New Units of Study Writing Assessment Reflections

  

 Reflections & Understandings about Authentic Writing Assessment in the Common Core Writing Workshop    Block: Part 1

This is the first post in a series about on-demand writing assessments, the teacher's role in administering, collecting and reviewing student data, and how that data will drive writing instruction.

So I'm sure you must be thinking I fell off.... you know, but I assure you I've been very busy. Actually, busier than I expected.  During the last three weeks, I have been facilitating training in my district using the new Units of Study writing assessment tools from the Lucy Calkins Common Core Workshop Curriculum.These scoring days have been the first of series of four trainings that will be provided over the course of this year to all of our elementary school teachers. They consist of cycles of grade-level professional development training using the new units of study writing assessment tools.

Units of Study in Opinion, Information and Narrative Writing A Common Core Workshop Curriculum

by Lucy Calkins and Colleagues

Here’s how it works… 

We begin the data cycle by having teachers administer an on-demand writing assessment prior to teaching in narrative, information or opinion/argument writing text types. During the on-demand assessments all K-6 students are given the same text-type specific writing prompt. (These were from They are asked to demonstrate all they know about writing within that specific text-type of writing in a forty-five minute sitting without any teacher support. 

So why an on-demand?

Our teaching on any given day is designed to lift writers, not just for that day, or piece of writing, but for every day and every future piece of writing they do. And we know that students are going to be assessed on what they can do independently, so knowing this, Lucy reminds us that we need to work with fervor to get students to transfer and apply the learning they do with your support to new work they do on their own. An on-demand allows a student to show-off what they can do independently and that gives us, as teachers, a chance to measure the stickiness of our teaching.

And why a pre and post?

I think we’re all used to an end of unit assessment as a way of determining what a student has learned and using it to determine whether or not they’re doing what they should be able to do.  This question is really about the pre-assessment. Many teachers ask me, “Why would I assess students on something they don’t know and that I haven’t taught them?” It doesn’t seem fair, or worth our time.

Here’s why we do it:

1)  It provides a baseline: We don’t know what our students know when they walk in our door, or begin a new topic of study. The pre gives us access to a starting place for each student, and it gives him or her an opportunity to work at their level.

2)  It allows teachers to self-reflect after a unit of instruction and ask “How should I adjust my teaching and expectations going forward?” 

3)  It supports our conversations with parents at conference time – a pre-post is specific evidence of learning and can be used to help parents understand their child’s growth trajectory. This is where they were, this is where they are, this is where they need to be, Here’s our plan for getting them their.

4)  It supports our conversations with students – it provides visible evidence of their growth, which spurs them on to make more progress.

Educational research has found that one of the most powerful things teachers can do in the classroom to lift student achievement is to engage them in a meaningful and regular feedback loop, using evidence (like the pre/post), goal-setting, conferring, and self-assessment, like the student checklist, to lift learning.

These writing samples are then collected and reviewed together with the company of their grade-level colleagues beginning the first steps of a data cycle.

•      Step 1—Collect, sort student work in high, medium and low piles and chart data (see sorting activity below)

•      Step 2—List students’ strengths and areas of concern

•      Step 3— Prioritize areas of concern

•      Urgent (+1)

•      May need attention/remediation (+2)

•      Material will be covered soon (+3)

•      Step 4- Identify strengths

•      Step 5-Establish goals: set, review, revise

•      Focus on one-high leverage are of concern that will affect the most students

•      Step 6—Select instructional strategies

•      Step 7—Differentiate instruction

•      Return to step 1 and identify teaching points for individual students to be used for small group instruction and/or conferring

•      Step 8-Calendar when progress will be reviewed

•      Next assessment date

Step 1- The sorting activity provides us with a quick way of seeing trends and patterns across the classroom and is critical in determining what is the high leverage area of concern we will target in instruction.

Next we can establish trends and patterns across grade levels and determine areas of grade level instructional focus.

Through studying performance assessments that differentiate student work along a continuum and through reflecting on adult proficient writing, teachers develop an understanding of the continuum of development. This knowledge helps teachers explicitly teach writers in ways that help them progress along a trajectory of skill development.

The Calkins Units of Study curriculum, is grounded in research on evidenced-based teaching (see John Hattie's Visible Learning, Geoff Petty's Evidence-Based Teaching , etc).

Teachers study what writers do, and consider goals that are within reach yet rigorous. Teachers give feedback that helps writers understand the progress they have made, and that which they still need to make, helping writers grasp onto important goals and work, deliberately practicing, so they become more proficient.

