Assessing for Learning Workshop

November 13, 2006

            The focus for the November series was Elements of Style, Fluency, and Inference,” other areas of need revealed by 2005-06 benchmark test data.  Hanna Baker began the day with a shared reading/listening to music activity, “100 Years” by Five for Fighting.  She noted that the song’s theme is reflection and said that this is a perfect time in the school year to stop and reflect, rather than doing “fly bys” that don’t improve student performance or retention.

            Angela Whetstone then gave us directions for using the “Walkabout” strategy to review big ideas from the assigned readings.  After randomly assigning the participants to five groups, she put the plan into action.  Each group had a few minutes to record their “best thinking” on chart paper displaying five key questions:

“How do we create meaning?” 
“What are your beliefs about teaching struggling readers"   
“What is fluency?”
“How do you recognize a struggling reader?”
“What classroom practices support struggling learners?”

            When all were finished with their written and verbal conversations, Angela noted that the group appeared most confident about beliefs and strategies (based on the responses) and least confident about fluency, which was to be a focus of the day.  She offered extensions for using the walkabout:  for anticipation guides, review, formative assessment, and active engagement anytime.

            Next, participants were encouraged to share the results of their “Try Its.”  Four teachers shared and thus gave evidence that they were already changing their practices based on what they’ve learned from the WIN training.  One had used written responses to the Conroy and Reilly texts used in September sessions.  One tried using cold text as a post assessment and had great success.  One had used “The Highwayman” to focus on figurative language.  Finally, the fourth has begun using daily read-alouds to get classes off to literate starts.

            Julia Markley conducted the immersion lesson on sentence fluency and how fluency is a product of tone, word choice, voice, cadence, and imagery.  Her text was taken from Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory.”  After a shared reading, she instructed us to jot down what we noticed about Capote’s rhythmic elements, which we then shared aloud.  One teacher pointed out that Capote’s use of present tense added to the timelessness of the piece.

            Julia then distributed envelopes to each table.  Inside were lengthy sentences taken from the unread part of his story, but the sentences were cut into individual words and provided no punctuation except a capital letter on one word.  The task was to assemble sensible sentences and to notice the strategies we used to do that.  The teams shared their final products, after which Julia showed Capote’s actual sentences on the overhead.  To debrief, she sought discussion of the strategies; those included using phrasing (“chunking” information), sorting, logical associations, and creating imagery.

Next, she instructed us to write one fine sentence to describe a personal memory, and to imitate Capote’s style if we liked. After we revised, we then “waterfalled” with each writer reading his sentence aloud.  It was touching, funny, and meaningful work.

            Lastly, Julia said, “Lest you think we haven’t covered any standards…” and used an overhead to list and read aloud two reading and two writing standards at grades three, seven, and ten which were central to the immersion activity.  She then advised us to use text a bit above the students’ grade level and that we can scaffold the sentence building by supplying a kernel (ex: the dog ran).  She ended with a look at the higher-order skills from Bloom’s that were engaged by the activity. 

            Hannah followed with a summation of the activity, beginning with a demonstration of sentence-combining and sentence-deconstructing using published text.  She emphasized the importance of teaching several standards at once rather than designing lessons to teach one standard at the time.  She showed an overhead listing eight strengths of Julia’s lesson:

1.  It is useable and useful for all grade levels and content areas.

2.  It is cheap.

3.  It provides teacher ownership, important as the teacher knows the students best.

4.  It shows connections: text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world.

5.  It allows use of challenging texts for read-alouds (as listening comprehension is highest) and for writing models.

6.  It gives you the chance to preserve wondrous words and sentences in journals and displays.

7.  It allows the chance to “clone” an author’s style (“What is it this author does that makes you want to read his work?”).

8.  It allows playing with language, an essential preparation for solid revision skills.

            After lunch, we were treated to Angela Whetstone’s energetic, entertaining read-aloud of THE WEB FILE, a parody of DRAGNET and nursery rhymes.  She then led us through our “energizer”: a round of “Charades” based on titles of books, movies, or television shows.

            We then focused on strategies and assessments that nurture young writers and don’t stifle them.  Hannah showed artifacts from her daughter Jordan’s life as a writer, noting that the most progress was made when the focus was on meaning, not correctness, and when Jordan could choose to write about her passion for ballet.

            Beverly Jackson then presented artifacts from kindergarten students and from her own high school students.  It was clear from Patty’s joyous pre-school writing compared to her pathetic, voiceless first grade sample that the teacher had effectively killed Patty’s fluency by demanding correctness over meaning.  She showed Michael’s letter about his disgust with traditional English instruction, noting that his letter changed her entire approach to teaching student writers.  She stressed certain keys to success:  building on students’ strengths, providing choice, allowing frequent writing opportunities (always dating papers to gauge progress over time), and immersion in quality, high-interest language in all genres.  She also encouraged her students to slow down and take more pride in their work by requiring all final drafts to be either typed or in ink.  She also refused to mark on their papers, preferring to hold individual conferences.

            The day ended with assignments to read and implement “Try Its” for the January sessions.

            William Butler Yeats once said, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”  This statement seems to capture the spirit of the WIN approach to professional development.  Helping teachers shift their paradigms about standards, texts used, assessment, and immersion in literacy activities is our best hope to light fires.