Content-Area Literacy

C3WP: Formative Assessment

Summary: This resource from NWP’s College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) features two strategies that teachers can use to assess students’ source-based arguments. The “Using Sources Tool” focuses on the quality of students’ claims and how well they use evidence to support them. The “Claim, Evidence, Reasoning Protocol” can...

Building Culturally Responsive Units of Study: From Texas to Mexico and Back

Author: Katie McKay Summary: By crafting units of study that cast immigration as part of the American historical process, a teacher-consultant at the Heart of Texas Writing Project creates opportunities for her bilingual fourth-graders to explore immigration in a trusting and productive classroom environment. This article can support discussions about...

What’s Next: Possibilities for Literacy and Content Area Learning (NWP Radio)

Summary: This NWP Radio show captures the conversation among planners, presenters and participants in the 2010 National Reading Initiative Conference in New Orleans. The conference captured learning from NWP sites engaged in the National Reading Initiative. Of particular interest to teacher leaders looking at the reading/writing connection and disciplinary literacy,...

Overview of NWP’s College, Career, and Community Writers Program

Summary: This overview provides key information about the National Writing Project’s College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) and how it works, along with the results from multiple years/areas of the country. In “About the Program,” teachers can find resources that complement each other in a year-round approach to teaching...

Introducing Girls of Color to Science

Author: ASU News Frame: Girls Writing Science, a program of the Central Arizona Writing Project that is funded by an NWP/NSF Intersections grant, aims to improve participants’ science writing and encourages them to consider professions in a science-related field.

Nonfiction Writing in the Science Classroom

Author: Nancy Lilly Summary: A fourth-grade science teacher, Nancy Lilly, describes how she helps her students recognize that the skills that elevate fiction are the very skills that can be useful in writing strong nonfiction, including science writing. Lilly shares her student writing conferences and details her process when working with...

Historical Fiction in English and Social Studies Classrooms: Is It a Natural Marriage?

Author: KaaVonia Hinton, Yonghee Suh, Lourdes Colón-Brown, and Maria O’Hearn Summary: What happens when history and ELA teachers form a study group to develop understandings of disciplinary literacy and ways this new knowledge might affect each person’s practice? As members read and reflected together on historical fiction and nonfiction, they...

Cultural Landscapes for Literacies Learning: An Innovative Art Museum and Teacher-Research Community Partnership

Author: Ralph Cordova and Michael Murawski Summary: Documenting the cross-disciplinary literacy activities supported by a partnership between teacher-researchers and a local art museum, this excellent resource offers both activities and practical strategies for taking writing about art into the classroom using resources from local art galleries and online virtual art...