CER Decision-Making Guide: Teaching Claims, Evidence, and Reasoning with Intention

Teaching Claims, Evidence, and Reasoning with Intention

Teach CER as a thinking process — not a formula.

This guide is designed for teachers who want students to move beyond template writing and toward meaningful reasoning.

The CER Decision-Making Guide helps you determine when CER is the right instructional tool, how to diagnose student writing needs, and how to support students in developing clear claims, purposeful evidence, and strong reasoning — without over-relying on sentence starters or rigid structures.

This is a teacher-facing framework grounded in classroom practice and aligned to grades 6–10 writing standards.

Who This Is For

• Middle and high school ELA teachers
• Instructional coaches
• Curriculum designers
• Private school educators and teacher educators

Especially helpful if you’re seeing:

• Formulaic CER responses
• Shallow reasoning
• Overdependence on scaffolds
• Difficulty moving students toward independence

What’s Inside

✔ A clear explanation of CER as a thinking process
✔ A decision framework for when (and when not) to use CER
✔ Alternative writing tools for different instructional purposes
✔ A diagnostic guide for identifying student writing needs
✔ A scaffold-to-independence progression
✔ Conferencing questions that support reasoning
✔ Common CER pitfalls and how to avoid them
✔ Two teacher rubrics (quick evaluation + conferencing)
✔ Fictional student examples showing formulaic vs independent responses

Why This Guide Is Different

Most CER resources focus on structure.

This guide focuses on instructional decisions.

Instead of telling students what to write, it helps teachers decide:

• what students need
• which supports matter
• how to fade scaffolds
• how to teach reasoning intentionally

The goal is not perfect CER paragraphs.

The goal is independent thinkers.

Format

Digital PDF
Teacher-facing
Grades 6–10