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Keyword: ‘fallacious reasoning’

The Top 15 Errors in Reasoning

January 14th, 2009

Skillful readers analyze the quality of written and spoken evidence and the writer’s reasoning and analysis of that evidence. They can identify fallacious arguments and

spot biases. Skillful writers know how to construct an argument with an effective line of reasoning. However, these are skills that must be taught, not just caught.

One logical method of instruction is to teach students what is good argumentative writing. Each of my Grades 4-8 and High School Teaching Grammar and Mechanics programs provide mentor texts to model exemplary language for each grammar and usage lesson focus. My TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE program includes mentor texts for students to master step-by-step essay strategies.
 
Another logical method of instruction is to teach students what is bad argumentative writing. That’s what the Errors in Reasoning does. If your students don’t understand faulty reasoning and inadequate analysis, they won’t be able to produce the clear reasoning and solid analysis we expect and hope them to learn.
 
Check out all 15 Errors in Reasoning. Each error includes a concise definition, example, and explanation of an error in reasoning (fallacious argument). 
 
The Errors in Reasoning Worksheets are found in my comprehensive TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE program. This how-to-teach-the essay program also includes 438 insertable Essay e-Comments, including 15 Fallacious Reasoning e-comments, formatted for essay response. Set up to automatically insert into student essays in Microsoft Word and Google Docs. This video shows you how.

 

But wait… There’s more. Read the article and download 4 (out of the 15) of the Errors in Reasoning Worksheets at the end of this article.

1. Synonym Errors

A synonym reasoning error occurs when the writer substitutes one term for another in the argument, yet the terms are not same.

Example: The undemocratic government of Mexico had only one political party with real power. This dictatorship has been in control of Mexico since 1919.

Explanation: The writer substitutes dictatorship for undemocratic. However, not all undemocratic forms of government are the same as dictatorships.

2. Non Sequitur Errors

A non sequitur reasoning error means that the argument does not follow logically. In other words, the conclusion cannot be reached from the facts presented.

Example: If the sky is blue, and blue is the color of the ocean; then the sky must be made of ocean water.

Explanation: The conclusion that “the sky must be made of ocean water” does not follow logically from the facts presented.

3. Red Herring Errors

A red herring reasoning error means that an unconnected reference is used to distract the reader from the argument. A red herring refers to a smelly fish that was sometimes used to throw hunting dogs off the track of the fox in English foxhunts.

Example: The politician suggests that poverty remains the most important problem in the world today; however, the world has always had its share of poor people.

Explanation: The statement “the world has always had its share of poor people” attempts to distract the reader from the issue of poverty as the most important world problem.

4. Unsupported Generalization Errors

An unsupported generalization reasoning error applies specific facts to a broad generalization without justification.

Example: Bobby and Amanda have blonde hair. They both excel at sports. All blonde children excel at sports.

Explanation: The fact that specific children who have blonde hair are good athletes does not justify the broad generalization that “All blonde children excel at sports.”

5. Poisoning the Well Errors

A poisoning the well reasoning error means that an argument is weakened by a criticism in the argument itself.

Example: The president’s plan to reduce taxes in order to encourage taxpayers to spend more money to help business has been harshly criticized as “unworkable” by all leading economists.

Explanation: The president’s argument that reducing taxes will encourage taxpayers to spend more money is weakened by the comment that all leading economists have criticized the plan.

6. Cause and Effect Errors

A cause and effect reasoning error occurs when the writer assumes that something directly causes something else, but the result is actually a matter of coincidence.

Example: An irritating commercial aired after my favorite television show. I sneezed twice. Irritating commercials always make me sneeze.

Explanation: Sneezing after a commercial is a matter of coincidence. Commercials do not cause sneezing—there is no logical cause-effect connection.

7. Begging the Question Errors

A begging the question reasoning error takes place when the writer assumes something to be true, that has not been proven, in order to support the argument.

Example: No one likes the poor musicianship of country music.

Explanation: The statement assumes that country music has poor musicians to support the argument.

8. Either-Or Errors

An either-or reasoning error sets up a false choice between two ideas or issues and ignores other options.

Example: Either you support the president, or you are not a true American.

Explanation: The statement ignores other options that true Americans might choose.

9. Comparison Errors

A comparison reasoning error attempts to find similarities or differences between two unrelated ideas or issues.

Example: The price of Chinese tea has increased and so has the price of American gasoline.

Explanation: The price of tea and gas are unrelated issues and cannot be compared.

10. Questionable Authority Errors

A questionable authority reasoning error refers to a source that is not a specific expert on the idea or issue.

