The Benchmarking Process

At the last K-4 ELA meeting, the group got into a fairly lively discussion about our current writing benchmarking practices, and especially how we score the listening piece. I've asked all of the committee members to go back to their respective teams and get a sense for where they are regarding how the listening piece should be scored. Before we get into what the issue is though, perhaps it's a good idea to really review what and why we're doing this benchmark writing for anyway. To try to help in this discussion, I'm attaching a graphic I designed to illustrate the three levels or purposes for benchmarking, in this case, writing (Note: Benchmarking can be done in almost any subject area and in the future, as a building, we may want to explore its use in other content areas). Every level is predicated on the fact that all of the students in a grade level are writing on the same topic at relatively the same time of the year.

In the Level 1 analysis, teachers can use the information that they get from the student writing to measure the progress of the individual child across time.

In addition, they get an idea of where each student is progressing relative to the rest of the students in the class.

In Level 2 analysis, teachers within the same grade level meet together to discuss student work. They utilize the student writing to establish a common expectation for each trait relative to the students in their grade level. In addition, they establish anchor papers for high, middle and low student work for each trait. In undertaking this work, teachers at each grade establish a clear and common understanding of what student writing should be at that particular grade level. One benefit of engaging in this level of benchmarking is that the establishment of those common expectations for teachers leads to a deeper understanding of students as writers. It enables teachers to establish grade level expectations and standards for students as well.

In Level 3, teachers from each grade level have conversations about student writing. Here, teachers not only deepen their understanding of students as writers at their particular grade level, but also grow in their awareness and understanding of how students are developing as writers across all grade levels. Level 3 benchmarking conversations enable teachers to establish building wide expectations and set standards for each grade level.

So what does this have to do with scoring the listening benchmark? There seems to be some concern for using the six trait rubric on the writing that is a result of the listening prompt. The problem is that this prompt is very different than the others; it's crafted to mimic the NYS tests and therefore is much more scripted than the others. When teachers try to score the writing using the Six Trait rubric, they have difficulty because much of the information is already provided for the students via the listening prompt and the prompt itself is very specific as to what information the students are to provide in their answer. It is difficult for the student to score maximum credit on the rubric for dimensions of Ideas and Voice. The problem is, that the rubric provided for the state is a holistic rubric (i.e. it results in a single score) and doesn's provide diagnostic/instructional feedback to the teacher or student regarding areas for continued growth. It would also be impossible to monitor and track growth, as in Level 1 above.

So what do you think? Should we use the same rubric? If so, should we change the listening prompts to be more "open ended" so that they lend themselves to be scored with the Six Trait rubric? Is there a way to score the passage on only a few of the dimensions, thereby accomplishing both tasks (practicing for NYS ELA and monitoring growth?) What do you think? Let you ELA rep know, or share your comments here.

Designing Your Own Classroom

I've had a few people send me comments about the "designing your own classroom" link I sent out via the listserv so i thought I'd start an entry here so you could share your thoughts. Jackie Rehberg said that she routinely thinks about the design of her classroom and how it's physically set up when she plans her lessons and shared the following story about a friend of hers on classroom design:

"One of my friends is a PE teacher. During student teaching his supervising teacher did something interesting. He had a piece of paper and a pen. When Aaron walked around the gym (or room) the professor drew his placement on the paper. Aaron was surprised to see that he'd only visited a portion of the gym, and therefor kids. So on his next visit Aaron was aware of the importance of using the hole gym floor."

If you have a story about how you like your room set up or an experience to share, make a comment below. The web site I shared was: http://classroom.4teachers.org/

Looking For Evidence

I was working on our district's professional development plan over the weekend and in one section, we have to expound on how we are measuring the impact of our professional development activities on improved student achievement. This of course, is the two million dollar question...how do we know that what we are doing is making a difference?!? As a district, how do we know that the resources, time, and efforts that are being allocated by the district on staff development, are finding their way to classroom practice (either by changing pedagogy or improving content knowledge)? As a teacher, how do you know that what you do on a daily basis is helping students to learn?

