Teaching Middle School ELA The Best of Writing Episodes: It's Time to Drop the RACE Strategy.
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The RACE writing formula simply stands for “restate, answer, cite, and explain”. This is widely used by middle school ELA teachers teaching writing as it makes a great tool to help learners construct their answers in a clear, logical format. However, this formula proves to be challenging when students need to move into essay writing.
If you’re one of the middle school ELA teachers who’s seeking help with teaching writing, but are required to use the RACE writing formula or a mashed up version of it, then listen in as Caitlin and Jessica share what we call the Evidence-Based Writing Approach that they developed to address the gaps in using the RACE writing formula.
Tune in now to hear:
- [1:36] Jessica starts off with how the RACE formula works and how it’s a great starting tool to teach students how to write short, constructed responses. However, writing essays consist of more than just jumping straight into their thesis or claim.
- [2:54] Caitlin touches on how students need to know how to formulate an introductory paragraph, several body paragraphs that support their claim, and a well-thought out conclusion to end their essays — all of which the RACE formula does not teach.
- [4:47] Jessica introduces the EBW Approach that includes 10 steps for your students to follow to be able to write well-thought out, text-dependent essays.
- [6:49] Caitlin discusses how the same writing struggles show up time and again with using RACE. You’re essentially left reading identical essays that only repeat the question and answer it with some random quotes and the same piece of supporting evidence afterwards.
- [7:42] Jessica pinpoints that these struggles are present when the writing tool you’re using no longer meets the needs and expectations of your students as the questions become more complex. You can learn more about introducing a more advanced framework in podcast Episode 159: The 2 Game-Changing Sentences That Will Instantly Improve Your Students’ Essays.
- [9:49] If your students are stuck writing basic paragraph after basic paragraph and if they are capable of more than just summarizing an evidence rather than explaining it, then you will want to hear more about our EBW Framework in our EB Writing Program. We have a free resource available that you can use to start teaching your students writing beyond using the RACE formula
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