Examples: Experts say that the world will run out of oil in 20 years. A Harvard mathematician claims that love at first sight is impossible.

Explanation: In the first example, the expert is non-specific. In the second example, a mathematician is not an expert in matters of love.

11. Contradiction Errors

A contradiction error says the opposite of what has already been stated in the argument.

Example: Skateboarding is the safest of all individual sports. Skateboarding injuries account for more hospital visits than any other sport.

Explanation: Skateboard injuries contradict the claim that the sport is safe.

12. Inconsistency Errors

An inconsistency reasoning error refers to parts of an argument that are not in agreement.

Example: Children should be required to wear helmets while riding bicycles, but not while in-line skating.

Explanation: The arguments that children should be required to wear helmets while riding bicycles, but not while in-line skating, are not in agreement.

13. Omission Errors

An omission reasoning error means that a necessary piece of information is missing in the argument.

Example: The Folsom High School Band has the best band in the city.

Explanation: The fact that the Folsom High School Band is the only band in the city has been omitted.

14. Oversimplification Errors

An oversimplification reasoning error reduces a complicated idea or issue to something simple.

Example: Baseball is a simple game of pitching, running, hitting, and fielding.

Explanation: This oversimplification ignores the complicated components such as baseball strategy, substitutions, and statistical probability.

15. Sampling Errors

A sampling reasoning error refers to the data from which conclusions have been drawn. A sampling error may relate to an insufficient sample size or an unreliable sample group.

Example:  Three out of four dentists surveyed agree that people should floss twice per day.

Explanation: Only four dentists made up the sample group—hardly enough people upon whom to base a conclusion. Also, perhaps three of the dentists are paid by dental floss companies to promote their product.

Purchase the author’s TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE to get 8 complete writing process essays (4 argumentative and 4 informational-explanatory) with accompanying readings, 42 sequenced writing strategy worksheets, 64 sentence revision lessons, additional remedial worksheets, writing fluency and skill lessons, posters, and editing resources. Also get the e-comments download of 438 writing comments to improve written response and student revisions. 

“Great step by step worksheets that help students build or reinforce essay writing skills.”

Pennington Publishing's TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE

TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE

Michelle Hunter

“A thoroughly comprehensive format to teach writing. Just what I needed.”

Tim Walker

Get the Errors in Reasoning Worksheets FREE Resource:

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Where to Put the Essay Counterclaim

March 6th, 2017
Where to Place the Essay Counterclaim

Where to Put the Essay Counterclaim

Where is the best place to put the essay counterclaim? The short and sweet answer? David Oldham, professor at Shoreline Community College, states, “The short answer is a counter-argument (counterclaim) can go anywhere except the conclusion. This is because there has to be a rebuttal paragraph after the counter-argument, so if the counter-argument is in the conclusion, something has been left out.”

The counterclaim is the opposing point of view to one’s thesis and is also known as the counterargument. The counterclaim is always accompanied by a refutation, sometimes referred to as a rebuttal. The Common Core State Standards include the counterclaim in Writing Standards 1.0 for grades 7-12. These Standards reference the organization of the counterclaim in terms of clear relationships and logical sequencing. See the boldface phrases in the following grades 7-12 Standards.

Common Core State Standards

Common Core State Standards

 

Seventh Grade: Introduce claim(s), acknowledge alternate or opposing claims, and organize the reasons and evidence logically.

Eighth Grade: Introduce claim(s), acknowledge and distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and organize the reasons and evidence logically.

Ninth and Tenth Grade: Introduce precise claim(s), distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and create an organization that establishes clear relationships among claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence.

Eleventh and Twelfth Grade: Introduce precise, knowledgeable claim(s), establish the significance of the claim(s), distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and create an organization that logically sequences claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence.

Placement Options

1. Writers can place a separate counterclaim paragraph with refutation as the last body paragraph prior to the conclusion paragraph.

Separate Paragraph Example #1 

COUNTERCLAIM Opponents argue that after school sports can increase the likelihood of sports-related injuries. Specifically, health professionals suggest that life-threatening concussions occur at frightening rates for student athletes participating in such popular after school sports as football, soccer, basketball, and wrestling (Bancroft 22, 23). Even minor injuries sustained from participation in after school sports increase absent rates and the expense of creating injury reports for students (Sizemore 3). REFUTATION Although students do suffer both serious and minor injuries in after school sports, these injuries are quite rare. The organization, supervision, and safety measures of school-sponsored sports are superior to those of alternative fee-based community-sponsored recreational leagues or even privately sponsored sports organizations (Kinney 2). Additionally, without free after school sports programs, many students would still play sports without adult supervision and even more injuries would result.

