Professional Reading Group Reflections - Chp. 9

Chapter 9 – Assessment and Evaluation

 “Numbers are like sharp knives; they divide kids into clear-cut categories and numbers that are difficult to forget” (p.102).

Using Assessment to Inform Your Teaching

• To assess students growth in a specific area or skill
• you need a clear understanding of the goals you hold for students
• document your observations of students
• reflect on those observation to make informed decisions about future instruction

Getting the Grade

“You can invite a parent in and show her this complex view, but you can’t avoid the fact that in other instances you will be required to boil this information down into a single grade” (p.104).

The authors suggest not to assign grades to individual papers, but rather to the body of a student’s work because:

• students need to take risks as writers and should not be punished for doing so
• students need to learn to be self-evaluators

            So, don’t ever grade student writing?  No!  Here are some options that help to make

students feel safe as well as encourage self-assessment:

• ask students to submit a certain amount of finished pieces (not all)
• have them submit their piece with a self-evaluation and attach your grade along side
• always discuss expectations beforehand (rubrics)

Statewide Writing Tests and Workshop

“Your students will perform fine on these tests so long as you provide them with regular opportunities for writing in the workshop” (p.109).

The authors suggest to help students prepare for standardized testing that they:

• think about the prompt
• identify the kind of writing
• use prewriting strategies
• conference with themselves after writing
• after they are satisfied with content, turn their attention to editing

            Since I am a primary teacher I do not typically have to assign letter grades to student
writing.  However, we do use rubrics to decide at what level they are writing.  I really liked that the authors emphasized looking at a student’s entire body of work to determine a grade as apposed to singling out on particular piece.  This way students have the opportunity to try out new writing styles without the fear of failure hanging over their heads.  This is something that I had been doing in my classroom already, but would like to refine with some of the suggestions from the author.  Sharing expectations through exemplary work and/or rubrics would be very helpful to show students my expectations.