Assessment of Writing

After reading this chapter I really feel like I am on the right track in terms of writing assessment. Right now I use a writing workshop that seems to incorporate many things that this chapter deemed as important in terms of writing.

First, the writing workshop I currently use is very student centered. Students are instructed about the genre of writing and work together to formulate numerous prompts that they can turn into a written piece. During our writing workshops students spend a lot of time in peer response groups and in teacher conferences. After a student has written a first draft they bring it to the initial peer response group. Before this response group the writer formulates questions about their piece. Before the writer reads the piece they read their questions to the group. In this way, the people who are responding know what to watch out for and what the writer is looking for. After the peer response group the writer goes back and continues to revise and edit their various drafts. After each draft the writer can approach the teacher for a conference about their piece. Finally, after the writer has sufficient drafts, they come for their final conference and it is during this conference that the writer and teacher use the LKSD 6 Trait Analytical Scoring Guide to score the piece. I make it a point NEVER to write on the students’ pieces and to never tell them what to write but to offer suggestions for improvement. Most importantly, before the student comes to a teacher conference they formulate questions about their piece and what they would like me to watch out for.

One thing I feel like is improving in our district is writing across the curriculum. One of the math specialists in our district is very, very supportive of the integration of writing into the math classroom. As I know plan my math lessons I try to think of ways in which I can have students write about what they are learning. I am currently teaching about various estimation strategies in my math class and I am planning on having the students complete poems that help us to understand more about the estimation strategies. I also try to have students write weekly learning logs on our Math Wiki, but unfortunately, I often forget to have them do this and I need to get in the habit of modeling how to do this better.

I also would like students to write more in my World History class. Again, I often feel tied to the curriculum and feel that I don’t have enough time for extensive writing projects in that class. However, I do feel that writing needs to happen in every class and that the old complaint that “this isn’t writing class” is even more invalid in today’s classroom than ever before.