of the sentence, and if not, where they need help.
Whatever you’re working on, having students color code it in their work gives them the opportunity to slow down and make sure they’re doing a good job, while also allowing you to check it quickly and provide targeted feedback.
Writing Scaffold: Start Tiny
Finally, you might like to try Christina’s strategy of starting small when it comes to a writing project. By designing backwards from the final product she wanted, Christina realized that the core of the academic argument paper she wanted to see was really a series of three sentences. If her students could nail those initial three sentences, the rest of their paper would be much, much easier to write.
So she set about teaching them exactly what they needed to include in the core of their introduction, and they practiced these sentences throughout the first month of school. As they built confidence with three crucial sentences (using frames and color coding along the way), Christina provided them with quick and effective on-the-spot feedback. By the second month of school, students were on the same page with understanding how to build a launching pad for their paper, and they were ready to move on to a paragraph, then several paragraphs, then a full paper.
So many writing projects can be broken down into small steps in this way, whether you’re teaching academic argument, compare and contrast, narrative writing, informational writing, etc. Starting tiny can help keep the project feeling approachable, while also giving students all the scaffolds they need to feel successful.
Connect with Christina from The Daring English Teacher
Hi! I’m Christina. I’m a full-time high school English and journalism teacher, wife, and mom. I’ve taught every high school grade level, and I love sharing my ideas, lesson plans, and ELA resources with other teachers. One of my passions is providing engaging, robust, and differentiated learning experiences to my students while helping other teachers do the same.
Explore more of Christina’s work on her website right here.
Grab your copy of her new book, Building Strong Writers.
Follow along with her tips and ideas on Instagram.
