Teach students to ACE their responses with this collection of mini-lessons that guides them to utilize their own knowledge to construct clear, cohesive comments. ACE is an acronym for “Answer the question, Cite evidence, and Elaborate.” At the heart of ACE are eight elaboration strategies that stimulate deeper critical thinking. Each mini-lesson provides explicit instruction, scaffolds and sentence starters, plus reproducible activity sheets to help students master short-response writing.