Assessment

I've been thinking a lot about formative assessment.  Specifically, I'm thinking of how/if it should be graded.  As someone who has, more than once, had a learning curve that was slightly slower than or different from the one the teacher expected of me, I'm annoyed that formative assessment is often graded on how well a student meets the learning target. That seems to kind of miss the point, assuming that the point of formative assessment is to see how well the student is meeting the learning target, with the probable result being that they're not quite there yet.  I've been trying to figure out how to work this, with the formative assessment I'm thinking of being things like exit tickets and journal entries.  Do they get full credit if they do it?  Should I attempt to make some sort of objective judgement of how hard they're trying? Do I just weight it pretty low so that it's low stakes if they're not quite where I want or expect them to be?

Right now, I'm tied to the way the school I'm interning at does it. They grade everything on a 5-point scale and differentiate between formative and summative assessment, weighting summative assessment more heavily (I think.)  The numbers correspond to a set amount of improvement:

0: no evidence of learning
1: needs improvement
2: is improving
3: meets expectations
4/5: exceeds expectations

So, I have to give a number grade on formative assessment, and since most of their grades fall under this category it can affect their grade pretty significantly.   How do I fit my ideas about formative assessment into this system, friends?

Instructional Sequence/Stream of Consciousness regarding the CCSS, Standard American English, and respect for diversity

The entire process of creating an instructional sequence has been an....interesting experiment. It's hard for me.  I've mentioned before that I tend to look at things globally and then have a hard time with details, and that is definitely showing up right now.

The biggest challenge at the moment is, when I go through all of the lesson plans I've created so far and try to match them up with the standards I picked out and the learning targets I wrote forever ago at the beginning of this unit-planning process, it isn't really working.  When I started, I had a vision of all these standards that worked wonderfully together and I was a bit short-sighted about the details of what the lesson plans teaching to those standards would look like.  And now, I have all these lesson plans that I really like that don't particularly fit with that global idea I started out with, but I think they're good and create a good core for my instructional sequence.  So I'm torn between going back to revise my short-sighted but idealistic group of standards and learning targets I started out with to fit my new lesson plans, or if that violates that idea of backwards-lesson-planning that I really do think is important.

In other news, I see interesting things happening between my principles and practices when it comes to the language standards.  Here's a fact: I really hate teaching grammar.  It's not that I don't know it, because I do.  I just think it's over-emphasized and I really dislike how much our culture values Standard American English over any other dialect a student might speak, like African-American Vernacular English or Hawaiian Pidgin, both of which I think are awesome.  Language is a huge part of culture and ultimately identity, and this may just be my former Linguistics Emphasis (and present Descriptivist) talking, but I think this is especially important in showing respect for diversity and the individual identities of my students. If someone can communicate effectively, I don't really care if they can speak Standard American English, but the standards tell me I have to care.  Unfortunately, academia and the workforce usually do care very much, so I need to teach my students to function in Standard American, but I'd really like to show them that their own way of speaking is valuable too.  At the moment, my lesson plans are skirting the issue and focusing on writing style.  Any thoughts on this, classmates?

Musings on teaching writing via authentic tasks

I've learned a lot in two years of working at the Writing Center, but one of the things that is a constant presence is that writing is hard.  Even after years and years of school, writing is hard. It's supposed to be hard.  The other day, I walked in on my boss, the assistant director of the Writing Center who has a master's degree in Rhetoric and Composition, with her computer screen showing a half-finished outline, her office floor covered in annotated hard-copies of research, and her highlighter gripped like a weapon.  She saw my concerned look and said, "Dory, writing is HARD."

My point here is that writing is a continual learning process and few of us can hope to be masters at that craft.  There are a few things I can pinpoint that are essential skills, though, that might pose an especial challenge to students.

• Writing is a form of communication--a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.  A lot of students (including myself, sometimes) think of an essay as a thing they have to turn in for a grade, rather than a way of expressing and explaining their ideas to another person.  How can we help students realize the real purpose of writing, and how can we make sure we're using writing for that purpose?
• Good writing requires certain instincts: an ability to realize what the reader will be thinking while they're reading, a way with words that communicates ideas clearly, and an ability to logically lay out an argument that may or may not follow our own thought process.  How do we teach skills like this, that seem to be pretty instinctive? Can we teach them?

I'm sure there are more, but that seems to be enough to be going on with, and seems to get at the core of why it's difficult to teach writing.  Our whole system of writing a paper, turning it in to the teacher who reads it for the sole purpose of giving a grade, then getting it back, seems to go against the entire purpose of writing serving as a form of communication and a way of entering the "Great Conversation" about our topic.  I'm not entirely sure I have any ideas on how to address this issue fully, but it seems to have something to do with the  "authentic tasks" idea that gets thrown around a lot.  We should be setting up situations where students' writing is authentic, where it is being used as a genuine form of communication.