2. Writers can place a separate counterclaim paragraph without refutation as the first body paragraph following the thesis statement to anticipate objections prior to providing evidence to prove the claim of the thesis statement.

Separate Paragraph Example #2 

COUNTERCLAIM Those who favor eliminating after school sports argue that after school sports can increase the likelihood of sports-related injuries. Specifically, health professionals suggest that life-threatening concussions occur at frightening rates for student athletes participating in such popular after school sports as football, soccer, basketball, and wrestling (Bancroft 22, 23). Even minor injuries sustained from participation in after school sports increase absent rates and the expense of creating injury reports for students (Sizemore 3). Additionally, youth and adolescents are not developmentally ready to play contact sports. Key components of the brain and skeletal structure have not yet formed (Mays 14), and injuries can have lasting damage to young people.

3. Writers can embed a counterclaim and refutation within a body paragraph.

Embedded within Paragraph Example

After school sports provide safe and free programs for students who might otherwise not be able to participate in individual or team sports. The organization, supervision, and safety measures of school-sponsored sports are superior to those of alternative fee-based community-sponsored recreational leagues or even privately sponsored sports organizations (Kinney 2). Additionally, without free after school sports programs, many students would still play sports without adult supervision and even more injuries would result. COUNTERCLAIM However, some people would argue that after school sports can increase the likelihood of sports-related injuries and resulting absences with the added expenses of creating injury reports for students (Sizemore 3). REFUTATION Although students do suffer both serious and minor injuries in after school sports and there are resulting absences and injury reports, without school-sponsored sports the likelihood of more injuries from less supervised recreational leagues or privately sponsored leagues with fewer safety regulations would, no doubt, be much worse.

4. Writers can embed a counterclaim and refutation within a sentence or sentences found in a body paragraph.

Embedded within Sentences Example

After school sports provide safe and free programs for students who might otherwise not be able to participate in individual or team sports. COUNTERCLAIM Even so, some would question the safety of these programs, citing the numbers of life-threatening concussions from after school sports such as football, REFUTATION but these statistics are misleading. According to the highly respected Youth in Sports report, fewer serious injuries occur to students playing after school sports as compared to students not playing after school sports (Green 22).

5. Writers can embed a counterclaim within the introductory paragraph and use the thesis statement as refutation.

Introductory Paragraph Example

After school sports are extra-curricular activities included in most elementary, middle school, and high schools throughout the world. COUNTERCLAIM Some would argue that schools can no longer afford these programs and the expenses of lawsuits resulting from sports-related injuries. REFUTATION AS THESIS STATEMENT On the contrary, schools can and should invest in well-supervised after school sports to promote health and minimize sports-related injuries.

Each of these counterclaim placements has merit, depending upon the nature of the argumentative essay. Help students develop the writing flexibility and dexterity they need by applying each of these strategies in the draft and revision stages. As always, show models of counterclaims and refutations, teach a variety of types of evidence, and help students avoid the pitfalls of fallacious reasoning.

In addition to Where to Put the Essay Counterclaim, writing teachers may also be interested in these related articles: Counterclaim and Refutation Sentence Frames, What is the Essay Counterclaim?, and Why Use an Essay Counterclaim?

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Teaching Essays

TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE

The author’s TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE includes the three printable and digital resources students need to master the CCSS W.1 argumentative and W.2 informational/explanatory essays. Each no-prep resource allows students to work at their own paces via mastery learning. How to Teach Essays includes 42 skill-based essay strategy worksheets (fillable PDFs and 62 Google slides), beginning with simple 3-word paragraphs and proceeding step-by-step to complex multi-paragraph essays. One skill builds upon another. The Essay Skills Worksheets include 97 worksheets (printables and 97 Google slides) to help teachers differentiate writing instruction with both remedial and advanced writing skills. The Eight Writing Process Essays (printables and 170 Google slides) each feature an on-demand diagnostic essay assessment, writing prompt with connected reading, brainstorming, graphic organizer, response, revision, and editing activities. Plus, each essay includes a detailed analytical (not holistic) rubric for assessment-based learning.

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TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE

October 29th, 2015
Pennington Publishing's TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE

TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE

TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE is a comprehensive curriculum designed to help teachers teach the essay components of the Common Core Writing Standards. This step-by-step program provides all of the resources for upper elementary, middle school, and high school teachers to teach both the writing process essays and the accompanying writing strategies. The print version includes a digital copy (PDF) of the entire program for classroom display and interactive practice.

The TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE program includes the following resources:

Eight Writing Process Essays

The program includes the writing prompts, resource texts, graphic organizers, response, revision, and editing resources to teach eight Writing Process Essays. The first four essays are in the informative/explanatory genre (Common Core Writing Standard 2.0). The last four essays are in the argumentative/persuasive writing genre (Common Core Writing Standard 1.0). Accompanying resource texts include both literary and informational forms, as prescribed by the Common Core Reading Standards.

Diagnostic Assessment and Differentiated Instruction

This essay curriculum is built upon comprehensive assessment. Each of the eight Writing Process Essays begins with an on-demand diagnostic assessment. Teachers grade this writing task according to relative strengths and weaknesses on an analytical rubric.

Teachers differentiate writing instruction according to this diagnostic data with mini-lessons and targeted worksheets. Remedial resources include lessons in subject-predicate, sentence structure, sentence fragments and run-ons, essay structure, paragraph organization, types of evidence, transitions, essay genre, writing direction words, proofreading, introduction strategies, and conclusion strategies. Advanced resources include lessons in fallacious reasoning, logic, coherence, unity, sentence variety, parallelism, grammatical sentence openers, and writing style.

Formative and Summative Assessment with Essay e-Comments

TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE provides the tools for interactive formative assessment. This program includes a downloadable essay e-comments bank of 438 comprehensive and prescriptive writing comments. Teachers who have their students submit their essays electronically can insert these comments into a student’s essay with a click of the mouse. The essay e-comments cut writing response and grading time in half and give students all the tools they need to revise and edit effectively.

Comments cover writing evidence, coherence, essay organization, sentence structure, writing style, grammar, usage, mechanics, and spelling—all with concise definitions and examples. Teachers can also add in content links and their own personalized comments with text or audio files. Students revise and edit with Microsoft Word “Track Changes,” then re-submit revisions and edits for peer and/or teacher review. Just like professional writers do with their editors! Teachers enter the results of their formative and summative assessments on the analytical rubric. Works on all Windows versions.

Essay Strategy Worksheets

To master the essay strategies detailed in Common Core Writing Standards 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0, students complete 42 Essay Strategy Worksheets. Students move from simple three-word paragraphs to complex multi-paragraph Common Core Writing Standard 1.0 and 2.0 essays, using a time-tested numerical hierarchy for essay organization. This “coding” takes the mystery out of how to organize and compose coherent and unified essays. Students learn and apply the essay writing rules, essay structure, introduction strategies, evidence and argument, conclusion strategies, and all of the common grammatical sentence models in the context of authentic writing practice.

Writing Openers and Quick Writes

TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE includes a full year of Sentence Revision (sentence combining, sentence manipulation, and grammatical sentence models), Writing Style Openers, and Rhetorical Stance Quick Writes to help students practice writing dexterity and writing fluency (Common Core Writing Standard 10.0). These 10-minute “openers” require no advance preparation and no teacher correction.

How much class time does it take per week?

The complete TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE program takes 90 minutes per week of class time. The resources in this book are user-friendly. External links to wall posters of the key essay writing terms and instructional strategies used in the program are also provided. Absolutely no prep time is required to teach this curriculum.

View the product description here and check out lessons samples in Preview This Book.

The Pennington Manual of Style Preview

RUNLAW Preview

Essay Strategies Toolkit Preview

Preview the introductory video.

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Free Resources to Teach Critical Thinking

August 15th, 2010
Critical Thinking Openers Toolkit

Critical Thinking Openers Toolkit

As accumulated content knowledge is roughly doubling every five years now, we may need to take a hard look at the content that we impart in our classrooms. It’s not that our content is outdated or superfluous; it’s just that we may need to shift our instructional focus a bit. In other words, we should start being more concerned with teaching process skills that will enable our students to be better equipped to deal with the exponential increase in our knowledge base. This new process-centered design is commonly referred to as critical thinking.

Following are articles, free resources (including reading assessments), and teaching tips regarding how to integrate process-centered critical thinking skills into daily instruction from the Pennington Publishing Blog. Also, check out the quality instructional programs and resources offered by Pennington Publishing.

Critical Thinking

How to Teach Critical Thinking

https://blog.penningtonpublishing.com/reading/how-to-teach-critical-thinking/

If we are to equip Twenty-First-Century students with the tools they need to add to our “knowledge pool,” we need to re-evaluate how we spend our time in the classroom. Critical thinking openers can help a teacher teach a schema for thinking that students can learn, practice, and apply with the coaching assistance of their teachers.

