Identifying and Using Effective Evidence

 Last Thursday, for the fourth time this fall, our group of teachers of writers met to talk about how to help students use evidence.  We started the meeting by informally sharing what we are learning about.  Topics such as gardening, baking, sports, family, personal health and more were subjects that we are all learning more about.  We considered these topics as we responded to the following Write Into the Day prompt: “Make a claim about your chosen topic.  Support your topic with evidence.”  To support our use of evidence, Nic provided us with a list of verbs and sentence starters. 

      The list of verbs and sentence starters was adapted from the work of Joseph Harris.  According to Harris, writers can use different strategies to support their claims.  Writers might use the phrase “an example of this is” or “this demonstrates” to illustrate a point.  Similarly,  a writer might use the phrases “according to” or “data makes clear” to generate support from an authority on their topic.  Sometimes it is helpful to extend supporting ideas by using phrases such as “a logical extension is” or “to take it a step further.”  Finally, sometimes it is helpful to address the opposing perspective, but use it to benefit your claim.  This could be done by using phrases such as “it is not sufficient to say” or “although he/she makes a good point.” The complete list of verbs and phrases can be found here.

      During our discussion part of the gathering, we broke into two different meeting groups, roughly an elementary group and a secondary group.  In these groups we dug deeper into our essential question, “How can we help students identify effective evidence and use it to support their claims?”  These conversations are the heart of our TWIG sessions.  As teachers we shared that this list of verbs and phrases helped to organize our thoughts and ideas.  Verbs from different categories changed the tone and direction of our arguments.  Personally, I appreciated the image of scientists needing to use evidence to demonstrate that a method or product is effective.  The bar for scientific evidence is very high and very clear.  As a teacher, I believe I can use this imagery to direct students to use effective evidence to support their claims.

      As our time came to a close this week, Nic provided us with a document that included the verbs we used earlier and organized those verbs into moves writers make when supporting a claim.  This one-page document lines out the names and purpose of each move.  Nic also created a worksheet that includes student examples of these moves.  These resources are valuable to all writers, regardless of age.  I encourage you to open the links to these resources and offer a few of these moves to your students.