During writing meetings held in January of 2008, we discussed the practice of “Daily Edits.”
Information shared with me by a teacher that attended an interesting seesion at the National Conference for the National Council of Teachers of English puts this practice into question. The presenter, Jeff Anderson, suggests that by putting incorrect models on the board for students to correct using editing marks may be training the brain to “see” incorrect models regularly enough to make it difficult for students to “write it correctly and fluently” in their drafts.
When you think about this, especially for some of our struggling readers and writers, being asked to find what’s wrong may be the wrong approach.
Anderson suggests that rather than putting up a sentence that has incorrect capitalization, punctuation, and spellings that teachers place correct sentences (drawn from literature that is being read to or by students in the class and focuses on conventions that are being studied) and have students identify the conventions the author is using to make it “print ready” or readable for the audience.
What do you think?
In meeting with staff at each of our elementary and middle schools, I’ve been asking our teachers to share their thoughts on where we are with our writing program. I’ve asked for thoughts on professional development needs (both individually and for the system as a whole) and what we should consider to keep our students’ writing moving forward.
Locally, we’ve invested much time in providing training through local experts and from consultants over the past several years. In addition, we’ve sought materials to support teachers in becoming more skilled at teaching writing across the curriculum. While the general sense is that our teachers ARE doing a great job teaching students to write in the genre that is most closely associated with the students’ developmental needs in K-2 or the genre that is closest to what students are preparing for in relation to the State tests, most teachers feel that they spend so much time focusing on one genre that all others get very little focused attention.
At the January State Board of Education meeting, Board members heard recommendations from the Blue Ribbon Commission on Testing and Accountability that may have an impact on the State’s writing assessments in grades 4, 7, and 10. The Commission recommended that the State writing assessments be eliminated and that “writing could be assessed in other ways.” (Read more by clicking on the links below.)The State Board took no action on this recommendation and it is hard to know when they will, but we’ll keep you posted.
But, with or without the State assessment, Currituck County is determined to continue to promote writing as the 21st Century Skill that it is.
With this in mind, I’m asking for you to share your thoughts by posting them to this blog. Where do we go from here? What are your needs and your students’ needs? Another section will share some links to ideas that I’ve looked at and shared at our meetings.
http://www.ncforum.org/doclib/friday_report/2008_0111.pdf or http://ncasa.net/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=7 )
Blue Ribbon Commission Report
Currently we use the State’s rubric for assessing writing, making some adjustments for off grade level use. We use this as a “point in time” summative assessment tool. We score papers holistically and determine a level of proficiency on a given sample at a given time. It wasn’t designed to provide diagnostic or formative feedback to the students. This has typically come from teachers through individual conferences or notes to the student.
Thinking about the recommendations for eliminating in the State writing assessments, I feel that this could be a very “liberating” change that can enable us to focus on the variety of genres that our Standard Course of Study suggests.
Understanding that writing is NOT going to be eliminated from our Standard Course of Study and that research shows that the more descriptive the feedback from a formative assessment–the more growth and improvement a student is likely to make, how can we move from a holistic scoring rubric to something that is more formative in nature?
In seeing what is “out there” that would mesh with our current philosophy of using real books and articles as models and would enable us to continue to focus on features of writing found in ALL genres, I came upon the 6+ 1 Trait Assessment Model.
While this model has resources that are commercially produced and offers targeted lessons on teaching the different traits, I visited the website http://www.nwrel.org/assessment/department.php?d=1 to review the assessment pieces which has a K-2 piece that is developmentally appropriate and moves into the upper grades–focusing on the same features throughout.
Please reveiw the info found at this site and share your thoughts on how this might enable us to provide feedback to our students on a VARIETY of different genres.
Thanks for taking the time to come to the “blog table” and share your insights!
Please read the posts to the ISSUES category and post your thoughts.
What questions do you have regarding writing instruction? Post your questions and feel free to contribute ideas to help answer questions posted by your colleagues!
Share your ideas! What has worked well for you and your students?
You’re invited to attach a lesson plan or supporting document that you’d like to share with others. Links to resources are also permitted!
