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Written Expression: Scaffolded Strategies for Beginning Writers, Haverhill – 6 weeks – Spring Online 2020

This 3 module course should take approximately 6 hours to complete

This professional development course explores process writing and specific instructional strategies for teaching basic writing skills to struggling writers, particularly students with language-based learning disabilities (LBLD), which fall under the diagnostic umbrella of specific learning disabilities (SLD). This course is intended for educators who wish to help students develop grammar knowledge and build expertise at the word choice and sentence structure levels before stringing sentences together into paragraphs. Content would be primarily beneficial for teachers of younger students, but it would also benefit those who teach older writers who need remediation in beginning skills. As a result of the learning experiences in this course, participants will be more competent in their ability to:

• Scaffold the process of written expression through targeted instruction at the word, sentence, and paragraph levels
• Employ effective instructional strategies to help students with diagnosed learning disabilities build and develop their basic writing skills

The course is divided into three, self-paced modules:

• Teaching Basic Parts of Speech helps educators understand how to provide targeted instruction in nouns, verbs, prepositional phrases, and adjectives.
• Sentence Level Instruction introduces the construction of kernel sentences, as well as other advanced sentence techniques and more complex parts of speech.
• Expository Paragraph Instruction breaks down the elements of a paragraph and provides strategies for helping students craft logical, organized, detailed paragraphs.

Specific Assignments:

• Pre and Post-Assessments: These ungraded questionnaires will be used to self-assess knowledge and application of course content.
• Discussion Posts: There is one discussion in each module that will require participants to post an initial response and reply to at least one other post.
• Assignments: The assignments in each module will require participants to put theory into practice as they read and follow specific directions and use rubrics provided as guidelines for format, length, and quality expectations.

MATERIALS

Excerpts of the following text will be made available within the course:
Jennings, T.M. & Haynes, C.W. (2018). From talking to writing: Strategies for scaffolding narrative and expository writing. Prides Crossing, MA: Landmark School Outreach Program.

This course was possible thanks to the support of the Salem Five Charitable Foundation.

See our FAQ page for specific information about our online courses.