Thank you to guest blogger Ashley Gable for  leading and writing about last week’s Teacher Academy on “How to Model Strategies in Writing”.

My name is Ashley Gable, and I am the Contextual Reading teacher here at Winterboro. This past Friday, I had the opportunity to lead Teacher Academy. Our focus was Modeling Strategies in Writing.

Academy began with a Google Form to get our critical thinking juices going! The form asked three questions about writing in the content areas as well as teacher strategies; then teachers had to “Agree, Disagree, or Defend” their responses.

Afterwards we watched a video clip of an amazing Secondary Writing Teacher-Kelly Gallagher. (Please Google him if you haven’t heard of his awesome contributions to the world of secondary writing!) Then we analyzed the process or gradual release of responsibility that secondary teachers should utilize for writing. Teachers should present a mentor text (preferably real-world and professionally written). Think real world-not 5 paragraph essay; this should be some movie critique, restaurant review, or proposal. Then we compared a teacher model-side by side to the original review. Finally, we analyzed student samples.

As a wrap-up to our lesson, we as teachers went through the process with a modeled text (“5 Things I can do to Help our Planet”), teacher text (“5 Things I can do to Improve Writing”), and student text (in this case-teacher created). Teachers created “5 Things I can do to Improve Writing in ___________” (lists varied based on teacher content area). We shared these in an awesome tech tool called Blendspace! This is a must see collaborative sharing board!

Here is our Protocol Card that gives an overview of our Teacher Academy discussions!

*All texts came from Write Like This by Kelly Gallagher.