Assessing writing has always been an issue in my mind. Writing is very subjective to the reader and the writer. Even when a rubric is used to “grade” the writing, I feel that it is still subjective. Most of what we write, we write with our emotions. We are able to tell the world about our thoughts and feelings about different topics. However, we can only reflect in our writing how much we have experienced. Whether our experiences are places we have been, things we have seen or books we have read. All of these things have huge effects on our writings, yet we expect all of our students to be able to take a prompt and write about it at the ages of 9 and 10 years old.
Reading what a child has written can tell you much about a child. You can know what they have and have not experienced, their reading skills, prior knowledge and their personalities. Even when students cannot perform on a test, they can sometimes tell you what they know through writing. Students will often times connect their topic to prior knowledge either from books they have read or something they heard in class. However, while you can tell how much a student is connecting text to self or text to text, you can also see when students are not retaining knowledge and are not able to make the connections they should. In this manner, writing is very individualized and informational to me as a teacher.
I have found in my class, I am still trying to use best practices and show my students what the writing process looks like and the steps they should be taking. (planning, review, polish, final) I have found to some, like any other subject, they take off and do well while others are still struggling with the basics. Becoming an independent writer is tough. Teaching someone to become an independent writer is even tougher. I find it even tougher because the schools are pushing the reading and math for testing, not the writing. Writing is often pushed to the back burner. We have really gotten into the writing in my classroom. I will continue to try to implement best practices and reflecting on this topic.
