Teaching Constructed Responses

      In sixth grade, constructed responses for short answer questions become a huge part of our curriculum.  Students are required to answer questions like that in every classroom, not just in ELA.  In fact, students even use it in math when they do an error analysis task.  Students must show mastery on this type of writing on our state assessment, too, so it is important they master it.
    I attended this year's Louisville Writing Project conference on Argumentative Writing, and sat in on a wonderful session about using crime puzzles to get students started on argumentative writing.  I took that idea and adapted it to this.
    Our students use the acronym RACE (restate, answer, cite evidence, explain evidence).  It helps that we use this building wide.  Every teacher posts something about it in their room.  Their might be a bit of variance depending on needs for the content, but every teacher shows students how constructed response questions are to be answered in their room.  We took this a bit further this year, and realized that we need to get students to RACCE or RACECE.  We had already taught students to RACE when I created this, but I know I will need to update this to use it earlier in the year.
     So, here's the plan:
   1) I show students released items from state testing.  I ask them to score the responses based on state rubric.  This leads to a lot of really good discussion.  
   2) I ask students to score their own recent constructed response answer on the state rubric.  They compared their own to the third released item (the highest score).  Almost immediately, they noticed that they were giving one piece of evidence but really needed to provide more.  I had to lead their attention to the explanation part of the answer, the part I felt like they weren't always great at, especially when the evidence lead to an inference (check out my post about teaching inferential evidence). 

These books are a great resource!
I purchased mine from Amazon.

   3) To practice, I gave students a copy of a mystery from the book Crime And Puzzlement: 24 Solve-them-yourself Picture Mysteries by Lawrence Treat.  (Some of the puzzles are inappropriate for middle school, so I purchased several used books from Amazon in order to have enough puzzles.)  The puzzles are a great resource for teaching this!  They combine a short text with picture of the crime scene so it works with all ability levels.  Each puzzle also includes questions to get the reader thinking like a detective.  I used these for scaffolding, when students were stuck on a puzzle. They worked in groups to find three pieces of evidence to prove guilt or innocence for each puzzle. 
    This plan isn't anything crazy new, but the crime puzzles as the text increase student engagement making them actually excited to do this, which helps when I want them to practice this over and over and over and over...
  I gradually released the responsibility from whole class, small groups, partners, and finally to individual students.  We did one puzzle a day for almost two weeks.  The first and second puzzles, the whole class found 3 pieces of evidence to prove guilt and then three pieces of evidence to prove innocence, then we created our constructed response answer together.  This became our mentor text and we put it on an anchor art in the front of the room.  In the third, fourth, and fifth puzzles, students worked in groups to analyze the puzzle, find three pieces of evidence for both sides, and then chose a side to create their constructed response.  In puzzles six and seven, students created the constructed response on their own.  If students showed mastery on it - great!  They were finished!  I used puzzles eight and nine for students who needed extra practice.  We completed them in small group so that I could see where we were getting off track, and then I give mini-lessons for those specific things.

Here's are some of the slides
in the mini-unit.

Me with my "Innocent"
hat!  They loved it!

     I added a bit of dramatic flair to it because, well, I teach middle school, and they are all about the drama.  I had red and blue hats, one for the defense and one for the prosecution.  I told them they had been hired by the defense to prove innocence, and once we had done that, I switched hats and told them they prosecution came along and paid them more money to prove guilt. Each time they were successful, I paid them with our school economy money.  They loved it!!
     If you are going to teach this before you teach argumentative writing (and I suggest you do - this is a great transition.  If they can't do this, than argumentative writing will be extremely difficult!), then you can easily show students how the RA is the claim, and you still need the C & E.  In fact, this is just like a body paragraph in an argumentative piece.
    These puzzles are great! Here's what I use with just a few of the puzzles to get you started - Constructed Response - Crime Puzzles.  Feel free to make a copy and make it your own.

Love and Sparkle,