One key idea we touched on this week was that of assessing student writing. We had first taken a look at a student sample- the student was 6 yrs. 3 months- and completed a quick write about our initial thoughts of the work. After this, we looked at the ‘6 + 1 Traits’ to assess the writing through, for lack of a better term, ‘the teacher’s eyes’. We then split into seven different groups and each talked about one of the different traits, which include: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation. Not only did I like having time to practice assessing student work, I liked the fact that we also received an example of how a teacher would create a student-friendly rubric. In my opinion, it is important to inform students how they will be assessed and what expectations you have for them, this way, when you do give them that final grade, there should not be as much discrepancy.
I especially thought it was interesting to see how a few of our original thoughts about the work changed once we viewed the rubric. The story, in short, was about a knight who was sent on a quest from the king to retrive some gold that was stollen by a dragon. For example, when I first read the story I mainly payed attention to the spelling and the student’s phonemic awareness. However, I was in a group that looked at the ideas of the story. We noticed how the student included the rising action, climax and falling action into the story, and it was overall clear and coherent. However, we thought that the student could have included a bit more details, like how the knight felt as he went on his quest.
Overall, as pre-service teachers, I think it is imperative that we take time like this to think of how we assess students to show that they are meeting the objectives we have in mind. I personally hope that we do more small ‘workshops’ such as this in the future, especially prior to elementary practicum, so we are more comfortable with our abilities to assess students adequately.
I’m glad you found this activity to be helpful, especially because your project for practicum will be to gather student work and do an analysis of what your students learned and still need to learn after you teach them!