Juli Kendall's Weekly
Writing Workshop Journal

A MiddleWeb Listserv Project

Members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List and other interested teachers are joining together to explore the Writing Workshop and other ideas about supporting young adolescent writers and readers. Juli Kendall, a reading-writing teacher/coach in Long Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion. Last year, Juli kept a weekly journal from her Reading Workshop.

This year, Juli is continuing her journals, but this time she's focusing on her Writing Workshop. Find out more about our project at our Reading/Writing 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.

If you'd like to join the daily discussion that parallels Juli's Journals, find out how here.


Writing Workshop
Week #25:

Teaching Student Writers
to Assess Their Work

If you think it's exciting in our Writing Workshop now, you should have seen us when we got our "new" student friendly writing rubric.

"What's this?" the kids said as we stapled the rubrics into their writing folders. "How come it's covered with words? Why does it have a front and a back?" (That's two-sided to the rest of us.)

I didn't know when I started my quest for a student friendly rubric to use in Writing Workshop that it would be akin to looking for the Holy Grail. It's like the movies "Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail" or "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." Lots of people have heard of it, but nobody seems to know how to find it! (See Journal #13)

But thanks to MiddleWeb editor John Norton, the search is over. While traveling through schools in Alabama, he unearthed a terrific student friendly writing rubric that is easily used in Writing Workshop. It's based on the 6 Traits model and evaluates both narrative and expository writing. A virtual Holy Grail!

This kind of rubric is "a form of analytic assessment, a method of looking at the main characteristics of writing and assessing them independent from one another," explains Ruth Culham in 6 + 1 Traits of Writing. After lots of reading and thinking about assessing writing, I pulled together my ideas and came up with this rationale, adapted from Culham's chapter "Advantages of Trait-based Writing" (page 13).

Why use analytic assessment with students?

Through analytic assessment, kids:
-- Develop a shared understanding of what "good" looks like.
-- Use a common vocabulary to describe qualities of writing.
-- Practice assessing with consistency and accuracy.
So kids can:
-- Get useful feedback to improve their writing.
-- Become self-evaluators.
"The only way to raise the quality of writing in a school," according to Barry Lane (1996), "is to create, share, and celebrate the specific criteria for that quality with everybody on a regular basis." That's what this rubric is all about.

What I've noticed to this point

As evaluators of their own writing and the writing of their peers, our kids:
-- focus on the spelling and conventions in the writing.
-- They evaluate their writing based on how much work they put in to it.
-- They have a very high (unrealistic) opinion of the work.
I think these things would help our kids improve their writing:
-- They need to "develop a shared understanding of what 'good' looks like."
-- They need "a common vocabulary to describe qualities of writing."
-- They need to "practice assessing with consistency and accuracy."
-- They need to "become self-evaluators" of their writing.
So, I'm using this student friendly rubric to teach our student writers to assess, and it's working wonders. Now we're more focused on the qualities of good writing as we work on learning to assess one trait at a time.

How I'm teaching the kids to assess writing

First we handed out the student friendly writing rubrics. Everybody gets one. We staple them into the back of the writer's folders ourselves.

Then we focus the discussion on "Ideas and Content." I use the four key pieces of the Ideas trait, from page 51 of Culham's book, to teach the kids what it means to talk about ideas in writing.
-- Selecting an idea (topic)
-- Narrowing the idea (focus)
-- Elaborating on the idea (development)
-- Discovering the best information to convey the ideas (details)
Next we look at the rubric and discuss the significance of the scores (1, 3, 5) under "Ideas." Here's what the rubric says:
5 ­p; Focused, clear, specific. It keeps the reader's attention.
a) I know a lot about this topic and added interesting tidbits.
b) I showed what was happening instead of telling.
c) My topic was small enough to handle.
d) I can easily answer the question, "What is the point of this paper/story?"

3 ­p; Some really good parts, some not there yet!
a) Some things are new, other things everyone else already knows.
b) Details are general (nice, fun, some, good.)
c) I'm still thinking aloud on paper. I'm looking for a good idea.
d) Maybe I'll write about this or maybe I'll write about that.

1 ­p; Just beginning to figure out what I want to say.
a) I haven't shared much information. I don't seem to know much about this topic.
b) My details are so vague it's hard to picture anything.
c) I'm still thinking aloud on paper. I'm looking for a good idea.
d) Maybe I'll write about this or maybe I'll write about that.

We talk about which score is best, if it's OK to get a "3," and how you would feel if you got a "1." Maria comments, "I wouldn't be upset that I got a one, if I knew how to make it better."

After reviewing the scoring, we read three sample papers for "Ideas" and discuss the score for each paper. (See a great source for sample papers below.)

I use the writing samples for Ideas from pages 41-50 in 6 +1 Traits of Writing. Our conversation about the writing moves immediately to a higher level. Using the rubric as our guide, we're no longer totally focused on conventions and spelling. As they notice what's going on with the ideas, they're thinking more critically about the writing.

Maurice is the first to chime in: "The writer starts out talking about nature and then switches to family. This is a '3.'" That's exactly what the analysis of the writing sample in the book says.

"I don't agree with the book," Divine says disgustedly, "they're too easy on the writing. Listen to this. It doesn't make sense."

I've participated in many groups of teachers analyzing student work. These kids were just as insightful and just as varied in their analyses of the work. We aren't calibrated yet, but it's all coming together with the help of the rubric.

Finally, we select a few responses peers can use "when a student writer is using ideas well." There's a large selection on page 50. They'll use these responses during peer conferences.
-- Fresh, original ideas, thank you!
-- I can picture this!
-- I was on the edge of my seat!
-- Tell me more about...
-- You sound like an expert.
-- You know a lot about this topic.

How will I know it's working?

After all this, how will I know if the rubric is "working?" Well, I'm watching for evidence in their peer conferences (Journal #24.) What they write on the peer conference form will document this, as will my observations and anecdotal records. But there's more

George Hillocks, Jr., has insight into how this rubric will help my kids as writers:
"Scales, criteria, and specific questions that students apply to their own or others' writing also have a powerful effect on enhancing quality. Through using the criteria systematically, students appear to internalize them and bring them to bear in generating new material even when they do not have the criteria in front of them."
From now on, I'm watching eagerly to see how the kids internalize the new student friendly writing rubric in their own writing. Time will tell if we've really found the Holy Grail!

NOTE: The NWREL website is a great source for sample papers to use for scoring practice. Just scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "scoring practice."

Download Juli's Curricular Calendar #7 (realistic fiction) for Writing Workshop

Download a comparison of Juli's Reading and Writing Workshop plans

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