We
begin with two stories:
Susan: With little fanfare, Oregon’s
required direct writing assessment came to my fifth grade classroom in 1991. I
welcomed this shift from a multiple-choice, standardized language arts
assessment to one focused on children’s writing. I had not, however, foreseen
the shifts that this assessment would force me to make in the ways I supported
my students’ writing development.
During
our first-time experience with the DWA, I quietly wandered through the
classroom peering over shoulders as students began to write. With growing
dismay, I noted that my students, used to a good deal of social interaction
during writing times, were left stranded—alone with prompts and unfamiliar
genres. Despite the instructional time
we had spent on prewriting activity in my class, only one student in the class
began with a graphic organizer. The others just took off writing--without
regard to developing or organizing their ideas. What I had thought might be a
more authentic assessment of my students’ writing seemed forced and foreign to
our usual interactive classroom writing activity.
Educational
materials for teachers regarding this new assessment were few and far between.
I still have one well-worn sheet of paper briefly describing the six traits of
writing that would be used for assessment. I tried to make sense of what these
traits even meant and how they would be assessed.
I
puzzled over how I could prepare my students to do well on this high-stakes
assessment while not giving up instructional approaches and activities that I
knew to be important and meaningful to my students’ writing development. Although
my experiences occurred over fifteen years ago, preparing students for the DWA
remains a conundrum for teachers.
Maggie: A few years ago, when my son was in elementary school, he received a DWA
writing prompt something like this, “You have just awakened to find out that
it’s a snow day. What will you do with
your day off?” This particular prompt
was ripe for my son’s fertile imagination.
He immediately assumed the role of narrator and took us on a fictional,
first-person narrative of his many adventures for the day, including his
thoughts and feelings as he explored the wonder of the outdoors. Missing from his essay were three to five
succinctly itemized tasks with supporting details; instead was a beginning that
went something like this: “I opened my eyes and couldn’t believe what I saw! My world was covered with a blanket of snow. I ran outside immediately in my pajamas,
forgetting my shoes….” His story, as
described to us later that evening, sounded delightful and exuded the
enthusiasm such an occasion elicits from young people everywhere.
When
we received his score months later, we were dismayed and surprised. We asked his teacher about it and she looked
into it for us. Our son had failed to
follow a prescribed format for responding to this prompt. Of course, I could argue that the prompt all
but begged for a personal reaction in the form of a story, but I wondered too
if he would have fared better if he had learned about – and could recognize –
the cues that indicate what kind of genre and expository structure were being
requested.
In the intervening years we have
thought about, read, and discussed issues of writing instruction and
assessment. Additionally, we have each spent time in classrooms observing,
researching, and working with effective elementary and middle school writing
teachers. We have worked to find ways that teachers can support student efforts
to create written products in the direct writing assessment format that could
both demonstrate capabilities with writing and provide meaningful writing
experiences. The following ideas suggest ways that classroom teachers can plan
for and implement writing instruction that go beyond the test.
Writing-to-a-prompt as a unit of study
One
way to integrate preparation for the direct writing assessment with effective
instructional
practice
is to engage students in writing-to-a-prompt as a unit of study (Angelillo,
2005; Gere, Christenbury, & Sassi, 2005).
Writing-to-a-prompt is a unique task that places complex demands on writers. A
unit of study focused on writing to prompts presents an opportunity to scaffold
students’ engagement with these particular tasks, and to help students (and
ourselves) find some relevance in DWA processes.
A writing-to-a-prompt unit of study is
not the same as having students
practice writing to a prompt over and over.
Although practice of processes is an important part of learning to
write, students need to understand features and purposes for these types of
tasks as well. Therefore, three components are important to planning and
implementing such a unit:
Ø
learning about key features, purposes, and
processes of writing-to-a-prompt
Ø
practice of task processes and strategies
Ø
engagement in self-assessment
Learning about key features, purposes, and
processes
Teaching/learning activities in
these units should help students understand what they need to do and why. The
following questions should be explicitly addressed by teachers.
What
is writing-to-a-prompt?
Writing-to-a prompt is a task that
provides unique challenges to the writer. The writing topic, for example, is
not determined solely by the writer, but rather negotiated by both the audience
and writer. Prompt topics can be broad (e.g. Describe a person who greatly
influenced your life) or narrow (e.g. Describe your shoes). In addition to
providing topics, some prompts inherently establish the written genre, be it
personal narrative, persuasion, or expository writing. Like a complex
multi-step math problem, successful completion of a particular writing-to-a-prompt
task thus involves knowing how to think about and respond to a prompt, as well
as knowledge of the genre and formats in which one is expected to write.
For
what purposes do we write to prompts?
Helping
students to understand purposes for particular types of writing and relating
these to their lives is important. The negotiative processes we find in writing
to prompts are founded on social/communicative purposes of written language. At
times in these communicative interactions, the reader wants to know particular
information or understandings about the person who writes. This type of writing
can be found in various settings, including important job and college
applications. Writing to prompts is essentially what we do in answering essay
or short answer questions for school work as well. Students are able to display
their knowledge or understandings for the reader. In the case of state writing assessments,
students need to know that the audience to whom they are writing is simply a
cadre of teachers who gather together for the sole purpose of evaluating their writing,
and the purpose of that writing is to demonstrate that they, the students, can assemble
a few paragraphs on a topic in a coherent, meaningful way.
Other
times, as writers we take the initiative in social processes as we communicate
our ideas and understandings about a particular topic. Our intentions may vary
from those of sharing information to those of persuasion. Letters to the
editor, for example, are responses to certain topics or prompts. Students are
often asked to create persuasive posters or essays around topics such as fire
safety or underage drinking. Brainstorming
ways in which we write to prompts or particular topics can help students understand
multiple contexts for engaging in this type of writing activity.
Read the rest in the print issue of InLand!