I guess I should start by saying that I H.A.T.E.D. my English classes growing up. While I loved to read and write, I absolutely dreaded getting any paper back because it would be covered in my teacher’s handwriting with my mistakes circled and detailed. Any book I might have enjoyed was boiled down to a multiple choice test.  When I was in school it seemed everything was graded for accuracy and my grade was the acknowledgement of what I knew or didn’t’ know. The trauma of the red pen loomed over me into my teaching career as I refused to co teach any high school level English class. I even had second thoughts on getting my Master’s through OWP- writing.. me… never!  

However, my fears and experience as a poor (B average) English student, make me a much better English teacher. I don't think of assessment and grades as the same thing and yet those words are used interchangeably. Does every assignment need to be assessed and entered for a grade?  Do you grade each assignment for accuracy? Does every paper need to teacher checked and scored? Do you grade on effort or completion?  Do you grade based on individual student growth? What does a grade even mean? Does an “A” mean that a student has complete and total mastery of the grade level content? But then what happens when the “A” student doesn’t pass the state test or their District standard assessment (we use MAP) shows that they are below grade level? How do you explain this to parents? Can a student pass English because they do all the work to the best of their ability and yet all your assessments show they continue to read and write below grade level? 

I hope to explore those questions with you over the course of the next few weeks. I do believe that I’ve found some strategies and methods which have worked for my students. I believe that assessing student should be varied and purposeful. Here are a few ways I use assessment in my classroom: 

-          Our students are required to take the MAP, a standardize computer assessment, in the fall, winter, and spring. This provides a report which gives an overall score, Lexile level, and reading level. MAP can further break each student’s score into 5 subgroups including vocabulary, reading information text and reading literary text. By looking at these scores seasonally, we can see which specific areas to target for individual students. We can also see how students grow over time. This does NOT impact a student’s grade. 

-          We are also required to give common formative assessments and bring the data to our biweekly TBT meetings. We use a variety of methods for these quick assessments, but all 4 ELA teachers at our grade level are required to ask the same question using the same text. We then meet to see how the students did and share any teacher methods we used which showed success. These assessments are over the common topic or skill we are all teaching and do NOT impact a student’s grade. 

-          For a student’s IEP, I use Easy CBM for reading fluency and reading comprehension questions. I use the fluency and comprehension questions which are at the student’s current reading level which may not be their grade level. I give these during an elective class time, not during their ELA class time. 

-          For ELA, my co- teachers and I have the same writing philosophy. We expect students to write more than we can ever read. Since writing is a craft, we do not grade everything they are writing. We write for a variety of purposes using a variety of styles. We typically provide all students with a completion grade on each assignment. We walk around the room and look to see that all students have written the amount required and they will receive full credit in the grade book. If we are grading for a taught skill, we ask the student to highlight where they showed that skill in their writing and we only grade that part. We may read the rest, but we only score the highlighted section based on the class created skill rubric. 

-          For reading, my co-teachers and I have a weekly reading grade for independent reading. Basically you read… you get the points. Then when working with reading comprehension questions, we use the A-C-E strategy. We teach the students to A-answer the questions; C- cite evidence; and E- explain how the citation proves their answer. During the first part of the year, we simply grade on completion and effort. We use teacher modeling to show how to use the strategy, provide sentence starters, use student answers as models, etc. It is not until the middle or end of the year that we begin to grade students on accuracy of parts of their answers. 

One strategy I’ve seen all over the Instagram teacher world is to create a stamp with universal expectations on it. This would save a teacher time from write the same comments over and over. 

Something I struggle with is having students take more ownership of assessing their own learning. I would like for my students to be able to check their own work against either the teacher or student model and check their answer without having to ask me too. I would also like to think of a way for students to track their own learning over time. This would be helpful for IEP progress monitoring and progress reporting (which we complete every 4.5 weeks).