Math Mondays and Teaching Tuesdays Rolled Into a Wednesday – Writing Frames

Several posts ago, I shared my recent professional development experiences which included three conference sessions with Anita Archer.   And in an earlier post, I shared our school focus on the use of summaries.  We believe summaries have the ability to help students process and retain information and have had several conversations around how best to support students in the process of developing this habit.  So I was very happy when Dr. Archer in her Short Writing Often NOT Just Long Writing Seldom session echoed our thinking about the use of summaries and  shared several writing frames to be used as scaffolds.

In this post, as promised, I will pursue the use of the one of the writing frames shared by by Dr. Archer.

As a reminder, here is the information provided in the 3rd Grade Math Performance Task.

And here is the question I want to answer using a writing frame.

This morning in our late start meeting, we discussed the fine line between an explanation and a summary.  Our conclusion…an explanation of a problem-solving process can qualify as a summary…especially in mathematics.   So for this question I decided to use the Explanation writing frame provided by Dr. Archer.

There are a number of reasons why ….

The most important reason is…

Another reason is …

A further reason is …

So you can see why…

As you can see, this frame is not a perfect fit to the writing prompt.  However, it is my conjecture, that students who are experienced with the use of these prompts will have developed a schema around the type of questions being asked and begin with the best frame they have and them make adaptations from there.

I changed the word reasons to ways, and I proceeded from there.  I captured my thinking in this video.   Here is the result.

There is still room for improvement, but I like that the frame provided a good first draft.  What avenues the writer can pursue next seem endless, but no longer overwhelming.  I cannot wait to see what the students do.