Extending Thinking with RAFT Writing
Bill Blynt
Jan 31, 2011
As state assessments continue to increase the number of ExtendingThinking questions, you also need to increase the opportunities you provide your students with to develop Extending Thinking strategies. In addition, states are placing increased emphasis on the need for students to become better writers. Content teachers are consistently asked to have their students do more writing in their class. Writing can be a vehicle to address both of these responsibilities.
Writing is an effective way to help students synthesize their understanding; however, students tend to view writing as a labor intensive chore with little benefit to them. As a result, their writing is often of poor quality. This lack of a quality end-product is frustrating and defeats the purpose of using writing as a learning tool.
One way to provide students with Extending Thinking experiences and promote writing for learning is to use the RAFT strategy. A RAFT (Santa, 1988; Santa, Havens and Valdes, 2004) activity infuses a writing assignment with imagination, creativity and motivation. The strategy involves writing from a viewpoint other than that of a student, to an audience other than the teacher, and in the form other than a standard assignment or in response to a question prompt. Therefore, students are encouraged to use creative thinking and learning strategies as they connect their imagination to newly learned information.
RAFT is an acronym for:
- R= Role - Who are you? What role will you assume? Painter, Refrigerator, Army Tank
- A= Audience - Who will read your work? Parent, Moon, President of US
- F= Format - What type of writing will you do? Letter, Postcard, Obituary
- T= Topic - What will you be writing about? Poverty in Your Community, Bullying= Topic - What will you be writing about? Poverty in Your Community, Bullying
The purpose of RAFTs is to give students a fresh way to think about approaching their writing. It requires a different type of writing that falls somewhere between standard essays and free-for-all creative writing. RAFTs require students to extend their thinking and utilize effective strategies while they develop their response. They require students to think about content from a different perspective. Provide multiple options to the students when developing RAFT assignments. Introducing choice into the assignment will serve as a motivator or can facilitate differentiation within the assignment. RAFT tasks should be graded using a pre-developed rubric.
Some possible RAFTs are:
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Buehl,D. (2001). Classroom strategies for interactive learning. Newark, DE: International Reading Association. |
Additional Examples can be found at:
http://curry.virginia.edu/files/rafts.pdf,