Critical Thinking Bell Ringers

 

https://blog.penningtonpublishing.com/reading/critical-thinking-bell-ringers/

Get your students thinking. We teach in a product-driven age of Standards, behavioral objectives, and progress monitoring. As we head back to school, why not achieve some sort of balance with a 10-minute process-driven bell ringer twice per week? Just display this warm-up activity while taking roll and listen to the happy sounds of brains engaging with some of the greatest brains of human history: from Plato to Shakespeare to Franklin to Rowling.

How to Teach Logic

https://blog.penningtonpublishing.com/reading/how-to-teach-logic/

A basic understanding of logic is necessary to be able to read critically and write with coherence. Good critical thinking follow rules of logic to observe, interpret, apply, and revise ideas or problems. These rules of logic are not new. In fact, five key forms of logic were developed by the Ancient Greeks.

The Top 15 Errors in Reasoning

https://blog.penningtonpublishing.com/reading/the-top-15-errors-in-reasoning/

Good writers analyze the quality of written and spoken evidence as they read or listen to authoritative sources. Thinking, reading, and listening critically will allow you to debunk faulty reasoning and improve your ability to argue effectively. This list of fifteen errors in reasoning will teach you the pitfalls to avoid in your writing and help you spot fallacious reasoning.

Teaching Fact and Opinion: When, What, and How

https://blog.penningtonpublishing.com/reading/teaching-fact-and-opinion-when-what-and-how/

Helping students understand and apply the differences between fact and opinion is crucial to analytical reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Distinguishing between fact from opinion is key to interpreting information intelligently. It is one of the few “macro” skills that is, indeed, interdisciplinary. It is also a skill that is refined from elementary school up through post doctoral study. Furthermore, it is a skill of life-long learning and daily use. This article shares practical strategies about when to teach, what to teach, and how to teach fact and opinion.

More Articles, Free Resources, and Teaching Tips from the Pennington Publishing Blog

English-Language Arts and Reading Intervention Articles and Resources 

Bookmark and check back often for new articles and free ELA/reading resources from Pennington Publishing.

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Pennington Publishing’s mission is to provide the finest in assessment-based ELA and reading intervention resources for grades 4‒high school teachers. Mark Pennington is the author of many printable and digital programs. Please check out Pennington Publishing for assessment-based resources created for teachers by a fellow teacher.

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Why and How to Teach Complex Text

August 3rd, 2010

A growing body of research presents a challenge to current K-12 reading/English-language Arts instruction. In essence, we need to “up” the level of text complexity and provide greater opportunities for independent reading. The Common Core State English-language Arts Standards provides a convincing three-reason argument in support of these changes in instructional practice. Following this rationale, I will share ten instructional implications and address a few possible objections.

1. Text complexity is the most important variable in reading comprehension. The level of difficulty is a more important variable in reading comprehension than is a reader’s degree of mastery of inferential reading strategies or critical thinking skills. In other words, what you read is more of an issue than how you read. Now applying reading strategies and critical thinking skills can certainly scaffold a reader’s ability to comprehend difficult text, but vocabulary, text organization, and sentence length seem to be more crucial variables.

From the Common Core State English-language Arts Standards Appendix A…

In 2006, ACT, Inc., released a report called Reading Between the Lines that showed which skills differentiated those students who equaled or exceeded the benchmark score (21 out of 36) in the reading section of the ACT college admissions test from those who did not. Prior ACT research had shown that students achieving the benchmark score or better in reading—which only about half (51 percent) of the roughly half million test takers in the 2004–2005 academic year had done—had a high probability (75 percent chance) of earning a C or better in an introductory, credit-bearing course in U.S. history or psychology (two common reading-intensive courses taken by first-year college students) and a 50 percent chance of earning a B or better in such a course.

Surprisingly, what chiefly distinguished the performance of those students who had earned the benchmark score or better from those who had not was not their relative ability in making inferences while reading or answering questions related to particular cognitive processes, such as determining main ideas or determining the meaning of words and phrases in context. Instead, the clearest differentiator was students’ ability to answer questions associated with complex texts. Students scoring below benchmark performed no better than chance (25 percent correct) on four-option multiple-choice questions pertaining to passages rated as “complex” on a three-point qualitative rubric described in the report. These findings held for male and female students, students from all racial/ethnic groups, and students from families with widely varying incomes.

2. Post K-12 text complexity in college, the workplace, and in popular media has remained constant or increased in terms of levels of difficulty over the last fifty years.

