Entry #7- Assessing Writing and Writing Feedback

I enjoyed the readings for this week because giving feedback on writing and assessing writing has been something I have struggled with as a first year teacher. Writing in 1st grade looks a lot different than what I was used to in my student teaching placements in 3rd and 5th grade, so it has been quite an adjustment. I have wondered many times if my students' writing is considered on grade level or is developmentally appropriate for their age. I have also wondered how missing out on essentially half of Kindergarten has impacted their writing. On top of all of this, as an (admittedly so) not-so-confident first year teacher, I started the year off wanting my students to like me so was very hesitant at first to make any major corrections to my students' writing. This may have been because I wanted my students to like me right off the bat, or rather I just was not entirely sure what was expected of a first grader. Nonetheless, chapter 4 of Tompkins and the article by Philippakos (2017) helped bring some clarity for me. 

An aspect of assessing writing that stood out to me in Tompkins was the idea of process assessment. Tompkin states that this approach is used “to probe how students write, the decisions they make as writers, and the strategies they use rather than the quality of the finished product” (p. 89). In my first grade classroom, I think this approach to scoring would be much more effective to determine the writing skills and needs of each student. Many of the writing pieces done in my classroom are modeled or shared writing, so when it comes time for students to write independently, the final product is not often as strong as it could be. However, there are some students in the class that can independently apply the skills and strategies that I modeled or we used during our shared writing, showing that they have an understanding of how to be a strong writer. On the other hand, some students need support throughout the whole writing process, which indicates to me that they are still a developing writer. In the end, the product from the strong writer and the developing writer are similar, even though one was done independently and the other was done with teacher support. Therefore, I think looking at the overall writing process for each student in my class would be a much more accurate assessment for how they are doing in terms of writing. 

When reading the article by Philippakos (2017), I was challenging myself to think about how I could implement peer review into my classroom. When returning to school this morning and looking ahead at my plans for next week, I realized that we are starting a new unit on opinion writing! This unit starts with lots of modeling and shared writing; however, at the end of the unit students are expected to independently write an opinion piece about their favorite place in the community. They have multiple days to plan, draft, revise, edit, and publish this writing piece, so I am thinking I will spend one of the days introducing how to do a peer review. Since it is the first time doing this, I do not expect it to be perfect. I think it is important to start peer review now, since it is an important tool for students to use throughout their writing careers. I am excited to implement this tool in my classroom and I will update you on how it went in future blog posts!

References

Philippakos, Z.A. (2017).  Giving feedback:  Preparing students for peer review and self-

evaluation.  The Reading Teacher, 71(1), 13-22.  DOI: 10.1102/trtr.1568