RAFT Papers are simply a way to think about the four main things that all writers have to consider:
· Role of the Writer
Who are you as the writer? A warrior? A homeless person? An auto mechanic? The endangered snail darter?
· Audience
To whom are you writing? Is your audience the American people? A friend? Your teacher? Readers of a newspaper? A local bank?
· Format
What form will the writing take? Is it a letter? A classified ad? A speech? A poem?
· Topic
What's the subject or the point of this piece? Is it to persuade a goddess to spare your life? To plead for a re-test? To call for stricter regulations on logging?

RAFT Papers give students a fresh way to think about approaching their writing. They occupy a nice middle ground between standard, dry essays and free-for-all creative writing. RAFT papers combine the best of both.
They also can be the way to bring together students' understanding of main ideas, organisation, elaboration, and coherence...in other words, the criteria by which compositions are most commonly judged.

What Is Reciprocal Teaching?
The creation of Palinscar and Brown, Reciprocal Teaching is in some ways a compilation of four comprehension strategies:
· summarising
· questioning
· clarifying
· predicting
Please understand that some think the choice of "reciprocal" in the name of this strategy is slightly misleading. It conjures up the image of a student in front of the class, or of students taking turns telling each other important ideas in the text. Instead, the strategy is best at seeking to promote comprehension by tackling the ideas in a text on several fronts.

How Does It Work?
The order in which the four stages occur is not crucial; you'll want to try out different versions of the strategy to see if a particular protocol suits your teaching style, and your students' learning styles, better. You will also want to choose text selections carefully to be certain that they lend themselves to all four stages of reciprocal teaching.
How Might I Implement Reciprocal Teaching in my Classroom?
Before you can expect reciprocal teaching to be used successfully by your students, they need to have been taught and had time to practice the four strategies that are used in reciprocal teaching.
1. Put students in groups of four.
2. Distribute one notecard to each member of the group identifying each person's unique role.
a. summariser
b. questioner
c. clarifier
d. predictor
3. Have students read a few paragraphs of the assigned text selection. Encourage them to use note-taking strategies such as selective underlining or sticky-notes to help them better prepare for their role in the discussion.

4. At the given stopping point, the Summariser will highlight the key ideas up to this point in the reading.
5. The Questioner will then pose questions about the selection:
· unclear parts
· puzzling information
· connections to other concepts already learned
· motivations of the agents or actors or characters
· etc.
6. The Clarifier will address confusing parts and attempt to answer the questions that were just posed.
7. The Predictor can offer guesses about what the author will tell the group next or, if it's a literary selection, the predictor might suggest what the next events in the story will be.
8. The roles in the group then switch one person to the right, and the next selection is read. Students repeat the process using their new roles. This continues until the entire selection is read.

What Is Selective Underlining?
Well, there's underlining, and there's underlining selectively. The way to make underlining useful as a tool for comprehension is for it to be strategic, selective, and purposeful. The underlining must be undertaken toward particular ends.
With selective underlining (and highlighting!), the idea is to underline ONLY the key words, phrases, vocabulary, and ideas that are central to understanding the piece. Students should be taught this strategy explicitly, given time and means to practice, and reinforced for successful performance.

How Can I Teach My Students to Selectively Underline?
1. First of all, let's realise that not every single bit of text you have students read is in a textbook and untouchable.
2. Second, consider seeking out appropriate content sources, such as newspapers, that students can indeed learn this strategy with while still pursuing meaningful social studies goals.
3. Third, think about how you can get around the problem of textbooks that can't be marked in. For instance, in order to teach the strategy, you might photocopy a page or two out of the text that students use and distribute it to them. Make an overhead of that selection for yourself. Model for them and guide them in practising the strategy on the photocopies. Alternatively, if you have enough of the materials available to you, give each student a sheet of transparency film, some paperclips, and some overhead pens. Let them practice directly on their texts by using the transparencies.

Think about how this strategy would work when combined with power thinking. Students might put a box around Power 1 ideas; an oval around Power 2 ideas; and an underline under Power 3 ideas.
Students might also use different colours in their underlining. Power 1s could be blue, Power 2s could be red, and Power 3s could be green.
Practice selective underlining for different purposes: underline key vocabulary and its definitions or explanations, and use this as an opportunity to focus on how authors reveal the meaning of new terms within the context. Or have students underline cause and effect. Or ask them to underline the facts and concepts that support a particular viewpoint, as might be useful with a strategy such as Opinion-Proof . Remember, you're limited only by your own imagination with teaching and applying selective underlining.

What Is It?
With a Semantic Feature Analysis chart or grid, one can examine related concepts but make distinctions between them according to particular criteria across which the concepts can be compared.

How Does It Work?
A set of concepts is listed down the left side (or across the top; it doesn't much matter which) and criteria or features are listed across the top (or down the side). If the concept is associated with the feature or characteristic, the student records a Y or a + (plus-sign) in the grid where that column and row intersect; if the feature is not associated with the concept, an N or - (minus-sign) is placed in the corresponding square on the grid. For instance, consider types of government: democracy, dictatorship, monarchy, oligarchy, theocracy, and republic. What might be the characteristics of governments that might be associated with various types?

How Can I Teach My Students to Summarise?
Please be warned: teaching summarising is no small undertaking. It's one of the hardest strategies for students to grasp, and one of the hardest strategies for you to teach. You have to repeatedly model it and give your students ample time and opportunities to practice it. But it is such a valuable strategy and competency. Can you imagine your students succeeding in school without being able to break down content into manageable small succinct pieces? We ask students to summarise all the time, but we're terrible about teaching them good ways to do this!

Here are a few ideas; try one...try them all. But keep plugging away at summarising. This strategy is truly about equipping your students to be lifelong learners.
· After students have used selective underlining on a selection, have them turn the sheet over or close the handout packet and attempt to create a summary paragraph of what they can remember of the key ideas in the piece. They should only look back at their underlining when they reach a point of being stumped. They can go back and forth between writing the summary and checking their underlining several times until they have captured the important ideas in the article in the single paragraph.
· Have students write successively shorter summaries, constantly refining and reducing their written piece until only the most essential and relevant information remains. They can start off with half a page; then try to get it down to two paragraphs; then one paragraph; then two or three sentences; and ultimately a single sentence.

· Teach students to go with the newspaper mantra: have them use the key words or phrases to identify only Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How.
· Take articles from the newspaper, and cut off their headlines. Have students practice writing headlines for (or matching the severed headlines to) the "headless" stories.
· Sum It Up: You have students imagine they are placing a classified ad or sending a telegram, where every word used costs them money. Tell them each word costs 10 pence, and then tell them they can spend "so much." For instance, if you say they have £2.00 to spend, then that means they have to write a summary that has no more than 20 words. You can adjust the amount they have to spend, and therefore the length of the summary, according to the text they are summarising. Consider setting this up as a learning station, with articles in a folder that they can practice on whenever they finish their work early or have time when other students are still working.