RAFT

As I sit here procrastinating the “real” work that needs to be done tonight (LESSON PLANS!), I’ve decided to share another differentiation strategy from Anne Beninghof’s Engaging ALL Students workshop I recently attended.  I actually remember learning about this strategy long ago, but it was something I wasn’t sure how to use at the time.  Since I never used it in my classroom, I forgot it existed.  I seem to forget things a lot more lately.  Stress?  Age?  Multi-tasking failure?  Who knows…? Thank God for technology, though, because now I have a place to store all these ideas! J

RAFT is a writing activity that promotes higher order thinking and gives students a fresh way to think about how to approach writing.  I think this would be a great summarizing activity at the end of a lesson or unit, as the students need to have the concepts mastered to be able to do this independently.  This strategy brings together students’ understanding of main ideas, organization, elaboration, and coherence. 

Here’s how it’s broken down:

Role - Who are you as the writer?

Audience - To whom are you writing?

Format - What are you writing?

Topic - What is the subject or point of the writing?

The topic should be considered first and should come from the objective(s) of your lesson.  For example, if students are learning about descriptive writing, the topic might be to “describe the importance of adjectives in descriptive writing.”  The writer could pretend to be a noun (role) writing a persuasive speech (format) for adjectives (audience), trying to get them to join the cause to improve their descriptive writing. 

Good evening, wonderful adjectives!  Tonight I want to ask for your help.  As you know, we common nouns have been included in many brilliant students’ descriptive writing as they tell about interesting places they’ve been and exciting activities they enjoy.  But we have noticed that there are only a few supportive adjectives joining the writing party.  I am here this glorious evening to ask for your much-needed help in making the beautiful stories these kids write more interesting.  We need help making a good impression when people read about us!  I don’t want to be considered “just a tree.”  So all you willing adjectives out there, Majestic, Willow, Green, and all the others, please come and support our important cause in helping the children become better writers!

Along those same lines, you could have students describe the importance of capitalization and punctuation in writing (topic).  The RAFT paper could be a text message (format) from a teenager (role) to a friend (audience), describing the effects of missing capitalization and punctuation.  (Can you tell we’ve been focusing on writing a lot lately in my class??? J )

So the charts would look something like this:

R Role	A Audience	F Format	T Topic
noun	adjectives	persuasive speech	Explain the importance of adjectives in descriptive writing.
teen	friend	text message	Describe the effects of missing capitalization and punctuation in writing.

Here are a few more examples from the participants at the workshop.  (I realize that some of these posters have misspellings and other errors.  It drives me crazy too!  Just think of these as rough drafts.)

I would suggest that in the beginning, you choose one RAFT assignment for your topic and model it for the whole group.  After several models and guided practice sessions, and as the students become more comfortable with the process, you can create a chart with several options and allow students to choose the one they are interested in.  The topic can be the same, but from different points of view.

If you have any input on this strategy, please share!  What grade level do you teach?  What topics did you use?  How successful was/is it in your classroom?