The New Art and Science of Teaching Writing. Robert J. Marzano
p. 175)
Hattie and Yates (2014) state that “in teaching contexts, it is more responsible to increase informational feedback while going lean on praise. Students need clear indications that the worthwhile target they are harbouring is becoming real” (p. 68). Therefore, when celebrating success, teachers should judiciously measure their words to emphasize the process of achievement and effort—kudos for engagement, tenacity, and risk-taking—and concretely indicate where students have made growth in their learning goals.
When teachers engage in curriculum design, they consider this overarching question for communicating clear goals and objectives: How will I communicate clear learning goals that help students understand the progression of knowledge I expect them to master and where they are along that progression? Consider the following questions aligned to the elements in this chapter to guide your planning.
• Element 1: How will I design scales or rubrics?
• Element 2: How will I track student progress?
• Element 3: How will I celebrate success?
Conclusion
Effective feedback—the first of three overarching categories in this model—begins with clearly defined and articulated learning goals. When teachers make expectations transparent so that students understand what they are to learn within a lesson or unit, they can determine how well they are performing and what they need to do to improve. Once teachers focus on providing and communicating clear learning goals, they direct their attention to using effective assessments.
CHAPTER 2
Using Assessments
During writing instruction, some teachers use assessments only as evaluation tools to quantify students’ current status relative to mastery of specific writing skills. While this is certainly a legitimate use of assessments, their primary purpose should be to provide students with feedback they can use to improve. When teachers use assessments to their full capacity, students understand how their test scores and grades relate to their status on specific progressions of knowledge and skill they are expected to master.
There are two elements within this category.
• Element 4: Using informal assessments of the whole class
• Element 5: Using formal assessments of individual students
Element 4: Using Informal Assessments of the Whole Class
Rather than formal assessments of individual students—the emphasis of element 5—the focus here is on informally assessing the whole class. This provides the teacher with a barometer of how students are progressing with specific skills along a continuum of growth to inform their instructional moves. Figure 2.1 presents the self-rating scale for this element so teachers can gauge their professional performance.
Figure 2.1: Self-rating scale for element 4—Using informal assessments of the whole class.
Within this element, we show how teachers can directly apply the following specific strategies to the writing classroom.
• Voting techniques
• Response boards
As mentioned earlier, refer to figure A.1 in the appendix (page 156) for a complete listing of all strategies related to each of the forty-three elements.
Voting Techniques
Teachers can pose questions with multiple-choice responses, and students reply by using clickers or displaying fingers. Prompts are based on items in a proficiency scale, such as this one for example A in the list that follows: “Describe what types of details can act as evidence in a text” (Generating Claims, Evidence, and Reasoning 5 ELA, GCER2, 2.0; Simms, 2016).
There are innumerable options for using voting to informally check for understanding of skills related to writing. For example, teachers consider depth of knowledge (DOK) when crafting prompts to require a range of thinking. Examples A through C focus on recall whereas D and E exemplify more rigor.
• Example A: Which of the following is NOT a type of evidence?
1. Quotes
2. Facts
3. Examples
4. Reason
• Example B: Which is NOT a reason to start a new paragraph?
1. Change the time or place.
2. Introduce a new idea or topic.
3. Insert evidence.
4. Change dialogue between speakers.
•