This is the Reading Instruction Show.
I'm your host as always, Dr. Andy Johnson.
The topic of today's podcast, this is part two, any two-part series looking at more authentic assessment for writing.
Now, the purpose of this podcast is to provide an overview of some healthy alternatives to standardized tests, writing tests, and rubrics for writing.
Six points. To be of any use, these healthy alternative assessment strategies that I'll describe here must reflect your values, your philosophy, your teaching style, and your students.
In other words, your system needs to be yours.
You can't assess effectively using someone else's system.
Thus, I will present some simple ideas here with the expectation that you'll discuss them with your colleagues and use them to develop your own assessment system.
Number two, your assessment system is not a permanent entity.
Expect that it will evolve and change over time as you get more knowledge and experience.
Three, an effective assessment system utilizes multiple forms of assessment.
Multiple forms of assessment.
That means you want to include multiple kinds of data.
No single assessment strategy or data should be used exclusively.
Number four, big picture, the role of a parent and the role of a teacher is to become obsolete.
You want to prepare students for the world they will encounter such that you are no longer needed.
Similarly, the role of good assessment is to become obsolete, to prepare students to evaluate their own work.
Thus, an important part of assessment is to teach students how to assess their own work.
Number five, students should be involved in the assessment process.
It should be something students do, not just something that's done to them.
And six, the only hard and fast rule about portfolios that we'll discuss in just a minute is that you use them.
Other than that, you're the professional.
You know your students.
Adopt and adapt all these ideas as you see fit.
So let's take a look at portfolios.
Portfolios for writing are perhaps the most valid way to document and demonstrate students' growth as writers.
Valid because they contain students' real life writing products, among other things.
So a bit of advice in working with portfolios is to keep it simple.
More complex doesn't mean more rigor.
It just means more complicated.
Let the portfolio evolve and grow with your understanding.
Start small, but think big.
Now, three types of portfolios will be described here, a student portfolio, a showcase portfolio, and a teacher portfolio.
I recommend that each of these be included in some form in your assessment system.
So let's look at the work portfolio or a draft portfolio.
This is the place where all students' drafts and work in progress are kept.
This portfolio is maintained by the student, by your students.
During daily writing time, students then are able to select the drafts from their work portfolio they wish to take through the editing and revision process.
Now, if you're working in a paper writing environment with young students, especially, use a Manila-Manila file folder with the student's name on it for each student for their work portfolio.
These should be kept in a box someplace or on a shelf anywhere other than students' desks.
And if you're working in a non-paper environment, use a shared online folder for each student.
Besides students' drafts and work in progress, students' work portfolios might also include any or all of the four items that I will describe.
It could contain a completed project list.
Here, students record the title, genre, and date completed of any writing projects that they've done.
And they might also record the type of media used to share their work.
For example, did they use a podcast, a book, a video, open mic, etc.
What did they use to publish and share that work?
The second list could be a future topic list.
This is the list of potential writing topics or ideas.
The third one is the lives list.
I'm often asked, what can I do to motivate my students to write?
And the answer is simple.
Include things that interest students.
And what is of most interest to all students?
Their lives.
Writing that intersects with students' lives brings about greater motivation and engagement, as well as better written products.
The lives list contains descriptions or lists of anything that students find important in their lives.
This could include friends, relationships, sports, music, games, hobbies, pets, movies, TVs, families.
And if you're using an online portfolio, students could also include pictures.
And you'll find over time that the items in the lives list will begin to find their way into all other lists.
Authentic writing about their lives.
And the fourth one is the daily progress report.
This is where students record their daily progress.
The date, tentative title, or topic of the work, and the steps or stage they're on are listed here.
That's the work portfolio.
The second portfolio is the showcase portfolio.
This is where students select the writing they think best demonstrates their growth as writers.
Now this portfolio can be shown to parents at conferences or sent home along with teacher analysis.
There are no hard and fast rules here.
You can include anything that documents and demonstrates students' writing progress.
For example, you could include a student self-report survey, student analysis of their own writing,
your analysis of their writing, checklists and samples of students' drafts or revisions or editing.
Anything that showcases their writing progress.
The teacher portfolio is the third one.