From the Common Core State English-language Arts Standards Appendix A…

Research indicates that the demands that college, careers, and citizenship place on readers have either held steady or increased over roughly the last fifty years. The difficulty of college textbooks, as measured by Lexile scores, has not decreased in any block of time since 1962; it has, in fact, increased over that period (Stenner, Koons, & Swartz, in press). The word difficulty of every scientific journal and magazine from 1930 to 1990 examined by Hayes and Ward (1992) had actually increased, which is important in part because, as a 2005 College Board study (Milewski, Johnson, Glazer, & Kubota, 2005) found, college professors assign more readings from periodicals than do high school teachers. Workplace reading, measured in Lexiles, exceeds grade 12 complexity significantly, although there is considerable variation (Stenner, Koons, & Swartz, in press). The vocabulary difficulty of newspapers remained stable over the 1963–1991 period Hayes and his colleagues (Hayes, Wolfer, & Wolfe, 1996) studied.

3. K-12 text complexity has declined over the last fifty years.

From the Common Core State English-language Arts Standards Appendix A…

Despite steady or growing reading demands from various sources, K–12 reading texts have actually trended downward in difficulty in the last half century. Jeanne Chall and her colleagues (Chall, Conard, & Harris, 1977) found a thirteen year decrease from 1963 to 1975 in the difficulty of grade 1, grade 6, and (especially) grade 11 texts. Extending the period to 1991, Hayes, Wolfer, and Wolfe (1996) found precipitous declines (relative to the period from 1946 to 1962) in average sentence length and vocabulary level in reading textbooks for a variety of grades… Carrying the research closer to the present day, Gary L. Williamson (2006) found a 350L (Lexile) gap between the difficulty of end-of-high school and college texts—a gap equivalent to 1.5 standard deviations and more than the Lexile difference between grade 4 and grade 8 texts on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

http://www.corestandards.org/

Ten Implications for K-12 Instruction

1. Higher Expectations

Clearly, we teachers need to “up” the level of difficulty of text and provide the scaffolds students need to understand that text. We need to challenge our students to struggle a bit. We can’t focus all of our instruction on the lowest common denominators.

2. Vocabulary

We need to use a systematic approach to vocabulary instruction including teaching structural analysis, context clues, and rote memorization and practice in what Isabel Beck calls “Tier Two” words that have high utility and applicability in academic language. Our students have got to master frequently used Greek and Latin affixes and roots.

3. Sentence and Text Structure

We need to not only analyze sentence and text structure, but also practice variations and complexities in our students’ writing. Good writers are better equipped to understand the complexities of how ideas are presented in academic text. The reading-writing connection is teachable.

4. Content

We need to teach the prior knowledge that students need to access difficult text independently. And we need to share and coordinate the load with our colleagues. For example, are our novels, poetry, and writing assignments aligned with what our students are learning in their history classes? We need to work smarter, not harder.

5. Reading Strategies

We need to be both content and process-driven. If we do not provide the tools and practice for our students, “reading to learn” will never work. Our elementary colleagues have largely handled the “learning to read,” but we need to apply the basic to the complex.

6. Critical Thinking

We need to teach the elements of logic and higher order thinking are prerequisites to understanding difficult reading text. Recognizing both solid and fallacious reasoning is an essential reading skill.

7. Expository Text

We need to put aside our exclusive love of literature and poetry for the sake of our students. College, workplace, and popular media texts are overwhelmingly expository in nature. We can do both.

8. Novel Selection

We may need to let go of traditional novels. Let’s take a hard look at what we are teaching to maximize content and process instruction. For example, Reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry may cover the content and standards nicely for an eighth grade ELA class, but the largely fifth grade reading level does not provide the text complexity that our students need. Additionally, shorter novels, selections, poems, articles, etc. will do the job more efficiently and with greater variety.

9. Differentiated Instruction

We need to recognize that all of students simply do not read at the same levels. Students have  different reading issues that inhibit their abilities to comprehend challenging text. We have to find out who has what issues and adjust our instruction accordingly. It does no good to play the “blame game” on previous teachers. We teach standards, but we also teach students. Diagnostic reading assessment has got to be a given for the conscientious reading/ELA teacher.

10. Independent Reading

We need to stop being co-dependents. The Common Core emphasis on CLOSE READING STRATEGIES can can be overdone. We do have to transfer the demands of accessing text over to students at some point. Plus, we need to fight the hard fight and require students to read at home. The amount of independent reading needed to increase even one grade level in terms of reading comprehension and vocabulary development necessitates reading at home.

Possible Objections and Howevers

We can certainly question the adequacy and accuracy of the tools used to measure text complexity. However, we all know that our students’ biology textbooks are more difficult than the Manga and Twilight that are students are reading.

What about the joy of reading? We want to create lifelong readers, not factory-trained automatons for the needs of academia, the workplace, and popular media. Reading trash can be entertaining. However, text complexity does not preclude reading for fun. The ability to read and understand more complex text should expand and enhance that experience.

