Week 5: Assessment and Writing Response

A lesson in Revision

                I think the concept in “A Lesson in Revision” of re-writing the same story so many times is a great one! This is something that I want to carry in to my classroom. I think revision like this is much more constructive with creative writing, though. I don’t think I would ever recommend writing the same Shakespeare analysis five times over, but I would find this useful if the story changes. Regardless, the tip that he gives about starting to write a paper (even without all the research or facts) a week early is very useful, to let the mind begin to develop the paper. Here is a lesson plan that actually models revision through activities and discussions for some practical ideas on how to facilitate revision.

Winn and Johnson

Winn and Johnson write about assessing student writing in chapter five. I think writing can be incredibly culturally relevant, but I think Winn and Johnson are on to something with the idea that it can be meaningful…with effort.

I really appreciated their suggestion to be transparent with our development in the writing process with our students. Directly modeling our processes and products is a great way to connect with our students and guide them (this reminds me of my elementary gym teacher who always used to make us run, but never ran with us…wtf…). One of the tips that I will take away is that it is important to get students to write every day. The best example I think of this is a journal. To enhance this, I found a website that gives journal prompts categorized by genre…pretty cool!

Another thing they talk about is culturally relevant assessment. A take-away for me from this chapter is that culturally relevant assessment is not just assessing the final product, but assessing the process. A great way to do this is by using the chart (figure 5.3) to help students focus on different aspects of others’ writing, and get them thinking about their own development in each category. I like the idea of doing these informally. I also like the idea of organizing personal ideas, ideas from media, and ideas from discussion so that the student can see how each of these resources contributes to their understanding, and can track the growth of their understanding.

Culturally Relevant formal assessment: I thought that portfolios and rubrics were great ways to “assess the process” of writing. While formal assessments can focus on the final product, this should be the final product as it has developed from formative assignments and assessments. I like the idea of a portfolio because it allows students multiple opportunities to explore multimodal writing- different genres, voices, technologies, etc…

This link is a more advanced approach to portfolios, but it sets up the groundwork pretty thoroughly. This link is a pretty comprehensive and practical way to set up a student portfolio assignment in a middle / high school classroom.