(I got this picture by googling screaming at books. Pure. Gold.)
Okay guys. Here come the mini heart attacks again. All of this reading for all of these
classes is converging at once and I have so many conflicting ideas that it’s
crazy. We’ve been talking a lot
about assessment and what matters when you assess and I’m not going to lie—I
have never thought about assessment.
When I picture my classroom, I picture everything but assessment, in
fact. Now it’s all I can think
about. It consumes my mind. Here is the big question—what is
important to assess? The content,
the presentation, both? If both, at what proportions?
Before I freak out, though, I should probably explain what I
got from the readings. According
to the Digital Writing Workshop, “what we’re really after is helping [students]
compose more substantive texts, both individually and collaboratively” (page
35). Okay, good. This is a
concrete definition of what we are aiming for. I feel like we haven’t had one in a long time. All of these philosophical questions
about our teaching, planning, and assessment styles are awesome, but not
knowing the answers is killing me and what’s killing me even more is that I
probably won’t know the answers to them until I’m actually in the
classroom. So of course when I
read in Chapter 6 of Hicks that “instruction and assessment are intertwined and
that digital writing makes that relationship even more complicated” (page 105),
I don’t feel a million times better (can you blame me?).
Aside from the assessment strategies of Hicks, which seem at
the least to quicken my pulse to an nth degree, Pathways to the Common Core
actually kind of calmed me. (I’m
about to quote a large piece of text, but it’s really important to me, so we’ll
all just have to deal.)
The image of a routine for writing is not just about sitting
down to write, however. A writing routine involved understanding what it means
to work at your writing. Writing anchor 5 states that writers will “develop and
strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or
trying a new approach” [18]. The
CCSS are closely aligned, then, with the practices researched by Pulitzer Prize
winning Journalist Don Murray, documented in a Writer Teachers Writing (2003).
Murray described how journalists learn, even when writing to deadline, to
revise on the run, to try out different leads and endings, to consider and
reconsider each word, comma, sentence structure in order to convey precise
meaning: they know that writing is a process. (page 106)
So what does this have to do with my assessment concerns?
I’m so glad you asked! This is another clear example of what to assess. Although I don’t see myself as the kind
of teacher who fits a goal to a standard, I think that as a beginning teacher
with so little definition of my philosophical views, it is important to have an
idea of what other educators think is important. As I was composing my goals/assessments chart for Peg, I
would be happy with my goal and then panicked when I couldn’t find a standard
to fit it. Add in the digital
component of goals and assessments and I’m a goner.
Unfortunately, my mentor teacher does not use any form of
digital literacy. As Hicks says on page 38, “’Couldn’t I do this with journals
or writing folders?’ Indeed you could.”
This is my mentor teacher’s approach. For his on-level classes we keep writing journals, including
daily writing examples. He does
not seem though, to be “conferring outside of class time […] building
relationships and responding to writers at their point of need” (page 38). I know that he definitely does not
confer outside of class time. He
may be building relationships based on the advice he’s given me about forming
relationships with students. As
far as responding to writers at their point of need—he gives feedback on the
journals every few weeks. I think
that he’s given feedback twice on the journals all semester when they write
every day. And these are
struggling writers. I have no idea
what the students do with this feedback.
It makes me wonder if there’s something we can do to make the feedback
more meaningful? Can we make revisions required? Or some reflection on the
feedback? I’m not sure. More assessment to think about…and you know how excited
I get about unsure assessments…
Megan,
ReplyDeleteThanks for yet another outstanding post! Just don’t have a coronary, okay? The great thing about teaching is that the questions are never over. I often remind myself of Rilke’s advice to “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.” But, I know how hard that is to do your first year. Anyway, in terms of assessment, as I mentioned in class, I have found rubrics to be extraordinarily helpful to me as I plan my units. I like to think about what I want the end project (preferably real world) to be, and then plan backwards from there. It takes some practice, but it truly can revolutionize your teaching. Rubrics can also be helpful because you can always include a category that focuses on improvements and revisions made from first draft to final draft, and then include that as part of the grade. You can also ask students to complete self-assessment. Often they are harder on themselves than the teacher is. Hope that helps. Thanks! Lindy
Megan,
ReplyDeleteI’m the worst blog buddy ever. I wrote you a reply last week, and didn’t save it or upload it. ☹ So here’s a new one!
I thought the part about your MT giving feedback to your students twice in their journals since the beginning of the semester was interesting, given that I just organized about 75 journals for my MT to grade and give feedback on today. It seems like it’s a little overwhelming to provide a good amount of feedback for every students, even when you don’t do it for every writing assignment. I was shocked to see how long it took me to grade and give feedback for one two-page essay, and it was a little disheartening to see when students just looked at the grade and were done with it.
You are totally not alone with your assessment anxiety. I feel like that’s one area that we haven’t had much practice with in any of our field experience. We’ve done mini lessons, led group projects, led discussions, but I totally understand why we aren’t given the responsibility of helping to make assessments. It seems like we should try to get involved in that or talk with our MTs about how they come up with the assessments.
Your questions about revisions and feedback are really hard to answer. I don’t want to force students to write revisions, but I want them to want to write them. Revising for the sake of your teacher doesn’t have the same effect as revising on your own terms, so I like the idea of optional revisions. It emphasizes that writing is a process, but if you are totally done with an assignment and never want to see it again, that’s okay too.
Sorry again!
Julie