Connecting to the Content
How To Engineer Daily Writing Invitations for Content Area Classes
While most of my lessons focus on creative and imaginative writing, sometimes I like to look at how writing is used in other high school content areas across disciplines.
Last month I visited with a few teachers at a local school district, and Nathan, a high school science teacher, shared with us a great writing prompt he used to introduce his astronomy unit. He wanted his students to consider the difference between astronomy, a field of science that studies celestial bodies, and astrology, a belief that the positioning of the stars and planets affect the way events occur on earth.
I’d like to use his prompts below as an example of how to create solid writing invitations for students especially for content areas, like social studies, science, and fine arts.
Here is the prompt:
Option 1: What does your horoscope say about you today? Is it accurate? Do you think astrology can actually influence behavior? Why or why not? Reflect on the practice of astrology. (12-15 sentences)
Option 2: What is your opinion on astrological practice? Why do you think people throughout history took it so seriously? (12-15 sentences)
Option 3: Compare and contrast astrology and astronomy. What makes them different? When did scientist start taking Astronomy more seriously? (12-15 sentences)
Why is this a great prompt? Here are five reasons:
1) Prompts are connected to the content, so the invitation doesn’t feel like busy work to kids. When students perceive that an activity isn’t meaningfully contributing to their learning, they often rush through it or ignore it entirely. A writing prompt like “What would you do if you won a million dollars tonight?” feels a bit meaningless and designed to just keep kids busy unless there is a contextual connection.
2) Prompts ascertain a student's prior knowledge of and familiarity with the content. By dismissing misperceptions, Nathan’s prompt introduces students to the commonly confused terms which is a great way to introduce the actual subject of the unit while also assessing their readiness with vocabulary.
3) Offer three options, instead of one. Giving students more than one writing prompt option even if the second one is a wildcard option, like "Write about what you didn’t understand about yesterday’s lesson," or “What questions do you have about the upcoming content?” Notice within each of Nathan's options, there are also follow-up questions (why/how) that allow students to extend and deepen their thinking.
4) Prompts center on the student's personal life and/or value system. (what does your horoscope say, what is your opinion..) Relevancy is necessary for transfer of learning, and these prompts allow students to engage personally with the subject to enhance agency and motivate them to learn more about the subject.
5) State clear success criteria. Nathan adds the sentence expectation he has for their writing output. This clear success criteria benefits the students by helping them to build fluency, stamina, and basic writing skills. By using sentences as the measurement, Nathan avoids the kid who writes super large and the kid who writes super small being put at a disadvantage by their penmanship.