The Adolescent Writing course teaches teachers how to improve student writing through backward design, assessing writing while encouraging students, exploring different writing purposes and text structures, conducting mini grammar lessons, incorporating peer response and publishing written works. The course begins by studying cognitive rigor and the importance of writing, and concludes by emphasizing the value of student publishing.

1. The Adolescent Writing course teaches a lot about improving teaching. The course begins with a study of
the Cognitive Rigor Matrix which explains the different levels of thinking required for various assignments.
Then, the idea of why writing should be taught is explored. Backward design is also introduced. This is the
notion of knowing what students are to learn and be able to do after the lesson is given. The course teaches
how to effectively assess student writing while still encouraging them to write. After that, the different
purposes for writing are explored, including the importance of graphic organizers. The purposes are further
explored with a study of text structures, and how they relate to comprehension. Finally, the content moves
into the value of mini grammar lessons and how to teach students to effectively edit their papers. Peer
response is also critical to writing because students often enjoy the opinion of their classmates. To conclude,
the course focuses on the importance of publishing because it helps writers when they realize more than just
the teacher will be reading and responding to their writing. All of these ideas presented in the course are
beneficial to writing teachers.