The Score
A journey into writing assessment.
If you’re a writing teacher like me, I’m sure you have spent hours pouring over rubrics and scrutinizing each paper and criteria for “the score,” debating in which box to place your checkmark. I thoughtfully craft short messages to my writers, letting them know one strength and one area that could be improved. When I finally get them all graded, I feel a huge sense of relief and accomplishment. I know my writers. I know their skills. But that sense of accomplishment vanishes the very next day when I hand out their rubrics.
They look at them for a quick second, and then they tuck them away, as if wiping their hands clean of it. They are ready to move to the next unit, but I wonder what did that rubric mean to them? How are they using that piece of feedback to help them grow as a writer? Do they feel a sense of accomplishment?
On our first unit of the year, personal narratives, I incorporated some ideas that I learned from my studies with the Greater Madison Writing Project. Instead of running an entire unit solely on short stories, I created a multi-genre unit in which the students wrote letters, short stories, and poems to share about themselves. I held conferences with students, gave feedback, and had a rubric/checklist for each type of genre. I certainly had their engagement throughout the entire unit, and I was riding a wave of excitement, feeling good. But I knew the end of the unit was coming, and it was the part I most dreaded — assessing it.
I have grown to dread this part of the unit because I have come to realize that I indeed am getting to know them better as writers through this process, but they are not getting to know themselves any better.
So, that got me thinking about self-evaluation and self-reflections in writing. I don’t want my students to only judge their growth by what their teacher is telling them. I want them to see the growth, to feel it. How can I help my students be more reflective and learn to assess themselves in a meaningful way? Of course I want it to be a partnership because students still need teaching, instruction, and support, but right now I keep coming back to the fact that assessment is something we do to our students and not with. I want that to change.
But as I kicked off the literary essay unit, excitement was not the primary emotion that I saw on their faces. So, while I am still planning to continue this inquiry into self-evaluations and reflections; I need to make a detour and find a way to bring the engagement into this new unit. Because, if I can’t help them feel excited about this new unit, self-assessment and reflection will never be meaningful. Wish me luck on this journey!
