In July, 2017, I presented a workshop for several Washington County Teachers on Writing across the curriculum. This workshop was called “Creating Consistent Communicators” and I partnered with a High School English teacher to discuss the inconsistencies in expectations across content areas and across grade levels. We began the workshop with this activity “Love it, Frustrated by it, Hate it!” to get a feel for the audience and to determine what we needed to focus most on in order to make this a productive and meaningful time for all involved.
We ended the workshop with an activity that involved the teachers “blindly” determining which writing SOLs corresponded with which grade levels. Most were surprised to see at what point certain writing expectations were introduced and where mastery was expected!