This is where you compile all types of data that you've collected to assess students' progress, your observation.
You would keep a portfolio one for each of your students in a desk drawer someplace where only you have quick and easy access.
You'd include your notes from observations, data from teacher interviews with students,
checklists, anecdotal notes, test scores, work samples at various times of the years,
and yes, even a stinking rubric if you wanted to do so.
There's no rules. You decide.
Now at report card time or conferences, you'd analyze and organize the data here.
And your analysis of this data provides a much greater context for understanding the material in the showcase.
Now, the last thing I'll say about portfolios.
In the 1990s, portfolios were a big thing.
They were the big thing for assessing learning and documenting students' growth across the curriculum,
not just in literacy.
And you'll find that most of the books and articles written about portfolio assessment are from this time in the 90s.
This was the golden age of literacy instruction before state and federal governments began and shooting into the classroom.
Back then, school districts and teachers were able to make decisions related to their curriculum, pedagogy, and testing.
Imagine that.
But a funny thing happened, or a tragic thing. Portfolios seem to disappear.
Poof!
So what happened to this very good portfolio idea?
Well, four things. First, the number monkeys got ahold of them.
They cried out, how could learning occur if it can't be quantified?
They said, how do we know who's above and below average?
How do we know what schools and teachers are winning?
We just can't have this portfolio nonsense, they said.
Second, the educational overlords got involved.
Instead of letting teachers develop their own portfolios,
school districts and state education departments decided they knew best.
They designed portfolios for teachers, mandated that they be used, and dictated exactly how they were to be used.
Imagine the amount of time and money that was wasted trying to identify a common set of traits for things and then describe levels of each trait.
These resources would have been utilized far more effectively if they were instead used for quality teacher professional development related to reading, writing, and portfolio assessment.
Now, any time more money is spent on assessment than is spent on instruction, something is seriously out of whack.
And we need to get that something back in whack.
Third, the educational overlords tried to standardize the process to make everything the same, the same, the same.
Even though schools, teachers, and students are all uniquely and wonderfully different,
a standard set of standards were mandated along with a standardized assessment process.
It was thought that if all were standardized, then students and teachers could be compared.
We could then identify the winners and losers and hold schools and teachers accountable.
Oh, what a glorious world that would be.
And fourth, the profiteers realized that they couldn't make money if schools weren't buying their tests and their very expensive reading programs.
We began to see the manufactured educational crisis.
Whole language, it was said, was the cause of everything wrong in American education.
Skills-based practitioners who really didn't understand whole language and who had obviously never read a book or article about whole language
began describing a cartoonish view of what somebody told them whole language was.
They don't teach phonics, they teach children to guess at words, they use a whole word approach, they say, test scores are plummeting, they said.
And even though they were wrong, wrong, wrong about all these things, they said them loud enough, long enough, with enough emotion and with enough paid lobbyists
that some began to believe their nonsensical prowl.
Parents became alarmed.
Politicians demanded that something be done to prevent total economic chaos.
Suddenly, whole language was said to be quote debunked, unquote.
Portfolios were replaced by instruments that could generate profits for the educational-industrial complex.
Now let's take a look at Checklist.
In an earlier podcast, I described rubrics.
Checklists are a healthy alternative to rubrics that are much easier to design and use.
And three kinds of checklists will be described here.
The first is a basic checklist.
This lists the traits you're looking for with a place to indicate if the trade is or isn't, was or wasn't present.
I've described in the past some examples of editing checklists for students to use when editing their own paper.
These can be adopted and adapted to use with an assessment system as well.
The second type of checklist is a rating checklist.
This lists the traits you're looking for with some sort of system for identifying the degree to which each trait is present.
You could use numbers or symbols, for instance, the key.
If I wanted to use numbers, three would be the trait is present to a greater degree.
Two, the trait is present.
One, the trait is present to a lesser degree.
And zero, the trait is not present.
I prefer to use checkmarks, however, or to use symbols.
A plus sign would say that trait is present to a greater degree, checkmark that trait is present,
minus mark that trait is present to a lesser degree, and a number symbol if the trait is not present.
However you decide to do this.
If you're teaching the writing process, it makes sense that you would assess the writing process.
