Teaching Students to Analyze Evidence (at last!)

Does the following story sound familiar to you?
For years, the Social Studies teacher and I banged our heads against a wall with getting our students to fully explain their answers, support their ideas with evidence, and then explain and/or analyze that evidence. We used witty acronyms, taught it consistently across the curriculum, modeled examples... and yet, students still under-performed.


My solution...
So this year, I decided to make a keepsake/reference tool that our eighth grade students could use all year long (in all content area classes) and even take with them to high school.

And voila - the analysis booklets were born.

The first (black) booklet is a crash course on what analysis IS and what it LOOKS like in different genres (like on tests, essays, and science lab reports/technical writing). The second (gray) booklet breaks down the 5-step process of fully leading into, stating, analyzing, and transitioning out of a direct quote or fact.

After initial instruction, my 8th graders used them to write timed, "open-booklet" literary analysis essays... and, for the first time in five years, a majority of the class could fully embed and analyze direct quotes that logically supported the topic sentences in body paragraphs.

(...Imagine my kind-of-freaking-out face inserted here...?!)

These worked so well that I just HAD to post them to TpT... My philosophy is, if it works, then other teachers and students could probably use it too, right?

... Enter my friend Nouvelle, another secondary ELA teacher, who bought the booklets and decided to use them in her classroom, too. She made this awesome video to show her kids how to put the booklet together (which we agreed only takes about 20 minutes of total assembly on average), and she gave me permission to share the video with you!

She's getting awesome results from her students, and to date, about 20 other teachers seem to feel the same way.

Also, in response to a teacher's request, I made an interactive notebook anchor page (so that students can "frame" and keep their booklets safe in their notebooks forever!)...

  

...and a zoomed-in sample page/poster, ready to print, photocopy, 

put under a doc camera, or blow up into poster size... 

I'm really excited to see how these booklets continue to help my students over time, and I hope they make a visible difference in your students' writing, too!

Let me know what you think! ;-)