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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Any thoughts on how/why the writing instruction, and quality of instruction in general, is so good?

For example:
Is it certain specific assignments they are given? (Which ones/which kinds?) 
The curriculum as a whole?
Do magnet teachers have a lower courseload and more time/ability to give detailed feedback on writing?
Are the teachers themselves just amazing?
Is it about the cohort/motivation and capacity of the students?
Something else about the program?

(I mean, I am sure that to some extent it is a combination of all of those things!  But for parents who want to lobby MCPS for more kids to have access to this quality of education, what should we be asking for?  Would replicating the curriculum (or key aspects of it) at home schools work, with cohorted classes?  How about opening other similar magnets?  Or is a lot of it just the specific teachers, or other factors that are really hard to replicate?)[/quote]

MCPS doesn’t really have a writing curriculum, IMO.  At most, in HS, kids are taught to write a 5 paragraph essay, but there is never any feedback beyond numbers on a rubric, so kids really have no idea why they got a score or how to improve.  Peer feedback is a joke at a typical MCPS school.

At EMS magnet, there’s a lot of writing for different purposes - video scripts, website texts, plays, etc.  One year (7th?), the English teachers do IDRP - interdisciplinary research paper - which is a 10+ page paper on a topic of the student’s choosing.  The teachers explicitly teach the whole paper writing topic from start to finish - idea generation, shaping a thesis, research planning, going to McKeldin library at UMD to do start the research, note-taking on cards- organizing your cards and outlining, rough draft, editing, and citations. Kids get extensive feedback from peers and teachers at every step along the way. The project takes the whole year. TBH, it gave my kid the critical skills to be successful all the way through HS, college and grad school.

This kind of research paper writing is not taught at any MCPS MS. It is not comparable to AP Lang or Lit writing in HS.  Kids who take full IB in HS do a 4000 word paper called the “extended essay”, which is sort of similar, except in addition to the essay they spend a lot of time writing about the process, which IMO is a little BS, but YMMV.

I will say, in addition to the writing process, kids at EMS spend a lot of time reading and discussing literature, and discussions are at a much higher level than DC ever experienced.

There is something unique about such a uniformly bright peer group that is exciting and motivating.  DC is 10+ years out and still runs into old EMS magnet peers all over the world doing amazing stuff.

In some ways, I do not think replicating the curriculum at homeschools would work well. IME, the quality of English teaching is weak.  The number of truly bright kids in a homeschool area is not big enough - you have maybe 15, and because they are the minority, socially they still mask any intellectual capacity because it’s uncool to be interested in school.  I also don’t think teachers in the homeschool have the training to reliably ID bright kids, and so a lot of bright kids of color or in poverty or with disabilities are left out. One of the true benefits of EMS magnet was that it was very diverse.

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