Assessing Assessment

Continuing my reactions to Dawn Latta Kirby and Darren Crovitz’s book Inside Out: Strategies forTeaching Writing (for another example, check out my post on the fiveparagraph essay), I wanted to talk about the contentious topic of assessment.  Kirby and Crovitz discuss this at length, devoting an entire chapter to the issue.  They offer up many ideas on how to alter and adjust your assessment of student work, and I’d like to reflect on these ideas with particular emphasis on the strategies I would like to try in my class.

First, it is important to note that these assessment ideas pertain to the assessment of writing, but I think that many of their strategies would apply well to other areas of instruction.  In particular, I appreciate the emphasis on what is best practice for student learning.  I think that all too often, we as teachers design amazing and engaging units that provide students ample opportunity to learn only to grade the end product in a way that has no ultimate benefit to the student.  Inside Out works against this end result primarily by suggesting that we 1) deemphasize grades (p. 221) and 2) involve students in their own assessments (p. 241).  I want to focus on these two elements because I think that they encapsulate my own goals as a teacher.

First, by deemphasizing grades, the focus shifts to the process of learning.  As a student, I highly valued my grades and I got really good at “playing the game of school” where I would figure out what I needed to do to get an A rather than focusing on actually learning course materials.  This did not impact me much in the classes I was truly interested in, but those that I did not naturally gravitate toward ended up being courses I scored well in but learning nothing.  I think that it is safe to assume that not all of our students are going to naturally love writing.  Therefore, it seems especially important that we emphasize progress and process in their writing.  By taking the sole grade away from the final result, you reward students who work steadily to improve their work while simultaneously disincentivizing those last minute papers.

The idea of deemphasizing grades ties in nicely with involving students in their own assessments.  As I mentioned in a previous post, one of my biggest goals as an educator is for my students to be able to assess their own writing.  If they are able to do this, they have mastered the understanding of what makes a piece of writing good.  This deemphasizes grades because the students will not be looking to me (and the grade I give) to know if their paper has value.  Further, I think that students should be involved in determining what makes a good paper.  By soliciting input from students on what they think is most important in evaluating written work, not only will they know what you expect from them in their work, but they will also increase their understanding of what constitutes good writing.

Ultimately, I think that our grading process needs to be reflective of our teaching practice.  If we teach our students to be critical thinkers and value their thoughts and opinions in class discussions, but take off more points for surface errors than we reward for actual content, the message students receive from that grade serves to undo the good work we have done in class.  Instead, by working with students to develop their writing ability and the grading criteria, they will see the value of their work and the process of learning.

Teacher resource: Check out this great graphic on ways to engage/redirect students who are off task! I love the variety of ideas, giving you plenty of options to tailor for each student.

The End of the Five Paragraph Essay?

The five paragraph essay: a dreaded but inevitable piece of writing for many high school students.  Despite ever-shifting state and national standards, the prevalence of the five paragraph essay (FPE) in high school English classes has endured.  However, it seems as though the FPE leaves many students unprepared for writing beyond high school.  As Patricia A Dunn writes in her blog, Teachers, Profs, Parents: Writers Who Care, many college writing instructors indicate that students enter their classrooms solely prepared to write expository essays.  These students simply lack the skills to express themselves through narrative.  

This issue is briefly taken on by Dawn Latta Kirby in her book, Inside Out: Strategies for Teaching Writing.  Here, Kirby indicates that there has been far too great an emphasis on the FPE.  To teachers who protest that testing standards require mastery of the FPE, Kirby indicates that test scores are not the sole judge of good writing, nor should they be the sole aim of our instruction (131).  Kirby encourages her readers to “engage in conversation with . . . colleagues to learn what you and they really think about FPEs” (131), and so that is exactly what I will do.

I agree with much of what Kirby writes (I was especially on board for the third chapter of Inside Out, which discusses building community within your classroom and developing a welcoming environment.  Not surprising, considering how obsessed I am with this website that lets you design your own classroom posters!), and I do think that writing in schools can often become too formulaic.  However, I think she comes down a little too hard on the FPE.  While Kirby acknowledges that FPEs are a building block for basic writing (131-132), she dismisses it as writing that stymies creative thought and even seems to attribute the prevalence of plagiarism to the constrictive, high stakes nature associated with the FPE (132).

In my opinion, the five paragraph essay is a critical writing form for students to know.  The FPE exam is not exclusive to English class alone, and knowing how to quickly formulate a thesis and supporting points is a crucial step for students who are limited to a 50 minute exam time in, for instance, their social studies class.  Would I love for all of my future colleagues to abandon high stakes testing and formulaic essay prompts?  Sure!  Making a portfolio or engaging in some other performance of knowledge is a much better demonstration of mastery than a pressure cooker exam.  However, the reality is that many high school teachers, college professors, and various exams (the GRE, LSAT, and MTLE to name a few) require quick writing that they expect to be at least organized and coherent if not in the FPE form exactly.  To not equip our students for this does them a disservice.

I agree with Kirby, however, that only teaching the FPE and teaching it rigidly also does our students a disservice.  Instead, I would advocate that students can use the FPE creatively.  Injecting humor, description, and narrative into a FPE can enhance and improve student writing.  The ideal FPE draws on both the formulaic and the creative: transition words help keep the reader on track while vivid imagery helps keep the reader engaged.  Organization and formula do not necessarily preclude creativity.  The two worlds can work together. 

It seems as though the FPE is here to stay, so I think that it would behoove us to focus at least some of our energy on learning not just how to teach the FPE, but how to teach it well so that student thinking doesn’t die along with their interest in writing.

What are your thoughts on the FPE?