Literacy Strategies for Secondary Social Studies Classrooms

Everybody Write

Type of Literacy Strategy:

Reading Comprehension (post-reading), Writing (informal and formal), Speaking (discussion)

Reading Level:

All Secondary Reading Levels; Based on how the teacher will use Everybody Write, it can be collected or have students share verbally what they write. For EL and struggling readers, breaking discussions to partner groups first can help students that need more time complete their writing before sharing with the whole class.

Prep Time:

1-3 minutes between reading a text and asking students questions.

Everybody Write in Use -

Have students finish their reading
Then taking anywhere between half a minute to three minutes, students will silently write their thoughts about what they read. It can be opinions, questions they have, a quote they found meaningful or thought-provoking, relating the reading to something in their life, in the world, or something from a previous lesson (The point is to get them writing using the text as a guide or focal point.)
Once students have had time to at least get a few thoughts or question on their paper, an unstructured discussion can develop. This ensures that students have enough time to generate ideas for the discussion, feel confident enough to share as they have something written down, and allows cold calling of students as they are all prepared with at least something before you even call on them
Now you can call on students who volunteer or cold call since they all have something written down to contribute to the class.

How to Fit into a Social Studies Classroom:

Everybody Writes lets the teacher monitor students as they write to ensure that all students are participating and ready for questions and discussions to follow; it also gives every student a chance to share. For the students that have answers right away and their hand shoots up, Everybody Writes makes them pause and solidify and strengthen their thoughts before sharing . And for other students that can be more shy or averse to sharing off the top of their head, this allows students to have a sense of confidence, feeling of preparedness, and also helps refine thoughts as writing can “challenge students intellectually, engage them, and improves the quality of their ideas and their writing” (Lemov, 2011)

No templates or examples as these are quick writes that lead to discussion.

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