Written Conversation in Div. 4 Social

I worked with the Social Department at LCHS to modify Written Conversations to work in their Social 10 and 20 classrooms (please see Mike’s post below).  They wanted to use the written conversation strategy to help students formulate an opinion on a guiding question about a text (a thesis statement), and then build an evidence-based argument supporting their position. 

The second and third writers had the goal of either: 1) attacking the original writer’s argument, showing areas of weakness, or 2) adding evidence and thinking that helps the original writer build their argument. 

We created the teacher planner below to help with the planning of this activity:

You can get a copy of the planning document, as well as a filled-in exemplar, here.

We learned that a discussion about quality feedback and commentary before going into the written conversation, prevented the amount of “cheerleading” that we saw in the first few sessions. They are not there to cheer each other on, (ie: “awesome thinking!”), but rather to act as a critical peer to construct the best possible evidence-based argument.

Students read about the French Revolution, formulated a thesis regarding their opinion of the possibility of a revolutionary spread beyond France’s borders, and then went through the Written Conversation process.  Of the 15 student conversations, there were 21 different occurrences of students both asking questions and adding information to expand the thinking of the original writer.

As one student commented, when the conversation was over and she had received her messy, annotated piece of writing back, “this was so helpful!”