Who was it who said, “We inspect what we respect”? It will be important for you to assess your students’ growth in writing using a number of different lenses to notice what students can do. The Project recommends you use the Continua for Assessing Narrative, Informational, and Argument Writing, three tools we have developed and piloted to track student growth in those modes of writing. These tools are works in progress and the newest versions are available on the TCRWP website, www.readingandwritingproject.com. We invite you and your colleagues to tweak and alter the instruments to fit your purposes. We hope they can help clarify the pathways along which developing writers travel. They will certainly help you iden- tify where a student is within a sequence of writing development and imagine real- istic, doable next steps for each writer. This can make your conferring much more
A CURRICULARPLAN FOR THEWRITINGWORKSHOP, GRADE3, 2011–2012 4 © 2011 by Lucy Calkins. Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH.
helpful and your teaching clearer. What began as an assessmenttool has become an extraordinarily important teachingtool!
You’d want to exercise caution, however, while assessing a writer against any developmental continuum. If you bypass listening and responding to a writer and considering the writer’s intentions, instead using a continuum as the sole source of your instruction, then the tool will have made your teaching worse, not better. Con- ferences always need to begin by pulling alongside a writer and asking, “What are you working on as a writer? What are you trying to do? What are you planning to do next?” Then you need to help the writer reach toward accomplishing his or her inten- tions. You do this by drawing on your knowledge of good writing and of how narrative, argument, and information writers tend to develop. This is where the assessment tool can be a resource.
It is crucial that your first assessments occur at the very start of the school year. Your students come to you with competencies and histories as writers. You cannot teach well unless you take the time to learn what they already know and can do. Then, too, if you capture the data representing what writers can do at the beginning of the year, you will be able to show parents and others all the ways in which they have grown as writers over the course of the year. In your autumn parent-teacher conferences, bring the writing a learner did on the first day of school and contrast it with the writing he or she did just before the conference. Having the “before” and “after” pictures for comparison makes this conversation productive.
Even if you are not going to use the continua to assess growth in writing, we think you will want to get some baseline data on your writers. To do this, at the very the beginning of the year, devote one full day’s writing workshop—fifty minutes—to an on-demand assessment of narrative writing, another full day to an on-demand assessment of informational writing, and ideally, a third day to a similar assessment of opinion (or argument) writing. We cannot stress enough that you cannot scaffold kids’ work during this assessment. Do not remind students of the qualities of good narrative writing, do notshare examples of powerful texts, and definitely do notconfer with writers. This needs to be a hands-off assessment. The exact words that we sug- gest you say to your students are available on the TCRWP website. You will want to repeat these on-demand assessments several times during the year, after finishing some work in that mode of writing.
If you worry that saying, “Welcome to a new year. I want to begin by evaluating you,” might seem harsh, you might soften this by saying that you can’t wait until the end of September before having some of your students’ writing to display on bulletin boards. Tell your youngsters they have only a day to work on the piece because you’re so eager to have their writing up in the room. The problem with saying this is that it may tempt you to coach the writing, which utterly ruins its value as an assessment tool. The alternative is to tell students this writing is just for you to get to know them and then to store it in their portfolios.
In any case, you will want to study what your students come into the year able to do as writers—this will help you establish a baseline understanding of what your
A CURRICULARPLAN FOR THEWRITINGWORKSHOP, GRADE3, 2011–2012 5 © 2011 by Lucy Calkins. Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH.
students know about the qualities of good writing. Note whether students have been taught and are using essential concepts. Look, for example, for evidence that children are writing focusedtexts.