I realize most of you are thinking...that's easy, I have students' grades as evidence that they are learning. But does the work you take a grade on always reflect an increased understanding of knowledge? Could it be that sometimes it represents an ability to complete a task in an efficient manner, hunt for answers in a book, put into short term memory enough facts to reproduce on a quiz or test, but not necessarily a deeper understanding of a concept. So, what other evidence might we look for that would suggest that what we are doing is making a difference?



In our writing classroom, the answer is easy. It is the ongoing analysis of student writing and the explicit evidence we see of improvement of skill from one writing piece to the next. It is the recording of student reflections on themselves as developing writers and the noting of attitudinal improvements as they begin to view themselves as authors. As we pull back and look at our building from a wider lens, evidence mounts as we listen to conversations between colleagues and overhear them discussing writing traits and how they "just taught a particular lesson on voice". And last, but certainly not least, it's the wonderful response I get each month, when I ask for work for the Board of Education room, and much of what I get is student writing (even though I've never specified that it needed to be).

But what about reading? As we begin to turn our focus onto reading in the coming months and years (while still keeping the "writing plate spinning", of course), what will we look for as evidence of a growing community of readers? What is that community like now? Obviously there will be formalized measures of reading progress. There has to be. We have reached a point in our knowledge about the science behind how to teach reading and the instrumentation is available so that we can now standardize the way in which we measure how well a student is learning how to read. What other "qualitative" measures will we be looking for? Students running in to their teachers each morning to discuss the books they've read the night before? Booktalks sponsored by the library or individual classes? "Reading Rainbow-type" book blurbs on the announcements each morning? The possibilities are endless. The work is promising. What are your ideas? How do you measure your impact?



Check out the Education Oasis. It's a web site where you can find a calendar which gives you a significant event for every day of the year. A great resource for finding quick facts and interesting information to incorporate into your classroom.

Getting Kids Involved

I just got back from the ASCD conference. It was a great conference, over 14,000 people there!. I went to a variety of workshops, mainly on assessment and using data to figure out how we're doing (imagine that!?!?). In many of the workshops I attended, there seemed to be a few overarching themes; one of which was the idea that kids should be involved in the data collection and keeping process....at all levels. During a workshop I attended with Robert Marzano, he discussed the impact of students recording their own progress on work completion. The context of his discussion was essentially homework and how some students weren't really "invested" in the process. He cited numerous studies on how students took ownership of the work simply by having them record their own progress on individual assignments and having them reflect on the nature of the assignment and its level of difficulty (or lack thereof) and role it played on increasing that student's knowledgebase.

Another workshop I went to again talked about empowering students by getting them involved in the assessment process (and by assessment, I don't necessarily mean "test"). The presenters talked about involving students in the development of the rubric that would be used to score an assignment, or at least reviewing the criteria which would be used PRIOR to assignment completion, having the student either take part in part of the scoring or, like Marzano, record and tract his/her own progress. Apparently, this "phenomena" has been shown time and time again....when students track and record their own progress and have a complete understanding of what they need to do to achieve a certain score/grade/point, they are much more apt to want to be successful than when they are given a grade/score, etc by a teacher and those same grades are kept by the teacher.

We can extrapolate this research and findings to our classroom for each of our content areas:
1. Studying math facts and keeping track of the ones that have been memorized.
2. Peer/self editing of writing using the 6 traits rubrics and keeping a writing portfolio along with a record sheet of 6 trait progress
3. Just in general, having students keep track of their progress for every subject.
4. Have students design a class rubric for a project or paper.

What other ideas do you have to apply this research in your classroom? Leave a comment to share.

Giving Kids Feedback

Some really interesting stuff....I'm at a conference right now and today I attended a workshop by Robert Marzano (you know, the "What Works in Schools" guy, etc). The workshop was on assessment and grading in a standards-based educational system; very fascinating. One of the things Marzano talked about was the impact of the different types of feedback on student student achievement. According to him, and all of the research, simple tests, where we just count items right or wrong that we administer, grade, and then hand back out to students actually have a NEGATIVE impact on student achivement.

