A Very Different-iated Day

from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg

Phew! I'm feeling a tad less like a fraud after a fabulously differentiated day in my room this week. I've been implementing the writing pre-assessment protocol Kacy and I talked about at the OCTE conference, which has lots of choice elements for the kids, a far cry from the "What I did on my summer vacation" style prompt for a fall writing sample. I did have the students all write in response to an Oregonian opinion piece about students taking responsibility for their own learning, but that was the only draft that everyone wrote on the same topic.

Each day, the students had time to begin a draft in a different writing mode. For imaginative writing, I used Chris Van Allsburg's Mysteries of Harris Burdick, a fabulous set of pictures with a title and caption for each, which the students had to incorporate as the story's first line. That book provided the students with at least a dozen choices of prompts. For narrative writing, the students brought in a photo of an event or experience they took part in. It added a level of excitement that they were actually allowed to bring the photo on an electronic gizmo like a phone or iPod. And for expository writing, the students had about 10-15 minutes to read any non-fiction writing in my classroom -- from National Geographic articles, to history books, to teacher resource books, and much, much more. Then they summarized what they had read.

So now the students had four unfinished drafts. They got to choose which one they wanted to revise and polish into final form. We have decided to tier the traits this year, with highest priority on Ideas & Content and Organization as the most crucial writing skills. We spent time reviewing the rubrics for both traits before the revision process. I have to confess that the rubrics are difficult to get the students to engage with; they are so wordy and sometimes vague. At least we only had to look at two of them rather than all six traits.

Before finalizing and scoring their final copies, we spent two partial periods scoring State writing samples for the traits, one day for each trait. We often ask students to score their own work, but without practice, without looking objectively at strong and weak examples that are not their own, the activity is of marginal use, in my opinion.

At last, the day for self-scoring had arrived. After explaining the process, I turned the students loose to work at their own pace. Some students, reluctant writers who had not completed a final copy, were working on that. Students scored themselves and finished at different times. Once they were finished, they began a journal response to a couple of quotes by the founding fathers as part of our Revolutionary War/Constitution unit. And when they finished that, they began to quietly discuss their responses. Four different activities happening concurrently, smoothly, and actively. It was a highlight moment of the school year so far!