While most people had the day off today, I did not. Instead my department gather in the early morning to grade and evaluate essays written by the sophomore students. It was a wide array of levels of writing, mostly caused by how the assignment was present.
- In one of my classes, I simply instructed the students to do their best. In another I instructed them to do their best and explained that “multiple-paragraph means at least 5 paragraphs while using elaboration”
- Another teacher instructed the students to “get out five sheets of paper” and told them to do a pre-write, rough draft and final.
- The third teacher did a pre-write with students the day before and has posted a sample outline on his white board while students wrote.
Tomorrow, I’ll be finishing a spreadsheet to really look at how the students did. I didn’t grade my own students ‘ papers – it makes the grading a more objective and hopefully more like WASL grading. For example, the grader will not know that student B is on an IEP for various things, but according the NCLB is still supposed to be on grade level… perhaps having fresh eyes looking at the student’s writing will help us get him to that point.
In the meantime, we did work on coming up with a plan of attack on class-wide deficits we identified. We will be doing a grade level assessment at the end of the semester to see if it’s working. It’s all very RtI of us.
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