I was chatting with a group of homeschooling parents in my Teaching Writing Workshop, and one of them mentioned that teaching ELA feels overwhelming because there are just so many pieces!
The list of topics to cover as part of a full ELA curriculum seems endless: vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, writing style, organization, research, citations, introductions, conclusions, reading comprehension, note-taking, and on and on.
It can be tempting to tinker with the more concrete and manageable elements (a set list of vocabulary words each week, grammar worksheets and quizzes with an answer key). After all, we have lots of other things to do in a day! ELA isn’t the only subject!
When you actually look at the Common Core standards for ELA (which I spent some time decoding here), that’s not where the focus is.
For additional context, check out the Guiding Principles on teaching writing from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). The focus isn’t on drills and isolated skill sets. It’s on the importance of communication and being part of a rhetorical community.
Instead of thinking about writing as those discrete tasks, it’s more helpful to think about genres and purposes for writing situations and practice all of those specific tasks within the context of a particular type of assignment.
With that in mind, here are the types of writing a through ELA plan should cover.
9 Types of Academic Writing Assignments
These are broad categories, and there are lots of ways to bring them into the world as real-life assignments (including in ways that combine approaches), but these guidelines can give us a starting place when designing writing situations for our learners that will cover a wide range of learning opportunities.
- Summaries (see CC reading anchor standard 2)
- Narratives (see CC writing anchor standard 3)
- Informative Writing (see CC writing anchor standard 2)
- Arguments (see CC writing anchor standard 1)
- Research Projects (see CC writing anchor standard 7)
- Close Textual Analysis (see CC reading anchor standards 1, 5, and 6)
- Comparisons Across Texts (see CC reading anchor standards 3 and 9 and writing anchor standard 8)
- Evaluations (see CC reading anchor standard 8)
- Reflection (a key component of using reading and writing to achieve complex learning goals)
How to Think About Writing Categories
Writing doesn’t fit into neat little boxes, and it’s not meant to be something you accomplish once and can mark off. Don’t think of this as a checklist of assignments to complete. Think of it as a jumping off point when designing authentic and meaningful writing activities.
Many of these tasks can be blended. Any good comparison across texts is going to include summary. Close textual analysis is often part of any research paper based on a literary text. Many research projects are going to include an informative section of background information.
Still, thinking about these nine approaches to writing can help us have a central goal for any given activity. It can also help us focus our own evaluation and feedback.