(Re)Writing Assessments for Secondary Writing Workshop

Where I am with Workshops

Kelly Gallagher (@KellyGToGo) and Penny Kittle (@pennykittle) have plenty to say on engaging students with writing, and many others have much more to say on secondary workshops than I can (see @AmyRass and threeteacherstalk.wordpress.com).

However, my focus here is the journey: a transition from a more traditional English classroom to one that engages with a reading-writing workshop.

As my new semester (on an intensified block schedule) approaches this Thursday, I have hurriedly been working to rework my procedures and syllabus. This past December, I jumped into workshopping my sophomore English class. To do this, I took two or three larger writing tasks, assigned them up front, and settled into what would become a new schedule:

·         15 minutes of independent reading,

·         20 minutes of direct instruction, and

·         45 minutes of writing workshop (see my previous blogs for this progression).

Identified Challenges to My Workshop Approach: Assessment

The problem was that too many of my students were not ready to budget their own time (even with some instruction on goal-setting and providing a graphic organizer to set goals by deadlines). I know many other teachers encourage students finding their own topics to write on, or give a lot of choice. However, in my shift, I needed to keep with some assignments I was familiar with; I could not reinvent everything in one fell swoop. As this semester was wrapping up, I knew I needed to revisit how I was assessing.

In beginning a new semester (repeating the English 10 course, but also adding two sections of Honors English 9), I need to establish workshop from the start. This also means that I still need some more direct teaching from the start, too, as my sophomores had already worked on writing and analyzing literary elements/devices throughout the semester before we started workshop.

Refocusing How I Assign Assessments

I am deciding to begin my courses with a simple three-day mini-lesson rotation as we begin our first unit of reviewing and delving into deeper analysis of the elements of literature. I created a reading log bookmark idea inspired from Berit Gordon’s (@beritgordon) book No More Fake Reading (and will ask students to read at least one novel every 20 calendar days) and will provide time in the first couple classes for students to select a book from my collection or our library (while also setting up workshop, classroom, Remind.com, and Google Classroom routines, procedures, and expectations). This will provide us with a handful of classes up-front for students to get into their self-selected novels. After two or three days of establishing our classroom, I will shift into the following rotation of mini-lessons, modeling, and assignments:

1.      Introduce a concept, skill, or strategy. (In the case of the opening lessons in this unit, these will be mini-lectures on characterization, setting, point of view, and so on.)

2.      Model reading and self-talk of the concept (For example, I will use The Lord of the Flies with my Honors English 9 class and Of Mice and Men with my Academic English 10 class to read a passage or page aloud, projected on the document camera while talking through the element from the day before.)

3.      Model writing in response to the identified concept. (I will return to the passage from the previous day and live-model my own writing reflection on the topic.) Then, I will task the students to do the same for their independent novel.

When I loop back to introducing the next concept, students will have the workshop time the next couple days to work on their written response. Within this time, however, students will also be budgeting time for vocabulary (we use Wordly Wise) and grammar exercises (I will be piloting GrammarFlip). This will provide me time to conference with students and record conferencing notes on a Google Doc for each student.

Selecting What to Assess

To redesign some of my assessments, however, I returned to my district curriculum and identified what Larry Ainsworth (@AinsworthLarry) calls Power Standards, rewrote them as Connie Moss’s Learning Targets for my classroom, and used these to generate paragraph-length written response prompts.

I created a Google Doc that each student will receive a copy of (via Google Classroom). It has a log for daily goals and accomplishments (with a column for my comments on any day I choose to leave one) followed by a chart of the approximately 12 learning targets for the unit (with a column for my notes as we specifically conference during workshop regarding each target). Most targets have at least one assessment attached to them—there are one or two targets that I will introduce in our opening unit but assess later. I know in a true standards-based classroom that I should have multiple measures for each standard, but I need to see how this works before adding more assessments (and I have not fully gone to standards-based grading yet—though I’m close to standards-based learning!). I have learning targets for text citation, theme, characterization, setting, point of view, conflict, fact/opinion, narrative writing, vocabulary, and grammar.

This added level of focus has already sharpened my mini-lesson content and Power Standards/Targets have better directed my efforts (as I was focused on a new learning target each day earlier this school year). Long-term goals listed from the start, introduced and modeled one-by-one, with workshop time to trouble-shoot is very exciting, and I do expect positive student feedback (as I will have more time to offer daily feedback).

In shifting to workshops, I wanted to open up writing options and provide flexibility to my students. However, since I did not fully build the procedures appropriately (since I was learning as I went along), my students were not yet ready for that freedom and flexibility. Moving into my new semester, I will be assigning set deadlines so to work within a structure my students are first familiar with before seeing when and where I can open the process to more choice and flexibility.