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Home : 2002 : Jan : 14
I've also been there
By intermediate teacher
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Just a couple of quick questions: What grade level are you working with? Second, in designing your assessment, is it something you came up with or something that the district designed itself? If it is your own, would it be possible to model a finished product before they write on their own? Depending on their age/grade level, they might not be ready to completely leave the steps of the writing process--you brainstormed and completed graphic organizers together, so maybe your students still need a little guidance with getting started. At this point, go back and think about what you are trying to assess: are you assessing their ability to write completely independently (if so, maybe try a new topic and skip the graphic organizer/brainstorming WITH them--maybe this hindered some of them or maybe it left some of them too dependent upon you for the next step.) If you are assessing how well they write in response to the writing process, then leave these steps in. Then decide if you are looking for too much at once: are you reading their writing for content, grammar, spelling, sentence structure, etc. all at once? If you are, STOP! Go back and read and grade for content first. Then go back and assess for other areas. You will feel better after doing this. Then assess the entire piece. It is possible you were anxious to start reading and when a few didn't follow what you had hoped for, you started focusing on everything that was wrong. Look at it another way: go back and list all that was right and then assess piece by piece. Finally, if you feel all is lost and the pieces just really don't meet your expectations, then finish out the lessons related to it, put it away for a week, reteach areas that showed signs of weakness and reassess in a week or two. Writing is NOT easy to teach. In fact, it is so hard to do because it is so subjective for each student and for each academic need you are trying to assess. If no one in the district is putting pressure on you to assess right this very minute, don't get discouraged--scaffold your way back up to where you want their writing to be and try again. You won't hurt anyone in the process. Your students benefit from the reteaching, you gain more experience with assessing and noting pitfalls (which will be to your advantage next year) and you will get a final assessment done when the time is right.
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