Writing Guide

At OER Project, we encourage students to write. A lot. At times, we want them to write informally, to express their initial understanding. Other times, we have them write formally, to solidify their thinking and refine their arguments. They will write, review, and refine their work multiple times. For most students, this isn’t easy. However, our research has shown that this hard work makes a real difference in the quality of their writing—a terribly unsurprising conclusion. Clear, consistent expectations, frequently revisited, isn’t a magic formula; it’s just good teaching.

Informal Writing in OER Project

We can’t expect students to produce excellent formal essays right off the bat. Therefore, we feel it’s important for them to have lots of opportunities to write informally. Students need practice writing sessions to learn about concepts, to make connections between those concepts and events, people, and places, and to try out the ways historians put together texts. The point of this informal writing is for students to gain comfort with writing as they think about concepts and what they’ve learned, rather than explicitly focus on formal writing techniques.

Each lesson in our courses includes multiple opportunities for students to write every day for multiple purposes. For example, students engage in opening and closing informal writing activities to activate prior understanding, and then recap new concepts. They write in preparation for whole-group discussions and to conjecture about historical concepts. This type of writing is part of a classroom routine that we encourage. Students then use these as resources for writing formal essays, and have opportunities to go back to their informal writing often and for different purposes. They will see writing as helping them to learn history, and they’ll learn about writing in history. This type of writing will provide them with a stockpile of ideas, tips, quotes, and resources for learning and for writing formal essays.

Implications for Instruction

• Students need to write every day for multiple purposes.
• Students need to understand the different types of writing in history—narrative, explanatory, and argumentative—and need explicit instruction on the different genres and how each uses historical evidence in distinct ways.
• Students need multiple models of the different ways that historians use writing so they can learn about writing and why writers in the discipline make the choices they do (for example, organizational structures, genres, language, and style choices).
• Informal writing doesn’t need to be graded. You, the instructor, don’t even have to read it. It’s practice. It’s also time to think, try out ideas, and gather thoughts. Students can get credit for doing it, but we advise against assigning letter grades.
• In a formal writing process limit feedback to one or two points during the revision stage. This will help students prioritize what needs revising. Be sure to note what is working.
• Student writing should be captured in ways that are easily stored and revised—either electronically or in a notebook.
• Students should share writing regularly with peers for feedback and support.
• Students should collaborate, producing writing together.

The Benefits

There are multiple benefits to deliberately and intentionally engaging students in informal writing.

• Informal writing, such as note-taking, annotating, journaling, and drafting, allows students to engage in the types of activities that actual historians engage in as they think through historical events and concepts, think critically, and formulate a deep understanding of an era.
• These writing activities solidify ideas and support retention and understanding of concepts, events, and eras.
• Informal writing allows the student to have just themselves as the audience, which enables them to try out and assemble ideas in various ways before sharing them with others.
• Students get a place to collect ideas and information so they can connect back to the larger concepts of history. This means that when it’s time to write formally, they have content to begin with and ideas to build on, revise, and refine.
• Informal writing can be formative assessment for the teacher, as it allows the teacher to “see” the student’s thinking and consider the best support and next steps.
• Students develop writing fluency and confidence. They learn to write better.
• Informal writing builds equitable practices. Having students write about a question in preparation for a whole group discussion gives all of them time to think of ideas to share—not just the students who think fast. It allows all students to see their ideas as valuable by the mere act of capturing them “on paper.”

Daily Routines

To support teachers with providing the types of opportunities we’ve described, our courses have incorporated informal routines where students use writing to learn about historical concepts and to learn about how writing is used in the discipline. For a selection of informal writing strategies, click here for a one-page, student-friendly guide.

Historians use informal writing all the time as a tool to help them figure out how the pieces of a story in history fit together. In this type of writing, they are their own audience. They collect evidence, analyze, try out ideas, hypothesize, revise, refine, and build arguments over time. In the OER Project courses, we strive to give students opportunities to practice these types of writing so they develop “muscle memory” for these writing habits. We support students as they build their own tool belts for writing. This informal writing is crucial to developing students’ identities as writers and historians with their own ideas, opinions, and ways of connecting concepts over time. While OER Project provides intentionally sequenced lessons to support students with formal historical writing, we also embed the writing practices that might not be considered “good” writing but that is writing that supports learning.

The routines are interconnected and interdependent

Although each informal writing opportunity is a separate activity, we recognize that all are connected. While they’re reading texts, students take notes about content and about the writing strategies the author is using. They may use their notes when creating an explanation or an argument. There is no one routine that is more important than the others. They work in tandem.

The routines are incorporated throughout the curriculum

The routines are used by students throughout the curriculum. They don’t learn how to do something in one lesson, and then forget it. It’s part of how students learn the content. The routines support students’ reconstruction of the events of the past, and they connect them to the larger concepts of history.

