Chapter 14 page 336
Figure 14.7 A diagrammatic representation to scaffold students’ identification of the parts of stories.
Source: National Center for Accelerating Student Learning, http://kc.vanderbilt.edu/casl/powwww.htmlAs students master use of the scaffolds, the scaffolds are gradually withdrawn. Eventually, the
teacher expects students to be able to write stories and essays without looking at the lists of questions or
using the diagrams. After many opportunities to use these scaffolds, students internalize the strategies so
that they can use them without assistance.
Goal setting and evaluation. SRSD encourages students, as quickly as possible, to set their own
goals and evaluate their own performance. By teaching students the parts of essays and the characteristics
of good essays, students gain critical tools that they can use to evaluate their own writing. They learn to set
goals to write essays that meet the criteria for good essays (“I’m going to write a story that is interesting,
that makes sense, and that has all seven parts that stories should have”), and they evaluate their essays to
see if they have met their goals. Working individually or in pairs, they use the diagrammatic representation
in Figure 14.7 to check whether their stories and their partner’s stories have all the needed parts.
In SRSD, students also compare essays they write after learning to use the writing strategies with
essays they wrote at the beginning of the year. In this way, they can clearly see how much they have