This chapter provided down to earth common sense about assessment of student's writing.
As teachers, we need to "put rubrics in perspective" and "be realistic and humane about grading". I know I have been guilty of grading too much. Routman stated that 80% of student writing needn't be graded. I know I could handle grading 20% of my students' writing, but is this enough to justify a grade on a report card? I guess my Big question to be answered is " do we need a writing grade on a primary report card? Time spent conferencing with students about their writing is what will make our student's better writers!! The Good Writing Rubric for Third Grade on page 241 is a good resource. I need to involve my students in the process of evaluating their writing. Page 253 provides numerous ways for students to do this and in turn improve their writing skills. Our time spent with Tamara has helped our grade level create our own writing guidelines and mini lessons. I would like to see us copy some of our student's work and create files of writing samples to use in our instruction. I also think it would be beneficial for us to all score the same writing samples and discuss our results.
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I totally agree, Mindy. We need to be humane about grading writing. There is nothing worse than a student having put hours in on a writing assignment and then have the teacher cut it to pieces.
I actually felt pretty good once I read that we don't need to grade 80% of our students'writing. You are so right when you mentioned that it isn't the scoring that will make our students better writers, it will be the conferences and more writing that will make them better.
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