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9780929895758

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Tim Clifford, a middle school language arts teacher in New York, brings to market a teacher's guide to organizing the writing classroom with The Middle School Writing Toolkit: Differentiated Instruction Across the Content Areas. The ten chapters are divided into three sections. The first three chapters address the unique challenges of middle school writers, as they adjust to working with as many as eight different teachers, all with their own curriculum and style of delivery. Teachers too face the challenge of meeting the needs of peer-driven students with widely varying writing competencies. Clifford's middle school experience prepares him well for setting up any classroom as a writers' workshop. The next five chapters differentiate instruction by targeting skill development across content areas. The last two chapters model skill lessons, workstation tasks, and a variety of composing techniques with revision strategies. Well-designed rubrics follow workstation lessons and provide both assessment and instruction, as they can be helpful tools in revision. In a final section entitled Teaching Resources, Clifford includes a variety of assessment and record-keeping worksheets to monitor both individual and class progress. The toolkit sorts the conventions of writing across content areas into genre and content specific lessons. The lessons are easy to follow, designed as single pages, and address a range of exposition including reports, persuasive essays, and responses to reading. The focus on expository writing instruction supports the middle school curriculum where students are learning to write for a variety of purposes and audiences. Clifford's methodical approach to skill-based writing instruction gives teachers a way to organize their classrooms for writers' workshop. The workstation and mini-lessons provide practice for adolescent writers experimenting with genre. Taken together, the lessons remind us of the complexity of choices available to writers. Teaching writing is as much about what to say as what not to say. Models included in the text offer techniques such as interesting facts, quotations, and anecdotes to demonstrate writing strategies for students. The teacher guides for instruction include specific tasks with suggestions for where the lesson best fits a curriculum, along with time saving guidelines for assessing each task. If students have opportunities across content classes to write, revise, and practice when and how to use Clifford's tools, writing proficiency has a chance to develop over time.Teachers will find this a useful resource, especially teachers outside language arts, challenged by organizing writing instruction in their classrooms. While the target audience for the toolkit is middle school content teachers, the workshop design assists teachers at any grade level interested in getting more writing and writing to learn strategies into their curriculum. The tools are here to begin and sustain writing instruction in any classroom, as all teachers become teachers of writing. -Reviewed by Roberta J. Herter, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Education, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, CA, for Education Book Reviews-- Education Book Reviews

Author Information

Tim Clifford is a native New Yorker who has taught English for the last 18 years in New York City schools. His experience has given him insight into teaching writing skills to diverse populations. As a middle-school English teacher, he felt the need for resources specifically targeted to students in this age group, and so he decided to fill the gap by writing his first book, The Middle School Writing Toolkit. He is also the author of Crafting Opinion and Persuasive Papers (Maupin House), three books from Rourke's Let's Explore Science series, and three volumes from Rourke's World of Science Encyclopedia. Tim is a graduate of SUNY/New Paltz, where he earned his B.A. in English. He earned a Masters degree in English/Secondary Education from the City University of New York at Queens College.

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