Work in Progress (or the new writing assessment rubric)

The newest set of writing rubric posters

that I'm working on for next year.

I'm still counting the days down...one more day with students and then two more days next week to finish things up. This is not another sappy blog about endings really being beginnings. This is about teaching writing and using the new Common Core writing rubric.

As of right now, my state of Tennessee will only test 5th, 8th, and 11th graders next year. But beginning with the 2014 school year, students in 3rd through 11th grade will take a comprehensive writing assessment as part of their standardized testing.

When I first began teaching, students in the 7th grade regularly took a writing assessment as part of their annual standardized testing routine, so I'm no stranger to the experience of teaching timed writing. However, the new testing will be different in a few ways from the way that we've done it up to now.

The new writing stimulus will involve the reading of two passages. This is where learning to close read will really come in handy. The students will then have to write an extended response of about three pages in length. There will be a whole new set of academic vocabulary that the students will need to know to be successful.

In addition to the new writing experience, the writing will now be scored on a new scale of  1 to 4 on four different qualities: focus and organization, elaboration and support, language, and conventions. This will allow the student to have as much as a 16 on their paper.

This new rubric will allow teachers to focus specifically on certain traits or qualities that they want the students to develop. In theory, it seems that this new rubric will allow students to more fully develop those characteristics of good writing and put it all together for the writing assessment.

As the year ends (uh oh, maybe this is a sappy "endings are really beginnings" blog post), we do need to make closure on this year and begin to brainstorm how we're going to teach the new Common Core State Standards and how we're going to teach writing and reading as one subject~merging the two. We need to remember that just like the students, we're "works in progress."

Melissa Reese Etheridge