Using Our Student Editorial Writing Contest While Teaching Remotely | Webinar

Each year, The Learning Network’s Editorial Contest provides students a platform to write short, evidence-based persuasive essays like the editorials The New York Times publishes every day. Over 10,000 students participate annually.

This year, in recognition of the upheaval caused by the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve extended our deadline by three weeks, to April 21, 2020. This webinar has also been updated to make it more relevant to those teaching and learning from home.

We hope our contest can give your students a chance to think deeply about the issues that matter to them most, and invite them to write in their authentic voices for a real audience. Even if they are not participating in the contest, however, the resources we’ll show you can be woven into any writing curriculum to help students practice the skills of making claims and backing them with reliable evidence and compelling reasoning.

In this 50-minute on-demand webinar, Learning Network editors are joined by Kabby Hong, a guest teacher from Verona, Wisconsin whose students participate in this contest annually. Together we will…
- Suggest ways to help your students construct an effective argument by first identifying and exploring issues they genuinely care about
- Show you how to find and use engaging writing prompts that can offer your students daily “low-stakes” practice in argumentative writing
- Explain how students might mine teen-written mentor texts, specifically those written by past contest winners, to identify specific “writer’s moves” they can use in their own writing
- Walk you through our contest and all the related resources that support it
- Leave you with ideas your students can use on their own at home, starting right away.

[JBudrys]

argument writing matters because it helps develop opinions.