Week 6- Best Practices by Steve Graham, Charles A.

MacArthur, and Michael Hebert, chapters 6-7

Chapter 6 is about argumentative writing. It goes through the definition of argument,

argumentative dialogue, how to support argumentative dialogue in a classroom, strategies, and

instructional support. It gives an example on how to support and facilitate debates in the

classroom and goes through the process of TREE (Topic sentence, Reasons, Explanation,

Ending), STOP (Suspend judgment, Take a side, Organize ideas, Plan more as you write), and

DARE (Develop a topic sentence, Add supporting details, Reject argument for other side, End

with a conclusion)-three cognitive supports for writing arguments. It gives several examples of

all strategies described. Chapter 7 is about writing to learn. In this chapter it talks about the five

genres of writing to learn (journaling, summary writing, argument writing, the SWH, and

multimodal composition), examples of cognitive and metacognitive example writing prompts,

writing strategies, and differentiation. It gives scaffolded supports for teachers when

implementing these strategies.

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, chapter 6 went through self-regulated strategies for

writing arguments (along the guidelines of SRSD). Because I want to teach lower elementary, I

thought the TREE method was really great. Students who use these methods learn to regulate

their behavior in the writing processes, set goals, and find appropriate ways to achieve their

goals. TREE is definitely something I want to use in my future classroom. Chapter 7 had some

really great examples that I loved. For example, on page 162 (in my Kindle ebook version), it

goes through the steps of self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) for historical writing.

Studies show that students who use this method produce higher-level thinking and writing. They

also showed a deeper understanding of the historical context. I thought this was a super useful

section of the book. This is something I want to implement in my classroom when teaching how
to write historical pieces with older students. Finally, in chapter 7 it talks about multimodal

composition. The example given about teaching strategies does relate to a high school chemistry

class, but the principles can totally be applied to an elementary classroom, and there were similar

effects on a study of grades 6-8 as well. Students who are allowed to create multimedia

presentations had an increase in their understanding of the topic and produced better

presentations (especially after given feedback from a real audience). Multimodal learning is

something I would like to include in my classrooms for even kindergarten.

Chapters 6 and 7 taught me a lot about some big pieces of writing lessons, argument and

writing to learn. I learned about the five genres, several ways I can introduce argumentative

writing, self-regulated strategies, SRSD, and so much more. These chapters were really

beneficial and informative for me and I enjoyed learning about things I had never even heard of

before!
 Works Cited

Graham, Steve, et al. “Chapters 6 and 7.” Best Practices in Writing Instruction, Guilford Press,

New York, 2019. Kindle Edition.