Backwards Mapping

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.4.4

Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development and organization are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

I chose to work backwards from this grade 4 ELA writing standard. I co-teach ELL students in grades 4 and 5, and they are usually at least two grade levels behind in ELA. If I actually want to teach a unit like this, I might have redo it for a similar grade 2 standard. Anyway, several of the assessments we use regularly in my department use grade-level standards and normative data from U.S. students, so I want to at least see what grade level looks like.

Getting a piece of writing to cohere depends on multiple independent proficiencies. We’re going to start by identifying the proficiencies the students will need to meet the standard.

3 Proficiencies:

• Recognize and write complete sentences. Know the parts of speech needed to make a complete sentence.
• Organize sentences into paragraphs. Recognize themes and topics in others’ writing, as well as their own.
• Identify task, purpose, and audience in others’ writing. Be able to write in a variety of fiction and nonfiction forms. Produce writing that meets restraints/criteria according to directions.

Next, some assessments that will help us determine student development in these proficiencies.

3 Assessments:

• First stating their purpose, audience, topic, and theme, students will write and edit a multi-paragraph essay  on space.
• Peer-edit a classmate’s paper for grammar, mechanics, and paragraph structure.
• Respond to a fiction or nonfiction text in a journal entry that includes an argument for author’s purpose, intended audience, and possible theme.
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Finally, 3 learning experiences that will help students develop the proficiencies.

3 learning experiences:

• Read texts that represent a variety of purposes and intended audiences: letters, poems, essays, information reports, editorials, speeches, and others.
• Diagram sentences, learning to distinguish parts of speech. Review with grammar games.
• Create a poster, glog, or presentation that examines a theme in literature or collects writing around a theme.

This is just for starters. Many more activities and assessments would go into such a unit, and teaching fourth graders to write up to the standard would probably take a lot longer than one unit, at least based on my experience. I wonder if a standard like this could be broken up and peppered throughout ELA and science, and social studies unit all year, assessments included, so that students have met the standard by the end of the year?