What we teach in K-12 is in-it-of-itself valuable and relevant to the needs of our students. It may also be foundational in terms of content and process for greater text complexity. We are not just training students for future college, careers, and citizenship; we are teaching students now. However, can’t we have our cake and eat it, too? If our students need to know about chimpanzee behavior, can’t we replace Curious George with a scientific journal?

Intervention Program Science of Reading

The Science of Reading Intervention Program

The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Word Recognition includes explicit, scripted instruction and practice with the 5 Daily Google Slide Activities every reading intervention student needs: 1. Phonemic Awareness and Morphology 2. Blending, Segmenting, and Spelling 3. Sounds and Spellings (including handwriting) 4. Heart Words Practice 5. Sam and Friends Phonics Books (decodables). Plus, digital and printable sound wall cards and speech articulation songs. Print versions are available for all activities. First Half of the Year Program (55 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)

The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Language Comprehension resources are designed for students who have completed the word recognition program or have demonstrated basic mastery of the alphabetic code and can read with some degree of fluency. The program features the 5 Weekly Language Comprehension Activities: 1. Background Knowledge Mentor Texts 2. Academic Language, Greek and Latin Morphology, Figures of Speech, Connotations, Multiple Meaning Words 3. Syntax in Reading 4. Reading Comprehension Strategies 5. Literacy Knowledge (Narrative and Expository). Second Half of the Year Program (30 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)

The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Assessment-based Instruction provides diagnostically-based “second chance” instructional resources. The program includes 13 comprehensive assessments and matching instructional resources to fill in the yet-to-be-mastered gaps in phonemic awareness, alphabetic awareness, phonics, fluency (with YouTube modeled readings), Heart Words and Phonics Games, spelling patterns, grammar, usage, and mechanics, syllabication and morphology, executive function shills. Second Half of the Year Program (25 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)

The Science of Reading Intervention Program BUNDLE  includes all 3 program components for the comprehensive, state-of-the-art (and science) grades 4-adult full-year program. Scripted, easy-to-teach, no prep, no need for time-consuming (albeit valuable) LETRS training or O-G certification… Learn as you teach and get results NOW for your students. Print to speech with plenty of speech to print instructional components.

SCIENCE OF READING INTERVENTION PROGRAM RESOURCES HERE for detailed product description and sample lessons.

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How to Teach Essay Strategies

March 14th, 2010
Writing and Football

Writing is Like Football

Writing is like football.

Most ELA teachers focus on teaching the W. 1, 2, and 3 standards: the argumentative essay, the informational/explanatory essay, and the narrative. Irrespective of using the writing process, we are content and product-driven.

Of course, football is all about the final product (the big game), as well; however, ask football coaches what they spend their practice time doing. They’ll mention their BIG 3: conditioning, tackle practice, and the omnipresent videotape. Less so the content and product-driven X’s and the O’s on the chalkboard. Perhaps we writing teachers should take a page from our coaches’ playbooks and be a bit more skill-centered. I’m talking about teaching the essay strategies that will prepare students for the big game. In other words, the CCSS W. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 standards.

Writing and football are all about skill development.

My first year of teaching was at a small K-8 school in Sutter Creek, California. I began teaching my first seventh-grade ELA class with a scintillating lecture, replete with masterful examples (including my own), on how to teach the five-paragraph essay. The structure, the components, and the unified balance of thought. “Go and do likewise,” I advised.

Of course, you probably already know the results. Most of my students did master the structure and had some sense of what the components were and where they belonged. But that unified balance of thought? I couldn’t understand why they just couldn’t fill in the rest of the blanks. Fortunately, after a few classes with U.C. Davis Area 3 writing mentors (Thank you!), I began to see the value of teaching the part-to-the-whole: the essay strategies, or skills, necessary to make sense of the content and structure.

After a number of years learning how to teach the essay, following are my BIG 3: 1. Eliminate the crutches 2. Teach and help students practice complex sentences. 3. Teach and help students practice grammatical sentence openers.

Eliminate “To Be” Verbs

How to Eliminate “To Be” Verbs

1. Teach and help students eliminate the crutches.

Sometimes removing a writer’s comfort zone is the only strategy that will force the writer to take the necessary risks to learn new tricks of the trade and improve his or her writing craft.

“To-be” Verbs: Restrict students’ usage of is, am, are, was, were, be, being, and been. Nothing forces students to search for concrete nouns and expressive verbs more than this strategy. Nothing makes students alter sentence structure more than this strategy. Nothing teaches students to write in complete sentences more than this strategy. After initial banishment, allow a few of these verbs to trickle into student writing, say one per paragraph. Sometimes the best verb is a “to-be” verb. After all, “To be or not to be. That is the question.” For more, see How to Eliminate To-Be Verbs in Writing.

