Entry #6---The ugly word which is "Assessment"

Whenever I hear the word assessment, I get this gut feeling of anxiety and nervousness.  I have always feared the days when someone thing is due and I hate the days when that assignment is passed back.  This fear has manifested especially when it comes to writing.  I know as an undergrad,  I wouldn't look at essays that were handed back until after class because I did not want to know what I had gotten.  I had this fear of being judged and then being rejected...this is a fear I still have today.

Writing, I am discovering more and more in this journey, is a complex task.  Our high schools really focus on one type of writing and way of being assessed.  High stakes testing has created a fear within writing and I am a product of that.  I can remember in high school taking Regents exams, and I hated the essay part.  Teachers weeks before spent days going over how to write this essay or write that essay.  I hated it.  They skipped crucial steps in the writing processed and just focused on the end product.  They should use rubics and how we would be judged.  They installed the fear if we did not pass, we would not move on to the next grade.  Writing in my lifetime became a task that might either pass or fail.

Now, finally as a grad student, writing is taking on a new light.  Writing is a process that can take 15 weeks to get to a finished product.  Writing is never complete and assessment should follow that as well.

Gail Tompkins really has shed light on this topic for me.  I never thought  about assessment being a process.  It is and there are vital steps involved in assessing our students writing.

The first being observing.  As teachers we need to have "careful focused observations of children as they writing" (Tompkins, 2008, p.77).  Teachers get involve also with students in this process.  Teachers are involved in writing groups....something I never really thought of doing ever....

Next if the conferencing stage.  I have done this before, but I made it optional.  It is hard even after reading how important this stage is, to know and how will I meet with 100 plus students...anyways...there are many different types of conferencing.  These conferences are "short, informal...to talk with children abut their writing or to help them solve a problem related to writing" (Tompkins, 2008, p.77).  I think I would use on-the-spot and drafting a lot in a social studies classroom.  I think that many of my students I have had have trouble brain storming and getting their ideas on the paper.  Conferencing would be a great way to over come that in my classroom.  

I love the idea of collecting writing samples and I am not sure why we don't have this in our secondary classrooms.  We are taught that learning and writing are processes, but why do we assess only once?  I think that if I am able too, I will try to have my students create writing folders in which they can see their writing progress...

More and more as I learn about writing as a process, the more and more does our assessment standards need to reflect this. One time only writing tasks create this fear about writing.  Ask any author...they write their bestsellers over and over until they are perfected...shouldn't our classrooms reflect that notion?  I think so...