Jane Schaffer Writing Format Pdf
Jane Schaffer Essay Template
Schaffer Method 5 Paragraph Essay
Jane Schaffer Writing Format Letter
Jane Schaffer Essay Example
Jane Schaffer Writing Template
Jane Schaffer Writing Format Examples

Jane Schaffer Writing. Jane Schaffer Writing Ratio the ration of 1 part concrete detail (CD) and 2 parts commentary (CM) CD: CM 1: 2. Jane Schaffer Terminology. 9Format includes insightful commentary 9Find corrections 9Organization is clear and logical 9Very few, if any mechanical errors. How to Write Schaffer Paragraph.The Jane Schaffer paragraph is usually composed of five sentences, and each sentence has a specific function. Arranged according to their sequence, these sentences are: Topic Sentence (TS), Concrete Detail (CD), Commentary (CM), Commentary (M), and Concluding Sentence (CS).

It wasn’t until I became an English teacher that I understood the relationship between silence and passion. My 12th graders were so quietly fired up over their persuasive essays on immigration that I had nothing to do but study the tops of their heads as they wrote and listen to raindrops ping against the classroom windows. Part of me was proud that my students had become such independent and motivated writers. The rest of me grappled with the teacher version of empty-nest syndrome: There were no hands desperately waving in the air, no side conversations, no one trying to make a 3-pointer into the garbage can across the room with a wadded-up criteria sheet.

Toward the end of class, Erica pushed her notebook aside and ran out of the room. I found her sitting in the hallway with her knees up to her chest and her face in her hands.

“What’s up, Erica?” Her alcoholic mother had recently kicked Erica and her 3-month-old baby out of the house. Life had become an incredible struggle for this young woman, who was currently living with her boyfriend’s family. I wasn’t surprised to see her check out of class.

“I’m such a crappy writer.”

“What?” It was the last thing I expected to hear. Erica was a star student and one of the best writers I had ever taught.

“You’re only supposed to have three ideas, right? How can I write a thesis statement with four or five? You’re only supposed to have three body paragraphs, so I’ll have to mush all of my ideas together, and then I won’t get a good grade because I’ll have too many sentences and too many ideas. I don’t know what to do.”

As we continued the conversation, I discovered that Erica had previously learned a five-paragraph essay structure that limited the writer to three big ideas, each of which the writer was supposed to develop in three corresponding body paragraphs of no more than five to six sentences, but only after providing a three-pronged thesis statement in the introduction to serve as a road map to the writer’s argument.

“Erica, it’s OK to add more paragraphs to the body of your essay. It’s important to develop a strong argument, no matter how many paragraphs or sentences it takes. You’re a bright girl. Trust your own ideas and your own judgment.”

“Really? I can do that?”

Seriously? How could one of the brightest and most talented kids I had ever met question her right to have more than three ideas about immigration?

Since then, countless paragraph and essay “formulas” have cropped up in my students’ work every year. In fact, the academic world teems with tricks for organizing expository paragraphs and essays, most of them conveniently packaged in the form of an easy-to-remember acronym such as TEETH (topic, example, explanation, tie to thesis, hook to the next paragraph) or TISAS (pronounced “T-sauce”—topic sentence, introduction to supporting evidence, supporting evidence, analysis, summary, transition sentence). There’s also the Jane Schaffer formula, which involves attaching two pieces of brief commentary to a concrete detail to produce a 2:1 ratio of opinions to facts, a generic recipe that reads like the literary equivalent of Bisquick. It’s a speedy and convenient “just add one or two quick thoughts and mix” approach that leaves you wondering how much better the piece could have been if the author had put in the time and effort to create the real thing.

Systems like these encourage students to produce shallow, fast-food versions of paragraphs that don’t allow much elbow room for creativity or critical thinking, yet lend themselves to speed grading by a standardized test scorer or an overworked instructor only 50 essays into a stack of 160 on a Sunday night.

I didn’t learn to write using an acronym and, perhaps for this reason, I avoided teaching formulaic writing for most of my career. Of course, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t teach essay and paragraph structure. My teachers had shown me that each paragraph of a narrative, expository, or persuasive essay exists to do a job: to provide evidence or commentary, to support a thesis, to help a reader see, hear, feel, and understand the writer’s message. Like my teachers, I gave students graphic organizers to gather their thoughts and evidence before they crafted thesis statements to provide a focus for their writing. I taught skill lessons to help them craft paragraphs that fit together to build their argument in a smooth and cohesive way.

Before they would begin writing, my students spent countless hours mining texts to “raise the bones,” as my current mentor, Linda Christensen, likes to say. Students examined articles, stories, and academic essays to figure out how they were organized, and what kinds of skills professional and excellent student writers brought to their craft. Together, students read, color-coded, and put together their own criteria for their essays, based on this examination of authentic models. As they wrote, I peppered class time with more lessons on skills that they could immediately apply to their writing. My students spent as much time discussing and sharing their writing as they did drafting their pieces; I spent as much time as I could meeting one-on-one with students for writing conferences.

The Specter of High-Stakes Writing Test

Those times didn’t last. A few years ago, I went to a conference partly funded by the Broad Foundation in Washington, D.C., where I attended a session on the Smarter Balanced Assessments (SBAC) that we would soon be using to assess students’ progress toward the Common Core standards. The tests were still in development but already seemed bewilderingly difficult, especially the writing test. Students would be expected to examine various texts on a preselected topic and then write an analytical essay that took a position and supported it using evidence from the models. The writing task was not unlike those my students were already used to; however, in order to graduate, students had to complete the essays with no help or scaffolding from the teacher.

At the diverse, high-poverty high school where I teach, we were worried. Many of our students arrived in 9th grade with minimal literacy skills. We had kids coping with poverty, parental job loss, successive moves, and fractured families, as well as kids who grew up in refugee camps in Kenya or Tanzania and came to us with no formal education or literacy in any of the languages they spoke. Nevertheless, they were hardworking students who, in the hands of a talented and inspired staff, made impressive progress by the time they graduated.

Like most high school staff members across the state, we expected the majority of our students to fail the SBAC. We knew that student scores would be reported to a public that was being increasingly turned against the public education system, teacher unions, and teachers themselves by conservative political voices in the media. Each one of us was aware that our students’ scores on an assessment developed by a private for-profit business were going to be reflected in our evaluations and perhaps our salaries. There was pressure on everyone to come up with a fix, to find a shared method that would get our students through the mad scramble that had become the path to graduation for all students across the state.

We Invent Our Own Acronym Formula

It wasn’t surprising when teachers at my school proposed developing shared language for writing analytical paragraphs that we could use across grade levels and content areas. It sounded like a great idea to me. Little by little, the shared language morphed into an acronym

Jane Schaffer Writing Format