Using the TSMs
The TSMs on the Writing Hub use texts from the Ministry of Education’s instructional series to support students’ writing and learning at curriculum levels 2, 3, and 4.
They provide practical and detailed guidance on how to develop your students’ ability to use writing as a tool for their learning in all curriculum areas.
Writing in science, level 3: Interdependence
This set of TSMs shows how you could use two texts with themes relating to the concept of interdependence to support your students’ curriculum learning and develop their writing skills. The texts are:
- “The Man in the Outside Office”, Connected 2 2010
- “Puketī Robins”, School Journal, Part 2 Number 1, 2011
- 1. Lists texts with related themes.
- 2. Analyses the features and structures of the texts in detail.
- 3. Gives a range of practical strategies to help your students transfer their new knowledge about the features and structures of texts to their own writing.
- 4. Identifies the writing demands of the three learning processes of building knowledge, investigating, and developing understanding.
- 5. Includes a series of prompts to help you plan ways to support your students to meet these demands.
- 6. For each learning process, suggests writing tasks relating to the big ideas of the curriculum.
- 7. Gives examples of student responses, reflecting each student’s learning and ability to meet the demands of the curriculum.
- 8. Includes examples of the deliberate acts of teaching – directing, modelling, telling, prompting, explaining, questioning, and giving feedback – that will help you to support your students’ curriculum learning and to develop their ability and skills in writing.
I liked the idea of different ways to approach the writing task – [such as] using writing to show their critical thinking [or] identifying and writing about bias. Really great for my kids. I could pick this up and run with it tomorrow.
Quite often we are told to “do things”. This [material] is showing us – not just telling us what to do.
Great student responses – they heighten my expectations for my kids and give me an exemplar of this sort of writing.
This resource provides a helpful focus on writing to meet curriculum demands.
Teachers involved in the review of the draft TSM
Guiding questions He pātai
- How do the three aspects of planning influence how I design my learning tasks? How might the Writing Hub support me in this?
- How do I currently identify the writing demands within learning tasks? How might the Writing Hub support me in this?
- How can I use resources from the Writing Hub to identify whether my students are meeting the writing demands of the curriculum at the expected level and to plan writing tasks that will improve their progress?
- How can we as a school use the resources on the Writing Hub to help our students achieve the expected level for writing at curriculum level 4 by the end of year 8?