This guide to the Georgia Middle Grades Writing Assessment (MGWA) serves the purpose of improving writing and writing instruction. It includes a description of test administration conditions, a sample test booklet, and a structured overview of the writing assessment. Prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading are explained in the…

Written by teachers for teachers, this book offers the first-hand perspectives of 7 teachers who used the writing workshop approach. It offers teachers in grades 1-8 a wealth of practical advice, based on the personal struggles, accomplishments, and classroom-proven solutions of the authors. Equally valuable to teachers already using writing…

Designed to give middle school teachers some of the tools necessary to prepare their students to do well on the performance based Missouri Assessment Program (MAP), this booklet provides released items from the 1997-1998 MAP Communication Arts test. MAP consists of three reading passages followed by constructed-response items, a formal writing…

Suggesting that poetry can be inserted into any classroom in any curricular area, this paper discusses reading and writing poetry in middle school classrooms. The paper begins with advice on reading poetry in content classrooms, and then presents a 31-item bibliography of poetry sources "for browsing." The paper then presents tips for writing…

Bringing together an enthusiasm for biography and a belief in in-depth learning through long-term projects which include manipulating the material to be learned, this book presents a reading-and-writing approach to biography for elementary and middle school students in which students research and write biographies. Following a foreword and an…

The first edition of this book in 1987 examined how teachers teach and how learners learn in the context of reading and writing workshops for middle school students. This revised edition still stresses the workshop approach to writing and English instruction, but it calls for a more activist approach by the teacher, encouraging more direction and…

The Nevada Writing Assessment Program has been developed, implemented, and facilitated by Nevada classroom teachers, who have adapted, designed, and continually revised the scoring criteria; designed the assessment writing prompts; evaluated and chosen anchor papers; led the scoring sessions and read and scored the student papers; and made the…