Chapter 10 focuses on the use of assessments and how to make them meaningful. The chapter suggests talking in your building about your writing assessment scores and deciding as a building and grade level how students should be progressing as writers. I cannot remember the last time I have talked to my grade level team about student development in writing and I don’t remember having done this as a staff either. So much of our time, as I’m sure many other building’s too, is spent discussing students’ progress in reading and math. Even though we are assessed in writing, there is never as big a push in preparation as there is before the reading and math assessments.
Also, as I was reading, I found myself making several connections between reading and writing instruction when it came to writing fluently. Writing fluently, is very similar to reading fluently. The chapter suggests giving students 20-30 minutes each day to have silent-sustained writing time. I immediately connected this to silent-sustained reading time or DEAR time as we call it in my classroom. I never give the students’ that much time to write silently because we have so much to get through in our day. Yet the students do have 30 minutes of DEAR time each day. We have been talking a lot about building stamina when it comes to reading at my school, and now I think it’s time to transfer that focus to building stamina when it comes to writing. I believe that students would benefit from this in both reading and writing.
Below is a picture of writing journal to remind me to give students silent-sustained writing time each day.
Lindsay, I agree that the focus seems to be more on reading and math. When reading about writing fluency, I too compared the practices to what we have our students do for reading. Like the text describes, getting on the same page as a grade level about what is expected of student writing is crucial to development. Creating child-friendly rubrics would help everyone to know what is expected. I found it interesting to remember that the six traits is an evaluation tool to help improve writing – not a curriculum.
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