Scaffolded High-Quality Writing Tasks

Shared writing, independent writing, writing assessments, and other writing structures described in a previous post are essential for teachers to assess individual students’ progress toward mastery of standards. But this isn’t the only kind of writing students should do. More scaffolded writing tasks that lead to high-quality work are important for building students’ formal writing skills and their sense of purpose, audience, and the impact of their writing.

The combination of individual independent writing tasks and scaffolded high-quality writing tasks allows you to get a holistic picture of student progress toward standards. Providing opportunities for both kinds of writing also supports students to develop confidence as writers, building their skills but also their belief that they can succeed through clear expectations, a structured process, frequent feedback, and multiple opportunities to revise. Scaffolded high-quality writing allows students to take real pride in their work and to see that they can do more than they may have thought possible.

A Closer Look At Scaffolded Writing in K-2 Classrooms

For more information on scaffolding writing in K-2 classrooms, read this piece written by EL Education curriculum designer Katie Shenk for Ed Week’s Learning Deeply series in which she shares specific examples of the read-think-talk-write process in primary classrooms using the EL Education K-5 Language Arts Curriculum.