We can improve on that slightly by just giving kids the right answer when we hand their work back to them. When students have knowledge of the scoring criteria BEFORE the assignment, the achievement goes up by almost 16 percentile points. The way I interpreted this was to go over the rubric that you'll be using to score a student's work, before they actually start the writing (or project).
You can increase the impact of this behavior (knowledge of criteria) even further when it's coupled with explanations of why a particular problem (or area) was right or wrong. Again, let's put that in the context of writing. What Marzano is saying is effective is to review the rubric first with the students, let them write, and then, after you have scored their writing, provide them with feedback on what they did well and what they needed to improve upon, based upon the language of the rubric (sounds like a writing conference to me. How about you!?) And finally, the one factor that has the most impact on student achievement.....graphing results....with the students; empowering them to monitor their own learning. Makes a ton of sense to me, how about you. What do you think of Marzano's work? Woudl it work for every subject?

Building Fluent Readers

If you subscribe to any reading journals, or even if you just receive any periodicals on teaching, you've probably been reading a lot of articles lately about "fluency". It seems that every journal I pick up lately has some information about this topic. When we think of fluency, we think of the speed at which a student reads, but we're learning that it's so much more. It's also the intonation or "feeling" that's used during reading and the emphasis on the words. Together, these factors can influence the way a student comprehends.
Simply reading fast doesn't necessarily result in increased comprehension, although it certainly plays a role. When a student has to slow down to decode a word, we all know that meaning is lost or at the very least, interupted. If this happens too frequently, then comprehension is compromised. If reading is "flat" and monotone (even silently), comprehension is also compromised.
Recently, some of our AIS teachers attended a workshop put on by GV BOCES. The speaker was Tim Rasinski. They came back reporting that he was wonderful, sharing many tips and techniques for improving fluency for all students. One of the key findings of the work on fluency is that it should be explicitly taught. In other words, students may not just naturally develop into fluent readers, but rather, through modeling, thinking aloud by teachers, and explicit practice with fluency building exercises, it can be improved. Fluency can also be measured fairly simply and easily. Students can be involved in this measurement and help track their reading rate. This helps empower them and build confidence as a developing reader.
If you have some tips/tricks that you use to teach fluency, please share them with us by adding a comment to the Comments section below. I've also added a link to Tim Rasinski's web site in the links section of this blog.

More on providing students with feedback on their writing....

I had some time yesterday which I took advantage of visiting some classrooms. When I stopped into Pat Hill's third grade her students were in the process of sharing the reports they had completed on the presidents. One of the ideas that I picked up while I was there was how she was providing students with feedback on their work. Pat had given each student a post-it (what would we do without post-its!!!). As each student got up to report, he/she would name one student in the class from whom he/she wanted feedback. That feedback would be written on the post-it. Prior to the sharing, Pat had gone over areas with the entire class on where the feedback might be given. These of course involved many of the six traits. She talked to them about specific language & ideas of what their comments could look like. While the students were presenting, she also gave input (via post-it, of course!). The students couldn't wait to get the post-its when they were done; you should have seen their faces. When the entire sharing session was over, the class "debriefed" on the experience of presenting....what it had been like. Some of the students talked about how they had practiced at home and hadn't been scared. Others, the opposite. It made great fodder for lessons on preparedness.

Noting what students are doing well with their writing, finding areas where they are taking risks and making a point to recognize them for the improvements they've made is a powerful motivating force. One of the areas where we are working so hard and it's starting to show is in helping our students feel like authors. This state of mind has to lead to increased risk taking in their writing and willingness to write overall. This is so important as we continue to create our community of writers at Wolcott St. School.

I'm so glad I happened to be in Pat's room yesterday to see how she (and her students) provided feedback in writing...especially since that's the topic I've been writing about here, but what about the rest of you. What are you doing? Feel free to leave a comment to share your great ideas with your colleagues!
Debby