As part of our continued evolution, we continue to research and evaluate the best ways to support our scholars. In a recent blog, The Writing Revolution: How We’re Evolving Our Teaching Methods, we shared how we’re applying new principles to our writing instruction to empower our scholars to write with confidence. Today, we’re talking about how we’re applying similar principles across various subject matter, specifically with our history curriculum.
Rather than assuming students will naturally develop writing skills through exposure, the Writing Revolution method provides systematic, step-by-step instruction. Students first master sentence construction before jumping into paragraph or essay development. The method builds skills incrementally, with clear feedback points to help students identify mistakes and monitor progress, reinforcing the need to plan—or outline—before writing at length.
To reinforce these skills, writing lessons are integrated across all subjects. By receiving the same message about the building blocks of writing, students experience a lower cognitive load while learning any subject. This allows students to focus on the lesson in front of them–like history–rather than the anxiety about doing their history-related writing assignment.
Evaluating Our Curriculum
In 2015, we made the strategic decision to switch from serving rising 6th graders to supporting students as they were entering 5th grade. We felt that an earlier start—working with students in the year before they made the transition to middle school—could help our program be more successful. Then, the pandemic hit, and we were working with younger kids, which left us with the question: is our curriculum doing what it should be doing?
To answer this question, Hannah Bahn, our former Academic Director and new Chief Program Officer, used her background in education practitioner research to conduct a review of Rainier Scholars’ Academic Enrichment Phase curriculum. As part of this work, we administered pre- and post-testing in reading comprehension and math to students at the beginning and end of the 14-month Academic Enrichment Phase. This allowed us to gather a quantitative understanding of where students demonstrated the greatest growth and what academic areas remained challenging for them. We also analyzed Rainier Scholars’ 6th grade spring report cards, looking for themes of where scholars excelled and struggled in their middle schools. Finally, Rainier Scholars conducted focus groups with five partner schools. This allowed us to gather qualitative feedback about how well prepared scholars were for college-preparatory middle school environments.
While most of the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, we saw an opportunity to evolve how we teach writing. Many of our middle schoolers said that argumentative writing—presenting a clear stance on an issue and supporting it with factual evidence and logical reasoning—felt hard. We set about updating our curriculum in response.
A Mighty Long Way
During our Academic Enrichment Phase (AEP), scholars complete the equivalent of one additional school year (1,000 hours) of academic enrichment. AEP looks a lot like a regular school day, with students engaging in lessons in science, history, math, and literature. In recent years, our history curriculum has focused on the civil rights movement. However, the subject matter has proven difficult because so many of the students don’t have all fo the relevant background info. We were searching for a way to dive deep into the subject matter across one story rather than learning through different articles or excerpts.
That’s when we discovered A Mighty Long Way.
A Might Long Way follows the story of Carlotta Walla LaNier, one of nine Black students who integrated the then all-white Little Rock Central High School in 1957. At just fourteen years old, Carlotta was the youngest member of this cohort known as the Little Rock Nine. This memoir follows her personal journey of fighting for equity in education and gives our scholars a stronger understanding of the many moving parts of the Civil Rights Movement, including the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and the landmark ruling Brown vs. Board of Education.
“With a novel, the whole world lives within that novel. In contrast, comprehending books about history requires a considerable amount of background knowledge and context,” said Bahn. “Looking at the Little Rock Nine as a representative sample – a case study, we’re able to explore the different ways people have fought for freedom, justice and a high-quality education: through challenging social norms, using the court system, generating new ideas, and using non-violent action. We liked that all these concepts are encompassed in this one book. We feel that this text explores a lot of themes that are relevant to the journey of Rainier Scholars. There is a lot that can be unpacked.”
Tools of Critical Thinking & Persuasive Writing
When students come to us, they often read and think quite literally. Rainier Scholars’ curriculum teaches students how to make inferences and defend their thinking using evidence. To help them make this development leap, we try to explicitly teach writing processes.
For many adults, critical thinking happens almost subconsciously: we receive new information, synthesize it with what we already know, and generate new ideas. However, young students need to be explicitly taught how to engage in these various processes. We’ve designed our curriculum to explicitly teach students concrete strategies that they can use to develop and write arguments. “We try to make the process explicit and not some hidden door in someone’s brain.”
Specifically, in our Summer II history class, which students take the summer before sixth grade, we teach a multi-step process for how to write an argumentative paragraph. For example, students apply this process to the prompt: How did Carlotta fight for freedom?
This prompt may seem simple, but for a student new to persuasive writing, it can feel overwhelming. So, for our first step, we break the prompt down following this toolkit, which can be applied to any writing prompt:
- Understand what the prompt is asking you: Is it a how question? A why? A should? What is it asking you to do? Analyze? Evaluate? Compare?
- What’s the key term(s) you need to pull out?
- How can you use the prompt to think about what you’re going to annotate (relevant content you will highlight and cite as evidence later)? Are you looking for specific actions or another kind of word?
Next, we have the students write the prompt inside the front cover of the book. This serves as an ever-present reminder of what they should be looking for while reading.
Once students have finished reading and annotating the book, we have them collect all the relevant evidence. At this stage, some students can easily see patterns. However, many students need help with synthesizing. So, we do an activity where students “code” each piece of evidence – writing one or two words that summarize how the piece of evidence answers the prompt. For instance, in response to the prompt “How did Carlotta fight for freedom?” you might see codes like “education” and “positive ideas about self” and “community.”
Once students have coded their evidence, it is much easier for them to begin grouping like quotes. “Grouping like-quotes from an entire book is a ton of synthesis work,” said Bahn. “We give them codes to help with that synthesis. For example, a quote related to friends or family will be coded differently than physical action. “This helps get the data synthesis out of their brain and all onto a page,” said Bahn.
Using the coding provided, students will group and sort all of their citations. Then we walk them through another critical thinking exercise:
- Which quotes are the most relevant?
- What evidence is the most convincing?
- Are the quotes unique or repetitive?
Through this activity, students identify their best pieces of evidence and begin to formulate their own perspective on fighting for freedom. This process helps students create an outline before they even start writing.
Like the building blocks of writing taught in our literature course, these skills lay the foundation for critical thinking. Skills that will prepare the next generation of leaders to think clearly, argue persuasively, and communicate ideas with power and precision. “We hope that they can take this skill and apply it across subjects throughout their educational experience, and beyond,” said Bahn.