Lucy reminds us- good instruction must be grounded in assessment.

Stayed tuned, in my next post I’ll answer questions from a mylifeasaliteracycoach.blog follower and fellow literacy coach- Crystal from Hampton, VA:

1)   How do teachers discuss learning progressions across grade levels?

2)   What successes have you experienced with using student checklist?

3)   What is your role as coach in the process?

For more writing resources please visit my TpT store

Formative Assessment Cycle Kick Off!

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

Development:

•  Elaboration
• Craft

Language Convention:

•  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!

Common Core Writing

  Admittedly I am overly-consumed with the writing standards, but my job is coordinating our district's literacy  curriculum and our focus this year is implementing Common Core Writing.  Here's what I hope teachers know about the writing standards, not just because students will be ultimately assessed on these concepts, but also because these standards require students to write and develop their understanding of language.

What writing looks like in the Common Core... 

• The Common Core writing standards are comprised of ten anchor standards. 
• Writing Anchor Standards:
• Text Types & Purposes (W.1, W.2, W.3)
• Production & Distribution of Writing (W.4,W.5, W.6)
• Research to Build & Present Knowledge (W.7,W.8, W.9)
• Range of Writing (W.10)

• Within text types and purposes there are three writing types.  These writing types are referred to as "text" types. The writing text types are --narrative, informational, and opinion. Once students enter sixth-grade, the opinion writing shifts to argument writing because older students should be writing about debatable topics. In the Common Core Standards, students are expected to write within these text types routinely and for a range, or variety, of tasks, purposes and audiences (Range of Writing-Writing Standard 10).  

• Students should be writing a lot. Students should have opportunities to do quick flash drafts in narrative, opinion and information pieces, as well as longer sustained research reports. The more that students can understand and appreciate that writing is an important way to communicate ideas and knowledge, the more success they will have as student writers.   This will ultimately help better prepare them for the college or workforce by making it easier to write as an adult writer within a range of writing applications like: drafting an email to a work colleague, the job application, the request for a day off, or the annual report.

• Students should be writing on a keyboard.  Provide multiple opportunities for students, even our younger students, to compose drafts, generating ideas and take revised and edited drafts to publication whenever possible. If you are in a district that is fortunate to have computers students should be using those computers in writing whenever possible. Even third-graders will be taking the new assessments on-line and they will need to keyboard their responses. Our students need multiple opportunities to feel comfortable and successful on computers since the Common Core Assessments will be technology driven. For more information on this see Smarter Balanced Consortium for a sneak peek at some practice ELA assessments. 

• Keep in mind, in the Common Core language and grammar do not live in the writing standards but they flourish in the language standards, another sub-section of the Common Core. By the time that students are fifth-graders, they should be proficient at the following writing mechanics skills using quotations, dashes, parentheses, commas, correct pronouns, and correct spelling.  This means that all of the other skills have to be mastered in earlier grades, as they are enumerated by the language standards. 

What does Common Core writing looks like in the classroom?

• Students writing daily for extended periods of time 
• Thirty to forty minutes independently writing depending on grade level
• Teacher conferring with individuals or groups of students or leading small group instruction

• Students writing for different purposes and audiences and in different text types...
• Students identify their audience and the purpose of their piece for example-  a possible student response might be I'm writing an All About Skateboarding piece to teach my classmates about skateboarding
• Teacher providing modeled instruction in all three text types: narrative, opinion, and information writing

• Students planning, revising, editing, rewriting and publishing
• Students cycle through the writing process 
• Teacher provides writing workshop structure for students to learn the writing process

• Students studying the work of authors and expert writers to learn a writer's craft and study literary devices
• Students study the different text types of writing 
• Teacher provides modeled instruction through the use of mentor texts or exemplar papers

• Students receive modeled explicit instruction in order to develop and strengthen their writing
• Students study writing strategies and skills 
• Teacher provides demonstration and guided practice instruction of writing strategy and skills 
• (I do, we do, you do model)

• Students using technology to produce and publish pieces as well as gather information from digital sources to support their research reports
• Students using computers in writing whenever possible
• Teachers providing technology as a resource whenever possible in the classroom through the use of computer labs,  classroom computers,  tablets and ipads, electronic books for demonstration lessons etc.

• Guiding Questions-
• How will I increase the rate and rigor of writing in my classroom?
  What is the connection between reading and writing instruction?
• How will I integrate the use of media?