The Ten Commandments of Essays

The Essay Ten Commandments

1st and 2nd Person Pronouns: Essays designed to inform or convince are not written as a direct conversation between the writer and the reader. Instead of using the first person point of view I, me, my, mine, myself, we, us, our, ours, or ourselves pronouns or the second person point of view you, your, yours or yourself(ves) pronouns, essays are written in the third person point of view such as in the writing model below. It’s fine to use the third person he, she, it, his, her, its, they, them, their, theirs or themselves pronouns to avoid repeating the same nouns over and over again. Nothing forces students to focus their writing on the subject more than this strategy. Nothing teaches students to rely on objective evidence more than this strategy.

2. Teach and help students practice complex sentences.

Adverbial Clauses

Complex Sentences

Some prerequisite direct instruction is required here. Students need to know what an independent clause is. Students need to know what a phrase is. Students need to know what a dependent clause is. Teaching and memorizing the subordinate conjunctions are essentials. See How to Teach Conjunctions for a great memory trick. Students must be able to identify subordinating clauses and create them. Students need to be able to identify complex sentences and use them. Sentence models and analysis works well. I recommend using Sentence Revision, which uses sentence models and requires students to practice sentence combining and sentence manipulation at the sentence level. Using individual student whiteboards for practice and whole class formative assessment works well. You are going to have to differentiate instruction to ensure mastery learning of complex sentences.

Complex Sentence Ladder

How to Teach Complex Sentences with Grammatical Sentence Openers

3. Teach and help students practice grammatical sentence openers.

Students have been trained to write in the subject-verb-complement pattern. Fine. Now we need to revise that writing mindset. We need to teach students that writing style and sentence variety matter. I suggest that you limit your students to composing no more than 50% of their writing in the subject-verb-complement pattern. Teach students to begin their sentences with different grammatical sentence openers. See How to Improve Your Writing Style with Grammatical Sentence Openers for a fine list with examples. Nothing forces students to write with greater sentence variety than this strategy. Nothing integrates grammar instruction into writing better than this strategy.

Look for my next article on the Pennington Publishing Blog on helping students learn how to scrimmage. Focusing on the essay writing strategies at the paragraph level, including structure, style, unity, and evidence will further help students prepare for the “big game.”

Check out this complete writing process essay to see a sample of the resources provided in the TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE. The download includes writing prompt, paired reading resource, brainstorm activity, prewriting graphic organizer, rough draft directions, response-editing activity, and analytical rubric.

Get the Writing Process Essay FREE Resource:

The TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE is a comprehensive curriculum designed to help teachers teach the essay components of the Common Core Writing Standards. This step-by-step program provides all of the resources for upper elementary, middle school, and high school teachers to teach both the writing process essays and the accompanying writing strategies.

The TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE program includes the following resources:

Eight Writing Process Essays

The program includes the writing prompts, resource texts, graphic organizers, response, revision, and editing resources to teach eight Writing Process Essays. The first four essays are in the informative/explanatory genre (Common Core Writing Standard 2.0). The last four essays are in the argumentative/persuasive writing genre (Common Core Writing Standard 1.0). Accompanying resource texts include both literary and informational forms, as prescribed by the Common Core Reading Standards.

Pennington Publishing's TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE

TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE

Diagnostic Assessment and Differentiated Instruction

This essay curriculum is built upon comprehensive assessment. Each of the eight Writing Process Essays begins with an on-demand diagnostic assessment. Teachers grade this writing task according to relative strengths and weaknesses on an analytical rubric.

Teachers differentiate writing instruction according to this diagnostic data with mini-lessons and targeted worksheets. Remedial resources include lessons in subject-predicate, sentence structure, sentence fragments and run-ons, essay structure, paragraph organization, types of evidence, transitions, essay genre, writing direction words, proofreading, introduction strategies, and conclusion strategies. Advanced resources include lessons in fallacious reasoning, logic, coherence, unity, sentence variety, parallelism, grammatical sentence openers, and writing style.

Formative and Summative Assessment with Essay e-Comments

TEACHING ESSAYS BUNDLE provides the tools for interactive formative assessment. This program includes a downloadable essay e-comments bank of 438 comprehensive and prescriptive writing comments. Teachers who have their students submit their essays electronically can insert these comments into a student’s essay with a click of the mouse. The essay e-comments cut writing response and grading time in half and give students all the tools they need to revise and edit effectively.

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