ISAW: A CWP Institute for Secondary Teachers
Workshop series and inservices can be designed for specific schools and/or districts. For more information, please contact us at the email or phone number below.
ISAW focuses on these goals:
- Demystifying the teaching and learning of analytic writing and critical reading.
- Examining how teachers can make academic writing an integral component of a high school curriculum by focusing on student improvement. .
- Accelerating the academic writing improvement of all students, the college-bound, English learners, and struggling writers and preparing more of these students for college going. .
- Fostering collaboration among high school, community college, and four-year university teachers to move students along a pathway of academic preparation that leads to success in and beyond high school. .
The ISAW program addresses the following:
- Investigating through workshops, teacher writing and revision, discussions of professional readings, inquiry, and assessment, the nature and purpose of analytic writing. .
- Learning to use the CWP Improvement Rubric to help students to recognize and document specific improvements in academic writing, demystify what to work on next, and write with an eye toward practice and improvement. .
- Exploring strategies that help students develop and organize their analytic essays.
- Deconstructing and analyzing texts, both non-fiction and fiction.
- Responding to and interacting with a text.
- Developing a claim
- Building strong examples
- Evaluating and selecting evidence
- Structuring the essay
- Creating coherence between parts of an essay
- Revising and editing purposefully
- Revising sentences for logic and completeness
- Using subordination, coordination, and parallelism comfortably
- Writing effectively on-demand or in-depth
- Experimenting with analytic forms, not formulas
- Enlarging the classroom base for reading: augmenting the reading of novels, stories, poems, and textbooks required in the high school curriculum to include more of the analytical essays, primary sources, academic articles, and informational and journalistic pieces students will read in college.
- Developing, with the support of school and grade-level colleagues, resources, assignments, and assignment sequences that help students understand the task and demands of issue-based writing.
- Providing students a challenging, culturally responsive writing program along with specific support for the needs of individual writers.
- Developing ways for school teams to share student achievement and progress as they transition to the next grade level.
For information about hosting an ISAW type program for secondary teachers in your school or district during the school year, please contact Karen Smith, A3WP Director, at a3wp@ucdavis.edu or (530) 752-8392.
