I'm excited to start this week!
I am kicking off the first of several days of staff development in my
district aligned to our formative writing assessment cycle.
Starting tomorrow, each
grade level K-6 will be attending a full day formative assessment to look at
student writing on a skill progression. Teachers have been busy teaching a
narrative unit over the past several weeks. In the days ahead, we will have the
opportunity to come together with our grade level colleagues district-wide to
closely look at authentic student work in narrative writing and learn the
assessment tools from Writing Pathways from Lucy Calkins’ A Common Core
Workshop Curriculum, Heinemann, 2013.
Here’s how it works….
All
elementary teachers grades K-6 gave the same narrative writing prompt during
the first few days of the school year back in August. Students wrote
independently to that prompt for approximately 45 minutes. Then, focused
instruction in the narrative unit took place across the next ensuing weeks.
Then, teachers gave the same “on-demand” narrative prompt to their students.
We are now meeting in grade
level teams, to learn the assessment system, which is comprised of:
~ Learning Progression
~ Rubric
~ Student Checklist
The
learning progressions show how writers progress step-by-step across
several grade levels. The learning progression focuses on a writer’s
development in three main areas of writing: structure, development and
conventions. Using the progression we can study the way a child might move
toward increasing sophistication as they practice and learn these areas of
writing thru the grades.
The
grade level rubric
has the same information as the learning progression with a narrower lens
focusing on your grade level and the grade level above and below the grade
level you teach. Rubrics help you to see where each child is in relation to
where the child used to be and where that child could be next. The rubric
provides you with a band, of sorts, to help you determine if student’s
resembles grade level expectations or those of the grades that bookend first
grade. Rubrics can be helpful tools for noting trends across classrooms and
grades. They may be shared with parents to raise the level of support they may
give their children.
Narrowing
the focus even further is the student checklist, which is just the learning progression, isolated at one
grade level. The student checklists take the grade level expectations and
change them to “I statements” for student use.
Grades K & 1 further differentiates the checklist and provides them
in an illustrated format as well as in a text format. These checklists are
designed to be used by students to self-assess their progress and set goals and
they also serve as useful tools for revision and editing.
These
tools help you look at a piece of writing and see ways that piece of writing is
a step ahead of yesterday’s work and a step toward tomorrow’s work.
As we look at student samples
we’ll frame our lenses with some guiding questions:
1) What does this student know about narrative, small moment
writing?
2) What does this student know about organization? Does each page
have new information or does it seem like the writer just put down the thought
w/o a sense of what should go together?
3) What does this writer say about one idea before veering off to
the next?
4) What about the pictures- do they reveal details?
5) What about spelling and conventions? What does this writer know
about letter sound relationships?
Looking at Student Work:
When looking at student work the focus will be
on the big three: structure, development and conventions.
Key
Areas of Focus:
Structure:
- Overall
- Lead
- Transitions
- Ending
- Organization
- Elaboration
- Craft
- Spelling
- Punctuation
These questions and answers
can guide us in tailoring the unit ahead and forming small groups as we see
fit. As you we this process, we will
expect and hopefully embrace differences of opinion. This is evidence of a
disconnect in the way we are viewing student work. Digging into that disconnect will help us
align our vision and ourselves.
Rest
assured we know there’ll be variation between our student writers and the
benchmark pieces from Teacher’s College. (Our students are only in year two of
writing workshop instruction, but the growth we have witnessed across the span
of the past twelve months is staggering!)
Once
the teachers have studied their students’ writing behaviors and determined
where their writers fall on the learning progression, they will determine areas
to guide their teaching.
Coaching suggestions:
Focus on these in your next
unit to target growth and possible gains.
1) What did we see that our students can
do well?
2) What did we see over and over that
students are struggling with?
3) Teaching implications –
If students are lacking skills in ________, what can I do in my teaching to
address this? In the next unit I should…
4) What support will the children need
to be successful?
- Ask yourself where will children need support in the next unit?
5) What support will you need next to be successful?
Teaching well
Teaching well requires
looking at student work and imagining next steps for students. Here’s to an
exciting week ahead, full of promise and of course next steps!
