Ch. 10: Make Assessment Count
In this chapter I learned that assessment should improve the quality of students’ writing, but unfortunately in most cases it doesn’t. Standardized tests hold students, teachers, and schools accountable, but they also do not improve instruction and learning. As teachers our forms of assessment should be helpful to students and should lead us to instructional decisions to improve student learning. I have been using a six trait rubric to assess my students’ writing. I usually only use the six trait rubric for formal assignments that students spend a lot of time completing. I think this is okay, yet Regie mentions in her book that rubrics like the one I use an also turn programs into isolated trait-teaching programs. I must admit that the program I use involves teaching mini-lessons about the traits in isolation over a period of several weeks and the rubric I use measures how the students are performing with the traits.
Next year I’d like to make more child-friendly rubrics like the examples Regie has in her book. I think this will be more beneficial to my students because the language will be easier for them to understand and the expectations will be clearer. I think that child-friendly rubrics are also more parent-friendly as well because they take away the school and writing lingo and put it into plain words and language that’s easy to understand. I teach third grade, so the child-friendly rubric on p. 241 is a perfect example for me to base my new rubric off of. I think that having the kids help you develop a rubric is a great idea too because they can tell you what they think makes good writing and should be expected as you can also state your own expectations.
There are many different types of rubrics that can be used- content, evaluation, holistic, analytic, formal/informal, and state/district/school/class. Most of the rubrics I use are evaluation and analytical rubrics. The same rubrics are used by the other third grade teachers as well. I think that we could use these rubrics to drive our instruction, but we don’t. We score our students’ papers with the rubric, but we should take more time to analyze the scores and look at our students’ papers to determine what needs to be taught in the next mini-lesson, etc. I feel like we are scoring students, but we’re not really scoring our own teaching at the same time. We need to look for trends where students are strong or weak in certain areas and improve instruction for the areas that students need help with.
I like Regie’s idea of not having to score all of the students’ writing. Sometimes I feel like I have to score most of my students’ writing so I can have enough grades in the grade book, but I’ve learned that grading everything can be stressful for students and stifle their freedom and creativity through writing. Grading all of the writing done in class also takes a lot of time on my part, so knowing that all of it does not have to be graded is kind of a relief. I’ve learned that students need to have plenty of practice before being critiqued. They also need more than just a score when they are critiqued- they need to have feedback.
Regie Routman claims that excellent teaching is the best test prep you can give to your students. It’s funny because you don’t hear that very often. I feel like I’m supposed to teach the traits and teach testing strategies to prepare students for the writing assessment, but Regie says that doing so can take the fun out of writing. Overemphasizing the big test can be stressful for students and teachers. Traits and strategies should still be taught, but they should be taught through content rather than in an isolated way. I think I need to change my mindset and start teaching with more shared demonstrations and whole-to-part-to-whole instruction. I also need to focus more on making writing joyful for students so testing does not become so much of a stressor. One thing that was mentioned in the book is that students who are taught to the test often feel “done” with writing once the test is over. I completely see this in our school once our Kansas assessments are over. The kids seem to think that because the “big test” is over that school is over too. It’s hard to get their attention and focus after that, but Regie makes it sound like if you do not overemphasize the test and you teach writing in a fun way that focuses on students’ messages, the “after test” attitudes may not be so bad.
I really like how Regie mentions talking to students about the audience/reader when they have to write and answer prompts for a test. She gives an example of how she actually told her students the “name” of a scorer in the past and told them she would be bored and underpaid, looking for excitement in their writing to wake her up. I think if you can get your students to picture someone in their head reading the message they are writing, you can probably build their motivation. Without allowing them to visualize the reader/audience, they just see their writing being sent away and then returned later without a purpose.
When I have quiet writing time or “sustained writing” in my classroom I feel like some of my students just sit there or get off-task and start talking to their neighbors instead of writing. Regie claims that students should be able to write a whole page in 20-30 minutes. I really need to get into gear! I can say that a few of my students last year would’ve been able to accomplish that task, but a lot of them could not, or did not. I don’t know if they really couldn’t or if I just wasn’t firm enough on my expectations. I think that I need to improve my classroom management and be more explicit about my expectations. Letting my students know what is expected from the beginning and holding strong to those expectations will hopefully keep them writing longer which will build fluency.
Regie recommends assessing student writing every day. This does not have to be done with one-on-one conferences all the time. It can also be done through roving conferences, student shares, and observations of students using anecdotal notes. I do most of my assessments with roving conferences and with the use of rubrics. I’d like to do what Regie recommends though and start preparing students to do more self assessment. I need to do this by modeling how I assess my own writing, charting what good writers do, teaching rereading for revision, and evaluating writing samples with my students. Independent writers know what good writing looks like and they know how to reread and assess their own work. A goal for teachers should be to help their students get to a point where they can write and self-assess independently.
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