My “Article of the Week” rubric for middle and high school

Plus rubrics you can tweak  to fit your classroom

Last February, I wrote this post about what I consider to be my most effective writing assignment: Kelly Gallagher’s Article of the Week (AOW).

I still use this assignment on a weekly basis, but I’ve added narrative writing to the mix by assigning what I call Essays of the Week (EOWs) every other week. These narrative assignments use prompts provided by The New York Times Learning Network. I select a grouping of prompts from the list and let students choose one to respond to.

Here are some photos of the rubric portions of my AOWs and EOWs. 

To purchase an editable Microsoft Word document that contains these five rubrics, visit this page of my site shop.

I usually assign a new AOW or EOW on the first day of the week with a hard copy due one week later. AOWs usually take a little more time to go over. For example, after a bell-ringer activity and a mini-lesson that addresses a specific skill required in the rubric (such as using semicolons), these take the better part of the class period when we complete these steps:

• introducing the assignment
• going over the rubric and its specific requirements
• discussing the writing prompt
• reading the article aloud
• watching any related video on the news story

EOWs don’t take as much class time, since there’s no article to read. We might go through each prompt choice, however, and do some discussion to help students come up with writing ideas.

Let me know how these rubrics work for you.

My adaptation of Kelly Gallagher’s AOW is a mainstay in my teaching. The AOWs build nonfiction reading skills, improve writing stamina, and increase students’ prior knowledge of the world around them. My EOW simply adds variety to our routine while giving them opportunities to write narratives.

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Thanks for reading again this week! I appreciate any and all comments. In fact, this post was created in response to a comment posted just last week about this article.