When HOTR Meets CCLR

Dawn Schlick, Wisconsin Heights MS

During my SIM Professional Developer recertification, I shared a thought that has stayed with me: as education evolves, we should continue examining emerging trends and asking how HOTR routines might help us meet new instructional needs. In Wisconsin, one major focus is College, Career, and Life Readiness (CCLR), with an emphasis on durable skills such as collaboration, communication, critical thinking, self-direction, and problem-solving.

This year, our district launched a middle school Academic Lab course built around design sprints in which students collaborate to solve authentic, real-world problems. As I helped develop the curriculum, I began asking an important question: How do we help teachers bring durable skill instruction into academic classrooms in a way that feels meaningful and manageable?

As interest in this work spread across our 6–12 staff, that question became even more relevant. Teachers appreciated the engagement and real-world application of design sprint learning, but like many educators, they did not want it to feel like “one more thing.”

That is where the Question Exploration Routine (QER) came to mind.

Our staff is already trained in QER, and it has been an important part of our academic success. Because teachers already understand its thinking structure, I began adapting it for design sprint instruction. Rather than replacing the core structure, the adaptation reframes QER to support authentic problem-solving and durable skill development. Students still identify the problem, define key concepts, break the challenge into supporting questions, synthesize the main idea, and apply their learning. In many ways, the problem-based nature of Academic Lab aligns naturally with Step 5 of QER. The biggest shift is in the real-world application, where the final product must connect to a CCLR standard.

What has been especially encouraging is how naturally my sixth graders transition between the formal academic version of QER in Reading/Language Arts and this adapted version in Academic Lab—and at times, even back into ELA instruction. The thinking remains familiar, even as the application shifts.

Link to Lab Adaptation of QER
Link to CCLR version of the QER used in my Reading Class

This experience has made me wonder whether adapting familiar HOTR routines may offer schools a practical bridge between rigorous academic instruction and durable skill development. For SIM Professional Developers, that may be an important takeaway: when schools are asked to address emerging priorities, the most sustainable path may not be creating something entirely new, but helping educators see how strong existing instructional routines can evolve to meet new needs.

What's in a Paragraph

Jean Schumaker and Whitney Miller

“A paragraph has a beginning, middle, and end. What else is there to teach?”

This is a question Professional Developers sometimes hear when introducing paragraph-writing instruction. At first glance, writing a paragraph may seem simple. However, strong paragraphs depend on a collection of skills that students must learn and practice. Understanding these skills and how to teach them can help teachers move students beyond simply filling a page with sentences and toward writing that is clear, cohesive, and engaging. 

 Consistency Creates Clarity 

Verb tense. When a paragraph is written, the author needs to write all the sentences in the same verb tense, either past tense, present tense, or future tense. The focus here is on the verbs in the sentences. If the student is writing about something that happened in the past, all of the verbs need to be past tense verbs (e.g., painted, had, was). If the student is writing about something that is currently ongoing, all of the verbs need to be present tense verbs (e.g., paints, has, is). If the student is writing about something that will happen in the future, all of the verbs need to be future tense verbs (e.g., will paint, will have, will be). Students who have not learned the concept of consistent verbs will use a variety of verb tenses in their paragraphs and may jump back and forth between verb tenses without reason. This inconsistency creates confusion for the reader of the paragraph. There are surely exceptions to this rule of using a consistent verb tense across sentences , for example, when the writer is using the present tense in most sentences but has to refer to something that happened in the past to provide clarity. However, the writer has to be fairly skilled to make all the sentences flow together if different tenses are to be used. 

Point of View. Likewise, the author of a paragraph needs to write all the sentences from the same point of view, either in first-person, second-person, or third-person point of view. The focus here is on the subjects in the sentences. Sentences written in the first-person point of view utilize subjects such as “I” and “we.” Such sentences are usually recounting something that happened to the author of the paragraph (e.g., “I went to the store.”) or a group in which the author has membership (e.g., “We are planning a picnic.”). Sentences written in the second-person point of view are usually providing instructions or commands to the reader of the paragraph. The subjects of these sentences are “You” (e.g., “You should be careful!”) or the understood “you” (e.g., “Take care of yourself.”). Sentences written in the third-person point of view are focusing on others beside the author and the reader. The subjects of these sentences will be names (e.g., “Arturo,” “Hallie,” “the soccer team”), nouns (boy, friends) or pronouns like “He,” “She,” and “They.” Students who have not learned the concept of using consistent point of view across sentences in a paragraph will jump from one point of view to another, and that can also cause confusion for the reader. 

Often, the type of paragraph that is being written dictates what point of view (and tense) should be used. For example, if the student has been assigned to write a paragraph telling a story about something that happened to the student, the story should be written in the first-person point of view (using “I” or “We” as the subject of sentences) and in the past tense. If the student has been assigned to write an instructional paragraph about how someone should get ready for a party, the paragraph should be written in the second-person point of view (using “You” or the understood “you” for the subjects) and the future tense. 

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