Assessing Our Assessments

By the time I reached my senior year in high school, I thought I had mastered the art of writing or at least the art of "faking it" to make a good grade. Every other week, my AP English class wrote in-class essays in order to prepare for the dreaded AP English test. I had become accustomed to making the highest grade in the class, usually a 4 or 5, until one essay pushed me into a slump. I made a 2 on what I thought had been a creative essay about Tess of the D'ubervilles--no feedback, just a few numbers on a rubric and a number 2 on the back sheet of my paper. When I looked at the grade, my face drained. I felt my creativity was ineffective and my thoughts were invalid. I felt defeated. Instead of looking to improve my writing, I shut down.  The next essay came, but all the prompts seemed to demand too much of me. Too much delving into my own ideas; too much thinking about how to change a 2 into a 5. So, I pushed all of my personal aspects away and basically wrote a summary of the Heart of Darkness. I restated the prompt, I wrote a whole bunch of fluff, and as Vicki Spandel states in Creating Writers Through 6-Trait Writing: Assessment and Instruction, I "resort[ed] to survival-skill writing" (Spandel 34). All of a sudden, I felt like middle-school-me who wrote as big as possible to turn two sentences into a half page journal.

I eventually rebounded after an individual writing workshop with my teacher, but when reading about assessments, I couldn't help thinking about all the students who have felt the same way after receiving a bad grade with no explanation--or worse, all the students who simply don't care any more because of all the bad grades their past writings have received.

Writing is a delicate process. We're asking our students to make their ideas concrete. We're asking them to share, to open-up, to be vulnerable. After reading the Hicks PDF on assessing digital-writing, I realized we are also expecting our students' writing to be "an act of identity formation, a twenty-first-century skill that students need to have as they represent themselves across a variety of online communities" (Hicks 107). We're asking a lot from our students as we try to create twenty-first-century writers, yet we're surprised when they choose to shut down and "resort to survival-skill writing." (Spandel 34). 

Reading about six-trait writing opened my mind to how assessment can be used to actually save our writers from the shut-down. Assessing our students doesn't have to be for the sake of recording a grade.   It should be used to encourage and enhance the ideas of our students. If we're asking them to write for us, then we can't condemn every mistake they make. We have to focus on the successful parts of their writing and on helping them achieve more success. If we're looking at THEIR writing then let's "make students partners in the assessment process" (Spandel 6). I think most of us want our students to be apart of the learning process, but I had never given much thought on including students in the assessment process, so this idea came as an "ah-ha" moment when reading the Spandel PDF. The assessment should benefit the student and teachers have to keep that in mind when tallying grades for other necessary reasons.  Not only should teachers create assessments that can truly improve the writing of the students but they should also teach students how to assess their own writing because we (teachers and students) often forget that students are "skilled self-assessors [that] are assessing and reflecting on their own work all the time" (Spandel 25). 

When I hear the word "assessment," I think daunting, constricting, detrimental--but, I'm changing my mindset. I didn't fall into a slump because of one bad grade. I fell into a slump because I had no idea why I made that bad grade. I had no idea how to change it.  That paper had been assessed but my writing process had not. If we begin to assess our own assessments and see how we can investigate the writer instead of intimidate, then we we will be one step closer to success and further away from the shut-down. 

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References

https://21stcenturywritingworkshop.wikispaces.com/file/view/Spandel_Six%20Trait%20writing_pgs.%201-39.pdf/448622508/Spandel_Six%20Trait%20writing_pgs.%201-39.pdf

https://21stcenturywritingworkshop.wikispaces.com/file/view/Hicks_Assesssing%20writing.pdf/448374838/Hicks_Assesssing%20writing.pdf