About ISAW
ISAW focuses on these goals:
The ISAW program includes, but is not limited to:
The ISAW program addresses the following:
- Demystifying the teaching and learning of analytical writing and critical reading
- Examining how teachers can make analytical writing an integral component of a high school curriculum by focusing on student improvement
- Accelerating the analytical writing improvement of all students—the college-bound, English learners, and struggling writers—and preparing more of these students for college.
- Fostering collaboration among high school, community college, and four-year university teachers to move students along a pathway of analytical preparation that leads to success in and beyond high school.
The ISAW program includes, but is not limited to:
- Professional development programs tailored to school or district needs, offered during the school year and/or summer
- A wealth of instructional materials, curriculum resources, and assessment tools
- The ISAW embedded assessment program for use with students that helps them focus on improving their analytical writing and documents their progress across eighteen dimensions of analytical writing
- Professional learning communities to support using the CWP Analytical Writing Improvement Continuum as a part of formative and summative assessment
- ISAW assessment results and data profiles for students, teachers, and schools
- Seminars and workshops for students—during the summer, after-school, or on Saturdays
- Coaching, mentoring, and demonstration teaching
- Invitations to CWP statewide ISAW conferences and seminars.
The ISAW program addresses the following:
- Investigating through workshops, teacher writing and revision, discussions, inquiry, and assessment, the nature and purpose of analytical writing
- Learning to use the CWP Analytical Writing Improvement Continuum to help students to recognize and document specific improvements in analytical writing, demystify what to work on next, and write with an eye toward practice and improvement
- Exploring strategies that help students develop and organize their analytic essays—
- Deconstructing and analyzing texts, non-fiction and fiction
- Responding to and interacting with a text
- Developing a claim
- Building strong examples
- Evaluating and selecting evidence
- Structuring the essay
- Creating coherence between parts of an essay
- Revising and editing purposefully
- Revising sentences for logic and completeness
- Using subordination, coordination, and parallelism confidently
- Writing effectively on-demand or in-depth
- Experimenting with analytical forms, not formulas
- Enlarging the classroom base for reading: augmenting the reading of novels, stories, plays, poems, and textbooks required in the high school curriculum to include more of the analytical essays, analytical articles, informational and journalistic pieces students will read in college
- Developing, with the support of school and grade-level colleagues, resources, assignments, and assignment sequences that help students understand the task and demands of issue-based writing
- Providing students a challenging, culturally responsive writing program along with specific support for the needs of individual writers
- Developing ways for school teams to share students’ achievement and progress as they transition to the next grade.