Teaching Strategies Writing Claims
How do we help students level up their claims? Even when students attempt to meet the requirements of the OER Project Writing Rubric, each skill in action can look fuzzy. Let’s zoom in on teaching moves that will actually grow student skills.Claim and FocusBreak It Down: Understand the rubricBuild strong understanding of rubric criteria as a whole class. Define the key elements of a claim and focus using examples that meet the criteria and examples that don’t. Snip from Writing: Revising Claim and Focus Activity in World History 1750Turn the criteria into questions to probe with students: • “Which ideas do we notice in the claim?” • “What is the writer saying about the topic/era?” • “Where does the writer bring in historical context?”• “What do we expect to learn about in the essay?”• “Given what you know about this time period, is there anything you would add to more fully answer the question?”• “Where does the writer address the counterargument?”Make an anchor chart with class observations about what makes a strong claim. Think of it like students putting the rubric in their own words. WRITING GUIDE: TEACHER MOVES THAT GROW STUDENT CLAIMSTry out some of the tips below to help students make, develop, and defend a claim. Our biggest advice: Show students both strong and weak examples so they can see the difference.Claim and Focus criteria from the OER Project Writing Rubric.Claim and FocusMake a fully developed claim that is historically defensible and responds to the assignment.Establish a strong line of reasoning and maintain a precise focus on defending the described claim.Develop the claim and counterclaims while thoroughly addressing the demands of the prompt.
2OER Project Writing GuideRemix: Revise writing samplesHave students revise writing samples to meet the criteria of the rubric, or ask them to use colored highlighters to identify the criteria from the rubric on a claim that would earn an exemplary score. It’s best to give students both strong and weak examples to work from. Pair students up to revise the claim and focus and then defend their revisions in groups. Or put the revised claims on posters and do a gallery walk with students voting for the strongest claims.Ask students to distill the key ideas of the claim and focus into a six-word sentence. (It’s harder than it sounds.) Deciding which words make it into the shortened form is a way to evaluate what matters most about the claim. Here’s our stab at a distilled version based on the example claim above: Industrialization: Grueling factories extract from colonies.Game-Plan: Get ideas flowingTry out different sentence startersor sentence frames to help students express specific claims. Check out the OER Project posters, which have sentence starters for writing claims, introducing evidence, and explaining and justifying reasoning.Model your own pre-writing and think aloud as you form a claim. Then, ask students to share what kind of thinking they heard, and what they’ll try as they draft their own claims.Glow-Up Round: Review/reviseStudents review and revise writing with a focus on a specific criterion. Students annotate a peer’s or their own claim, and then discuss rubric-based glows-and-grows.Pull a few student claims (no names!) that represent areas for growth. Lead a quick discussion of each claim, measuring it against the rubric: What’s working? What kind of revisions do we suggest to this writer? Then, have students “assess” their own drafts as a reviewer, offering advice to “the writer.”Share the LoveHave a favorite claim-making activity from your classroom? Share it in our Community Forum. For more informal and formal writing, check out the OER Project Writing Guide.Detail from the Sentence Starters poster.