One Rubric, Thirty-Two Writers

Hold constant: the four criteria, the prompt, the audience, the deadline, and the requirement that every student make and support a claim. If I swap the task for a worksheet for the seven students who can't write a thesis, I can no longer claim the rubric measured the same standard, and those students get six weeks of practice in something other than what's assessed.

Differentiate: the entry point and the amount of structure in the process.

• The seven without a thesis: claim frames with slots ('___ should ___ because ___, ___, and ___') plus a bank of four arguable and four non-arguable statements to sort before writing. Speech-to-text students draft orally first - their bottleneck is transcription, not argument, and the pre-assessment confirms they have ideas.
• The four ELLs: their gap is rhetorical, not linguistic. Pair them with the claim-frame work, not with vocabulary worksheets. This is the error I'd most likely make under time pressure - the WIDA level invites a language intervention when the data shows a genre intervention.
• The six missing counterargument: a two-paragraph side assignment - steelman the opposing view, then answer it.
• The four exceeding: independent, with the added constraint of addressing the strongest counterargument and citing two sources.

That is three process paths converging on one product.

Nominal differentiation is what happens when the teacher hands out three versions and then only supports one group. With 90 minutes and two adults, I'd use a station rotation with a hard schedule:

1. Whole group (15 min): model the claim frame once, aloud, with a weak and strong example. Everyone sees the frame, even the four who won't use it - they need to recognize a claim when they evaluate one.
2. Station A - teacher-led with co-teacher (30 min): the seven thesis students, six at a time, drafting claims orally against the frame. Two adults means two small conferences, not a lecture.
3. Station B - Chromebooks (30 min): drafting. Rotate carts by half-class; the other half drafts on paper. No student is blocked by hardware.
4. Station C - independent (30 min): counterargument work for the six, source evaluation for the four, drafting for the eleven.

I'd write the station assignments on the board with names, not on cards. Public placement on a skill station, framed as 'today's job,' avoids the quiet shame of the colored folder, and it lets me move a student out of a station on Thursday without explanation.

Build in 10 minutes of buffer - rotations always run long.

Attendance is the enemy of inference here. Two blocks a week means roughly six contact days remain; if I only look at the summative, I can't separate my instruction from a student who missed Tuesday.

So I'd build three cheap checkpoints:

• Exit slips on claim quality, scored 0-2 with a single rubric line, collected every block. Looking for movement in the seven, not for mastery.
• A one-line conference log for each student in a scaffolded path, recording what they did independently versus with support. If by day five the seven still need the frame in front of them to produce a claim, that's information about my scaffold, not their ability - the frame may have become a crutch rather than a bridge.
• A blind rescore of the two strongest and two weakest summatives by the co-teacher against the rubric. My own scores will drift toward what I hoped to see.

The specific signal I'd watch: whether the four ELLs' essays show a claim and a reason, even in simple sentences. If they produce elaborate sentences with no argument structure, the intervention targeted the wrong thing and I'd change it mid-unit rather than report it at the end.