401 Reading Response 6

This week we read chapters 8 and 9 of Fletcher and Portalupi's book "Writing Workshop". It was about different skills that students already know and how to teach new ones. There were writers' workshops for three days a week to focus on practicing new skills and keep exercising those. It was also about teaching the editing process which involves "1. Create a routine that gives students the responsibility to be their own first editors. 2. Teach them how to implement this routine. 3. Diagnose student needs based on their edited work. 4. In an editing conference, selectively teach one or two skills that students are ready to learn." (pg. 92). I really think that these rules will be great to use in my classroom because they really hit all the points that editing should cover. Once students are taught the editing routine, it is important to diagnose student needs and to conference with students and to teach skills. One-on-one teaching will help to focus on teaching a skill and generate it into the next workshop. It's also crucial to use assessment to inform teaching by holding a clear understanding of goals and to document observations of students in action. Students will also want to know what grade they will be getting, so be sure to have students self-evaluate so that they get more out of their paper than just a letter grade. Overall grading should take into consideration the quality of composition, the correctness of conventions, the use of a variety of composing and revising strategies and participation in the writer's workshop. Ask students to reflect on everything once they are finished and take into account how to improve on the workshop from their feedback.

In Assessment by Ray, one main key component that stood out was the fact that it is made clear that we want children to do things on their own.Seeing a child do it when asked to is one thing, but having them do it on their own without being asked is another. It is stated that we think about assessment in four ways. The following are, "Looking closely at individual pieces of writing, watching and listening as children are engaged in the process, asking children to be articulate, and looking across the work of a single child over time...These are simply the kinds of things we're thinking about as we're continuously assessing what's happening with children and their writing." As we look at our student's writing, the main question we have is what does this masterpiece show us the student knows? A list is made to show what the student knows. Also, when we watch and listen to a student write, it lets us in on some much more information and it helps us understand their process. As teachers, we are to ask the students to tell us about what they're working on. This we ask to maybe help us understand a little bit more about what the student is creating and to see if they have new possibilities. When asked to "tell me" about the writing, it also asks the questions of why and how. After awhile, the students just articulate the answers to the teachers. Our assessment directs our teaching, it helps in what to teach, it makes the teaching more richer, and it provides data. A lot of the assessment also helps with the parents and it shows the parents a lot more than what they're familiar with. All in all, assessment is key, because it allows teachers to keep track about how they teach. Tying in with this is Regie Routman's Writing Essentials Chapter 10, making assessment count. Routman states that assessments should be able to increase the quality of a student's writing. However, it doesn't. One key point that Routman makes is that having excellent teaching skills is the only test prep that is the best for the students to receive. According to Routman, assessment should happen every day. It takes practice before the students can be really critiqued. When they are being critiqued, just giving them a score for their writing isnt enough. Each student needs his or her own feedback so that they can learn from it. For teachers, a main goal for them would be to get their students to be able to do their own self assessments.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P7hOPJ1Pb4 This video ties great into the topic of assessment, because it gives another side to the assessment of the students. It talks about the misunderstandings that are associated with child assessment. We read mainly what assessment was for, but this adds more to understanding assessment in a different way.