"California State Universities Expository Reading and Writing Course Assignment Template" Response

            The document for study this week was the California State Universities Expository Reading and Writing Course Assignment Template. This assignment is meant for teachers who are trying to get their students to read a write critically within the Common Core State Standards. This document started off with an analysis of who students should read critically. Second the document contained the outline for the teachers to connect the reading of their students to the writing that they can do with it. Lastly the document explained how to achieve critical writing with students based on the critical reading skills outlined in the beginning of the document.

            I really enjoyed how in depth the document goes into how students should read critically. The steps outlined in the template are many reading and writing strategies that I, or other students, are already using while reading. One such reading and writing strategy that I use while writing would be to read the section headers as well as the bolded print and pay special attention to the main idea contained within that section. After reading a section I will summarize the main idea in my own words. In this way I begin to understand what the document I am reading is about.

There were many other ways that students can read and write critically that are presented in this text that I had not heard of before. One such example would be analyzing the entire structure of the document. In the template the example of analyzing the structure was that students should underline where they thought the introduction ended and where they think each body paragraph is. In this way students are able to find an overall structure to the text and are thus able to understand what the author is trying to say. I found this way of reading critically to be very engaging and would be a great starting point for students who have never navigated their way around an informative text before.