Smarter Balance Project Analysis

Next steps
After analyzing my 10 student work samples, I now know exactly what students need to work on. The first next step that I would like to do would be coming up with a different outline before students write their paper that will help students to write more than a sentence that states their opinion and concluding thoughts. Before students wrote their paper, we made an outline and they were only required to provide one topic sentence and concluding sentence that stated and supported their opinion. However, a paragraph is at least four sentences and students did not do this in their papers. I want students to get into the mind set that we are writing more to prepare them for 4th grade and that means no more one liners that state their opinion. So next time, we will make an outline that includes a …show more content…
For example, Morgan had a great fact that Lincoln created the two term limit, but then stated another fact right after instead of elaborating on how creating the two term limit was important. This is something that can easily be fixed with an outline. My original outline had students write a topic sentence that stated their opinion and then they had to list four facts that supported their opinion. However, to push students a little further to meet the criteria for the Smarter Balance Writing Rubric, I will create a different outline that has students state their fact that supports their opinion and then list how that fact is important to prove how their opinion is the right one. Since I know students can pull out facts to support their opinion, by doing this, students will then be able to back up their facts with supporting details to write a great opinion piece. At the end of this paper, I will include a sample outline on how this will look by writing an outline on tackle football since that is the next opinion piece students will be