I would create a ratings checklist that focused on the five steps of the writing process.
The five steps would be listed on one side,
and the other side would contain an open column for comments and observations.
On the list on the left side, you'd mark the degree to which the editing trait is present.
Then you'd use the comments section to describe the strengths and specific focus areas.
The simplicity of the ratings checklist makes it much more likely to be used.
The comments column provides the flexibility for it to be useful.
Of course, if you wanted to take a closer look to get a sense of the particular elements related to one of the traits,
you'd create a simple checklist for students to look at.
For example, if I wanted to get a sense of the pre-writing strategies used by students,
I'd simply list the strategies and during writing conferences, I'd check the strategy used
and record any relevant observations.
And the checklist would then go into the teacher portfolio.
Keep it simple.
You can create a checklist to enable students to document their own progress related to one or all five of the stages.
This could be stapled inside their draft portfolio.
Students would put a tally mark or a check mark each time a strategy was used.
And you could create strategies, a checklist for drafting, revising, editing, sharing, and publishing.
Limited only by your imagination here.
Now, the open-ended checklist is a type of student self-report survey.
It's sometimes called an open-ended checklist.
Here you're asking students to reflect on their own writing and writing process.
This often results in valuable data that would not be available with any other form of assessment.
Self-reports like this could be collected every month, but no more than once a month,
every two months or every quarter.
Of course, I recommend collecting these before report cards.
And for students in kindergarten and first grade, you would have students dictate their ideas to you or a teacher or a paraprofessional.
Now, some ideas, some questions to give you ideas for you to create your own student self-report survey or open-ended checklist.
But you need to actually think about what you'd like to know and design and include the questions that will get you the data you want.
And know that the kinds of questions used here will most certainly evolve as your assessment system evolves and changes.
Now, here are some of the types of questions.
What kind of pre-writing strategies do you use?
You simply ask students.
In the writing process, what do you do well? What's something you struggle with?
What skills have you mastered this quarter? What skills are you still working on?
What kinds of writing do you like to do?
What do you like to write about? What are your goals for this quarter?
How can your teacher help you with your writing?
What kind of writing project or topic will you be working on next?
How do you like to share your writing?
A survey like this by itself will tell you something, but remember, multiple forms of data.
The anecdotal notes are the quick written descriptions of the observations you make as students are writing.
These should be short and simple.
Use small pieces of paper to write down and record anything you find interesting or important related to students as they're writing.
Your anecdotal notes that are slipped into students' teacher portfolio in your desk.
Some teachers are very purposeful in their observations.
They observe two or three students during writing workshops and use a checklist to ensure that all students get observed on a regular basis.
Others are less systematic simply writing anecdotal notes when they see something.
Experiment. Use the approach that works best for you.
When it comes time to compile data before report cards and conferences,
the anecdotal notes along with all the other data collected
provide a rich context to understand your students as writers.
Compare this with the limited one-dimensional view you get of your students
when you're using just writing tests or stinking rubrics.
The last area I want to talk about is involving students.
Remember I said up front, assessment should be something students do,
not just something that's done to them.
This means you need to involve them in the assessment process.
Not all the time, but some of the time.
Remember the ultimate goal for assessment is to enable students to assess their own work.
Out in the real world, nobody's going to hand out a rubric before they write an article or report or a memo.
Five ideas you might use to begin to involve students in the assessment process.
First, work with students to decide which pieces are displayed or best show their growth
and should go into their showcase portfolio.
Two, work with students to design checklists to examine their writing.
Boys and girls, what do you think should be included on this checklist?
What do you want included?
Three, teach students to give good feedback to others.
Four, get students reflecting on their own work using a self-report survey or even a checklist.
Five, get students using checklists to edit and assess their own writing.
As mentioned before, you always want to keep your assessment system as simple as possible.
More complex doesn't mean better.
Simple systems are more likely to be used and maintained.
Complex systems are more likely to be ignored and replaced as soon as the next shiny new thing comes along.
And the last word, without the ability to teach writing well, all the assessment in the world is not going to help.
Put another way, you can't assess your way to good writing.
This has been the Reading Instruction Show. I'm your host, Dr. Andy Johnson.