Juli Kendall's Weekly
Reading Workshop Journal

A MiddleWeb Listserv Project

Self-selected members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List are joining together to explore the Reading Workshop and other ideas about supporting young adolescent readers. Juli Kendall, a reading teacher/coach in Long Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion. Juli is also keeping a weekly journal of her own Reading Workshop initiative. Find out more about our project at our Reading Workshop homepage. You'll find Juli's background article here. Links to many of the tools created by Juli and her colleagues are embedded in these journals. Most often, when you click on them, a PDF file will begin to download. You'll find a list of the downloads here.

Week #35
Reading Assessment:
And Now for Something Completely Different


This Reading Workshop Journal includes quotations from Monty Python, a British comedy group. The quotes are in italics. Their humor (reminiscent of "Jabberwocky" and the Marx Brothers) is sarcastic but laced with enough truth that it reflects the nature of an absurd moment in time -- standardized testing. Perhaps, if we laugh a little more, we'll teach a little better.

Obviously, I've entered "The Land of the Absurd." How do I know? Because, right now, this quote from Monty Python makes perfect sense to me.
"The human brain is like an enormous fish - it is flat and slimy and has gills through which it can see."

Our Reading Workshop is heading toward the end of the year and we are drowning in assessment. Probable indicators, benchmark tests, the SAT 9, the California STAR tests and other mandates are arriving like a military invasion. It's just like the infamous Monty Python scene where everyone marches around singing, "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam."

Recently, we've experienced so much change in our state, our district and our school, often because of the demands of high stakes accountability, that it seems nonsensical. The new jargon is so confusing.
"We are no longer the Knights who say 'Ni!' We are the knights who say, 'Icky icky icky becon loop boing bighow!'"

Trying not to go adrift in all the absurdity, I'm giving lots of thought to the nature of reading assessment. But here's what we don't want, what we know won't work -- just throwing assessments at our readers. In another context, it might look like this:
"You can't stamp a huge lion 'Property of the Zoo!' "
"They stamp them when they're small."
"What happens when they molt?"
"Lions don't molt!"
"No. But penguins do. There! I run rings around you logically."

During the current onslaught of standardized testing, reading Chapter 7, "Teaching Reading Self-Assessment Strategies" by Peter Afflerbach, in Comprehension Instruction, Research-Based Best Practices (edited by Block and Pressley) is grounding me. Presenting "a shift in perspective on reading assessment," it discusses the need to teach self-assessment strategies in reading to "help students achieve independence" as readers. How refreshing!


Reading Assessment - Five Categories

Afflerbach lists five categories for "using specific reading assessment materials and procedures to teach reading assessment" (pp. 102-107). I'm using them to sort out what we are already doing and to plan for next year. [You'll find examples of some of the "what we already use" items here.]

1. Teaching Questioning and Oral Feedback to Students

"Classroom talk is a first promising context for the explicit teaching of assessment strategies, including asking questions of one self while reading challenging text." (p. 102)

What we already use:

-- Conferencing with students
-- Bookmarks for Guiding Questions, Improving Literary Understanding Through Classroom Conversations, CELA
-- Teacher Think-Alouds, Improving Comprehension with Think-Aloud Strategies

What we want to add:

-- Text-Based Assessment and Think-Aloud (Strategy Use Interview), Mosaic of Thought, pp. 228-231

2. Checklists and Observation Forms

"Publicly displayed checklists will remind students to use them and how to use them. As will classroom discussions that are centered on the uses of checklists." (p. 104)

What we already use:

-- Checklist for "Choosing a Just Right Book," The Art of Teaching Reading

What we want to add:
(From Guiding Readers and Writers)

-- "Reading Genres" Checklist,
-- "How to Give a Book Talk" Checklist
-- "Preparing for a Book Discussion" Checklist
-- "Guidelines for Reading Workshop" Checklist

3. Performance Assessments

"Detailed and step-by-step rubrics provide information that helps readers focus on different critical features of their reading performance. Well-constructed scoring rubrics are a guide for students to do good work. Such rubrics help students understand intermediate goals to which they can scaffold their own work and progress, as part of a self-help evaluative routine. Samples of student work discussed in relation to a scoring rubric may help students internalize a schema for increasingly complex self-assessment routines. As teachers, we need to provide feedback to students that is well aligned with scoring rubrics, to provide students with a consistent message and means for better understanding how they might assess themselves using rubrics."(p. 106)

What we already use (see this page to download some of these):

-- Independent Reading Rubric
-- Rubric to Evaluate Literary Conversation
-- Fiction and Nonfiction Retelling Rubrics
-- Sequencing Rubric
-- Summarizing Rubric
-- Inference Rubric, used to evaluate responses in Reading Logs
-- Reading Fluency Rubric, "Oral Reading Fluency Scale," Guiding Readers and Writers, p. 491

What we want to add:

-- Vocabulary Rubric, A Handbook for Classroom Instruction That Works, (p. 300)

4. Portfolios

"The portfolio is ideally suited to helping students develop self-assessment. In fact, the portfolio can serve as a meeting point for diverse reading assessment materials and processes, including checklists and performance assessments. Reading portfolios have a multiplicity of possible uses. They may serve as both repository for reading assessment materials and procedures and a context in which to practice assessment processes. It is important to dedicate a portion of the portfolio to student reflection and the development of reading assessment routines. Portfolios provide students with an ideal context in which to become familiar with and practice self-assessment." (p. 106)

What we already use:

-- Reader's Notebook including a list of books read, evidence of using strategies (post-its, comments and charts), retellings, responses to reading, self-reflections on reading using the Independent Reading Rubric

-- Reading Assessment books (running records, reading conference notes, oral questioning records)

-- Fall Survey--Reading and Writing, Yellow Brick Roads, pp. 281-282

-- Sentence Completions, pp. 283-284

What we want to add:

--Criteria for a Reading Portfolio that includes literacy across the content areas and can be used as the basis for student led conferences

-- What does student work look like for Reading? (Running records, anecdotal records, benchmark reading assessments, etc.)

-- Guidelines for looking at student work in reading
1. What should students know and be able to do?
2. What were students asked to do?
3. What story does the work tell?
4. How good is good enough?
5. How can our inquiry guide further instruction?

5. Paper-and-Pencil Tests

"The more clear the relationship between the daily teaching and learning routine of the classroom and the test, the more beneficial a test may be to helping teach students about assessment and having them understand how assessment and learning are related." (p. 107)

What we already use:

-- Integrating test preparation into instruction following Guidelines for Teaching Middle and High School Students to Read and Write Well: Six Features of Effective Instruction, CELA (p. 7)

What we want to add:

-- More collaboration among teachers

Sometimes it takes a new book like Comprehension Instruction, Research-Based Best Practices to pull me away from my brooding and bring me back around to focus on what works for kids.

According to Monty Python, it's "All in a day's work for a bicycle repairman."

Additional resources for thinking about assessment:


Classroom Instruction that Works, Robert J. Marzano, et al
A Handbook for Classroom Instruction That Works, Marzano, Norford, Paynter, Pickering, and Gaddy
Assessing Student Learning, From GRADING to UNDERSTANDING, David Allen, Editor
Looking at Student Work, A Companion Guide to Assessing Student Learning, Blythe, Allen, and Powell
Understanding by Design, Wiggins and McTighe (Also visit the UBD Exchange.)
The Understanding by Design Handbook, McTighe and Wiggins
Knowing Literacy: Constructive Literacy Assessment, Peter Johnston



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