The routines are dependent on the content and concepts students are working on

The routines are flexible in that they are used in ways that support the students with specific content. Students conjecture and reflect when it makes sense in the sequence of instruction. Language and style choices are also specific to particular content and eras of study.

End-of-Unit Informal Writing Opportunities

While there are many options for informal writing throughout the course, we have built in structured opportunities in our Unit Notebooks and AP Themes Notebooks. In these recurring activities, students visit, and then revisit the Driving Questions of each unit.

The aim of these notebook activities, which appear twice in every unit (once at the beginning of the unit and again at the end), is to keep students and teachers connected to the core themes of the course. Additionally, these exercises help both you and your students assess how their thinking is progressing, where they’re gaining mastery, and where they might need additional instruction. Although it may seem that your students don’t have enough context to respond to the prompts and questions at the beginning of each unit, you can use their responses as an informal baseline assessment to help gauge what students already know about the ideas and concepts you’ll be covering. Learning scientists called this “activating prior knowledge.” Students create a mental model that later allows them to organize the ideas and correct misconceptions they brought into the course, as well as expand on their initial understanding.

Formal Writing in OER Project

We know informal writing is a key to strong writing. We also know it’s important for students to build their skills for more traditional, essay-style writing. Not only is this a skill needed for many standardized tests, such as the SAT and AP® exams, but it’s a great way for students show their understanding in a more extensive manner than allowed by informal writing.

Formal writing appears in the course in the form of formal essay prompts, including those related to causation, historical comparison, and continuity and change over time (CCOT). To support students in writing these essays, our courses offer a comprehensive set of lessons, scaffolds, and opportunities to furnish them with the knowledge and skills to craft strong written arguments. Emphasis is placed on ensuring students comprehend claims and develop their own, test claims, identify and embed appropriate evidence, and explain how that evidence supports the claim. Students also learn about style and organizing structures suitable for historical writing, and gain experience with writing through a revision process.

Writing Activities

Because social studies teachers are not necessarily trained as writing teachers yet must help students develop their writing skills, we have created a series of writing activities in each course that focuses specifically on developing core writing skills so that students are prepared to construct their own historical narratives in response to varied historical prompts. The writing activities in the course are based on the OER Project Writing Rubric. Each activity focuses on two sections of the rubric. Throughout the courses, students will evaluate and revise sample essays, and then plan and revise their own essays—all using the rubric. Finally, they’ll put it all together toward the end of the course when they practice editing both a colleague’s writing and their own.

Types of rubric-based writing activities in OER Project

While all these activities correspond to specific writing prompts, note that any of the activities—in particular the pre-writing, post-writing, peer-editing, and self-editing activities—could easily be modified to support any kind of writing, whether or not it’s OER Project-related.

Formal Writing Opportunities

In each unit of OER Project: World History (WH) and in two units of OER Project: Big History (BH), there are opportunities for students to participate in a formal writing activity that results in an essay. In WH, assessments can take the form of document-based questions (DBQs) or open-ended long-essay questions (LEQs). Each prompt is offered on its own, if you’d like to assign an LEQ, or with an accompanying set of sources, if you’d like to assign a DBQ. In BH, DBQs—which are called Investigations in that course—are offered as writing assessments. All document-based assessments require students to analyze and interpret documents related to the essay prompt. We recommend that writing assessments span approximately two days, with one day devoted to document analysis or research and a second day dedicated to writing.

We’ve placed these formal writing opportunities wherever they fit best in each course. Sometimes this is at the end of a unit, sometimes it’s following a lesson that directly relates to the prompt. As with all OER Project materials, the choice for what and how to assign these writing assessments remains with you, the teacher. Nine formal essays (the total if you assigned one per unit) in one school year is a lot! You may want to assign these essays every other unit, or ask students to submit only an introductory paragraph or outline. We’ve even known teachers to forgo the essay writing and instead use the documents in DBQs to generate a class discussion or debate. Click here to see where these writing opportunities live in each World History course.

Learning from Example

OER Project believes that for students to get better at writing, they not only need to write a lot, they also need to see what good writing looks like. For each extended writing prompt we’ve provided annotated samples that represent four different levels of writing and identify evidence from four of the OER Project Writing Rubric categories: claim and focus, analysis and evidence, organization, and language/style. We’ve also included unmarked versions of the same essays. You will find these linked in the lesson guides, where the writing prompt is located.

These writing samples provide a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure exercise for writing instruction— they have lots of applications! They can be a tool to help students practice and develop writing skills by evaluating both good and not-so-good responses. Plus, although peer-editing is an important tool, anonymous samples can help overcome some of the logistical challenges of objectively assessing peer writing. In some writing activities, we give students a choice: they can review their own essay or a sample essay. This is especially helpful earlier in the course when students might not have written an essay yet. We encourage you to use these sample essays however you see fit in your classroom.