Use Rafts for Meaningful Writing Assignments
Using a RAFTS (Role, Audience, Format, Topic, and Strong Verb) model is a high yield instructional strategy that content area teachers can use to produce meaningful writing assignments. Since writing assignments provide an opportunity for students to reveal their thinking process, it is essential that teachers provide their students with a context for those writing assignments. A strong context provides a series of guidelines that students can follow, and those same guidelines can be used to construct a rubric which teachers can use to evaluate the writing.
Teachers can easily construct an assignment using the RAFTS components
The STRONG VERB is a verb from Bloom’s Taxonomy which identifies the TYPE of PERFOMANCE from the writer
With these 4 elements in place, assignment can be stated in a narrative (sentence) form.
Ex. 1: Assignment: 10th grade English students will write a persuasive editorial.
You are a member of the Westgate High School newspaper editorial staff (R). Write a Persuasive Editorial (F) for the student newspaper (A) where you address a current Westgate HS policy that needs to be changed (T)
Ex. 2 Assignment: 9th grade Earth Science students will write up their observations using the scientific method.
You are a botanist (R) who has grown plants under different conditions. Record (S) your observations (T) for your fellow botanists (A) as a lab write up using the scientific method (F).