In my role as District Literacy Coach, using the Lucy Calkins Common Core Writing Curriculum as a guide, writing workshop essentials, that reflect much of what I have mentioned above, were developed by myself and my team of elementary instructional coaches.  These essentials are a guiding tool for teachers to develop their writing workshop instructional best practices and for an excellent tool for administrators to guide them in conversations with teachers about the best practice writing instruction taking place in their classrooms. I hope to share more about these writing essentials in a future blog post. If you would like to know more about implementing writing workshop in your primary or intermediate classroom please check out my TpT store for mini lessons addressing the management and routines of writing workshop in primary and intermediate classrooms. 

We are no longer getting ready for the Common Core in schools across the nation. The Common Core is here.  This spring, many districts will be administering pilot tests and the more that we educators understand the CCSS, the better for all of our students. 

If other readers or bloggers have additions to make about what we should know about the writing standards, please share!

Happy Writing!

Kathi

Building A Community of Learners

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Back to School! I can say that as an educator this time of year is always exciting. This school start has a special excitement, my grandson, Zackary, started Kindergarten. What a thrill it is to see school from his perspective with a fresh pair of little eyes. That milestone for our family caused me to pause in the midst of my “back- to- school” chaos to reflect on what an honor it is to share this journey of discovery and learning with children.

We teachers are truly blessed that we can hone our craft, reinvent our teaching practice and ourselves afresh each year. I know many of you are already back at it, but it’s not too late to make sure you are laying the foundation for an awesome school year.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you go through the first month of instruction.

·     Establish strong classroom community. It’s so tempting these days to jump right into content. The Common Core Standards are here and there is a lot of pressure to “get it all in.” However, if you skip the community-building step, you will find yourself dealing with lots more behavior “drama” issues than necessary all year long. Want to learn more about how to build community? Visit the Responsive Classroom. That site is FULL of great resources and ideas for community building.

Morning Meetings are a great way to start the school day with a positive sense of community. Now that I've seen the power of daily meetings and their impact on student attitudes and behavior, I would never teach without them again.

These are some of my favorite sources of professional books that I have collected over the years for morning meeting activities. Even if you don’t use “Morning Meeting,” some of these activities and ideas make great icebreakers at the beginning of the year.

·     Activities for Morning Meeting

·     The Morning Meeting Book

·     Take time to teach procedures and routines. You already know this. It is the same idea as community- do it right up front so you don’t waste time for the rest of the year dealing with classroom procedures and routines. The goal is to enlist students in developing the classroom rules as well as management and procedures. This is the foundation of a classroom community with the goal of each student being a proficient self-regulated and independent literacy learner. Think of it as going slow to go fast.

I’ve just posted a great resource for teaching the procedures and management of Writing Workshop on my TpT store. 

Building A Community of Writers: Procedural Writing Workshop Mini-Lessons provides mini-lessons on the procedures you’ll want to remember to teach when starting writing workshop. Tuck them into writing workshop before you start a writing mini-lesson. These procedural min-lessons help you lay a strong foundation for our students to become self-regulated writers for the remainder of the year.  

Building A Community of Writers: K-2 is the expanded version of the writing workshop launch support documents I provided teachers in my district. Many teachers have shared that these Building Community lessons have proven to be very helpful in launching workshop successfully!

Building A Community of Writers: K-2 includes a list of great read-alouds for launching narrative in a primary writing workshop as well as examples of anchor charts, workshop tips and strategies.  I think this read aloud list is so helpful I've featured it as a new free product to my TpT store.

·     Make Movement Part of Your Daily Routine. Movement is such a powerful motivator for students and is also a fantastic learning tool. Movement enhances memory – We have learned so much about the human brain and how it learns.  Physical movement is a powerful hook for memory and long-term learning.  Numerous brain researchers tout the benefits of hands-on learning experiences. Learning that is experienced kinesthetically is much more likely to “stick” than sedentary learning experiences.

·     Connect with Parents. Aside from the “normal” communication methods (weekly newsletter, homework agenda, etc.) try to find a simple and personal way to let each child’s parents know that you see something valuable in their child. Here are some ways to do this: a short note home, a quick email, a brief phone call home, a concise conversation that communicates:

1) You are getting to know their child

2) You care about their child

3) You are excited to share in their learning journey

That simple reassurance goes far with parents and will set a positive foundation in the event that in the future you need to communicate with them about academic or behavioral concerns.

I am so excited to start a new school year with you. Stay tuned… I have a lot of ideas for literacy learning up my sleeve. Have a FABULOUS beginning to your school year! 

 What’s on your Back to School to do list? What do you make sure to do during the first month of instruction? I’d love to hear!

Happy School Year!