Entry #8 - Bless, Address, or Press

Katie Mason, in Entry Six of her blog Katie's Blog, discusses teacher driven assessment. She stated "In my opinion, I think that we would wear ourselves out if we graded every piece of writing and offered consistent and meaningful feedback". She went on to say "Most students, who are apathetic to writing, will not take the time to read all of the comments and critiques written on their writing". I think both of the above statements hold truth in many classrooms, but I also think that teachers grading every piece of student work is not beneficial for many other reasons.

When reflecting on assessment practices and what I have learned throughout this course, I have come to believe that assessment must be strategic, purposeful, and very clear. When we do assess students of any age they must understand completely what and how they are being assessed. As educators, formal assessment can provide us with specific feedback as to where our students stand and more importantly, where they need to go. I think it very important to take that information and instead of having the mindset "this student must be able to... by ..." we must turn that around and think "what can I do to be able to help this student...". When assessment is used in that way, it is much more reflective and purposeful.

I also think it is important for teachers to use informal modes of assessment in their classroom. Tompkins (2012) wrote that “teachers need to ask themselves whether assessing each piece of writing will make their students better writers, and most teachers will admit that such arduous critiques won’t” (p.104). If this is the case, we as teachers can be observing, taking notes, or simply conferencing with student to gain a better understanding of what they need and what we can do to help. Using these methods of assessment are much less intimidating and will make our students better writers, rather than assessing them for a finalized grade only.

Mason also discussed in her blog the importance of communicating with students versus giving work a final grade and stopping there.

"In my other classes, I assign much of the writing as a grade. I do not critique their actual writing though. Instead I skim through the writing to get the gist and grade them based on the relevance to the assignment. If the student is writing and is missing the main point, I will occasionally write questions back to them, in an attempt to get them to be more thoughtful"

Tompkins (2012) would agree with Mason in that assessment should be clear and communicative, and not only based on grammar, mechanics, etc. Students need feedback that lends them to ponder, using higher level thinking skills to debrief on how they can make their writing piece stronger. It seems like that is what Mason is using in her own classroom. Instead of only assessing writing mechanics, she is trying to get students to make connections and elaborate on what they have already written. I think this is a pertinent part of assessment.

Just last week I was working with my writing group to discuss ideas we had and the starts of our Genre Pieces Projects. I was lucky enough to have a group that essentially broke down every single idea I had, giving me other viewpoints, only to build back up each part of my project much stronger than it was initially. They cause multiple moments when "uhhhh..." was the only thing out of my mouth, and many moments when I felt like I was completely starting from scratch! In the end, that informal peer assessment helped me to create ideas that I am proud of and genuinely look forward to expanding upon!

My hope as an educator is that I will someday have the ability to take a student who is anxious about an assignment, struggling with it, or giving up all together, and give them the motivation, confidence, and ability to think through their anxieties to build amazing pieces of writing!!

Entry #6 - Open Entry

The way in which a teacher assesses student writing can either aid in the development of writing confidence or hinder that confidence development in students. As a college student, it has been difficult for me to get papers and projects back, with red ink on every page. I know over the past 4 years I have become a stronger writer, however I have lost much confidence in the task. Tompkins (2012) helped me to realize that there are many modes of assessing writing, and formal assessment of the final product is only one of them. 

Since my students are so young, and since I am teaching in a Day Care facility, I find ‘formal grading’ to be intimidating for me. I worry that since students are with me half day and with their school district kindergarten teacher the other half of the day, that parents expect our half day to be relaxing, unstructured, playtime. Since it does not meet those expectations, I worry about grading my students as a teacher would typically. Although I have these anticipations, I also know I need some sort of assessment for myself as an educator to know where my students started, what they have learned, and where we need to go next. Therefore, I have been using many informal modes of assessment to help me gain the information I need, without the ‘typical’ report card number grades.

Informal monitoring of writing can play a large role in younger students writing tasks. Through observing alone, I gain a better sense of what my students are learning and how exactly they are growing. Although this assessment may be subjective, as long as the teacher creates careful, thoughtful, detailed notes of observations it is extremely meaningful. Along with observing, I often find myself informally conferencing with my students. Oftentimes, this is an on-the-spot conference, that was not planned and students did not prepare for. Through these conferences I am able to informally visit each student at their own desk and see how their writing is progressing. There is no intimidation factor with this mode of conferencing since I spend a short time with each student, yet I still gain a better understanding of what that child is working on and what they may need facilitated.  

I also find myself gathering and reviewing writing samples. Even though we have not begun writing stories, over the past 5 weeks of school I have been able to gather written sentences, pictures with descriptions, and handwriting my students have been working on. Gathering all of these works in progress is a way for me to informally monitor student work, as well as for students to monitor their own work and successes!

When reading Tompkin’s (2012) work this week, I was trying to gather modes of assessment that would work for me in my classroom. The use of checklists stood out to me. I am currently not using them in my room, yet I think they would benefit both my students as well as me. The use of a checklist could help students understand exactly what I am looking for in their writing task, focus both student and teacher attention during the writing and assessing processes, and help students gain a better understanding of a certain piece of writing. For example, this past week my students were studying days of the week, and completed a writing task for me. The task included writing a sentence such as “On Wednesdays, I go to swimming practice”. Students were asked to think of a day of the week they have something important to them, and write a sentence and illustrate their sentence. Instead of me assessing these tasks, I could have easily used as checklist to have students assess their own work. The checklist would include pictures versus phrases to be checked off. Later in the year, or even within the next few months, I may even be able to use short words to describe the task to be checked off like the following:

O   Name
O   Capitol letter starting sentence
O   Punctuation
O   Best writing
O   Colored picture

Using this mode of assessment, students can learn to hold themselves accountable for their own work, and parents can see exactly what was expected and whether or not their child met those expectations.

There are many modes of assessment to be used in the classroom. The assessment used is strictly dependent on the task the students have been given. This week I have thought a ton about assessment I have been using, continue to use, and how I can change it to meet the needs of my students and be more purposeful.