Saturday, January 26, 2008
Raise Your Expectations
I think we need to set some school wide and grade level expectations for writing. This seems like a good way to improve our state assessment scores. Setting grade level expectations would establish what good writing looks like at that grade level; however, building expectations would increase student improvement over time. I know of a school that has an expectation that every student has the same heading at the top of their paper. The expectation is started in first grade. Every year thereafter, students have a heading on their paper written in the same manner. The next year's teacher doesn't have to teach it. Just think what would happen to writing, if we set writing expectations: Your story has to have a hook, handwriting has to be neat, did you check your spelling and reread your work. Rereading is a big expectation because most upper grade students don't reread. If they would just do that, students would catch a lot of their errors.
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3 comments:
I like your idea of school wide expectations. Because of teaching a variety of grade levels it is interesting to see what they bring to my room that they are proud of. They sometime share or I prompt them on who taught you this. I am a big encourager so this also gives me the moment to connect to them as a writer.
Tammy,
I agree with your idea of having school wide expectations for writing. In particular, I liked the idea of having the heading for papers be the same in all grade levels.
You asked me about our classroom book, "How Mrs. Richerson's Class Dug to the Other Side of the Earth". We basically write the story together as a class and use a lot of the terminology from our study of the earth and rocks and minerals. As we "dig" through the earth, we identify where we are located and what we are seeing at that location. The stories are quite different each year but still incorporate the language and knowledge from our science studies.
Mindy introduced this to me as I began to teach third grade.
I agree with your idea of a school wide and grade level expectations. This last summer, as team 6 was trying to align our writing yearly layout, we could not find anything that other grade levels were doing for us to build on. I think "build on" is the key for each progressing year.
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