One of
the most common inquiry questions surfaced in the first five days of training
asks about how to assess students on the reading process while also assessing
content, all while maintaining our sanity as teachers. This is the million
dollar question!
In the
spirit of true inquiry and collaboration, we are asking you to share some tips
and recommendations for how you have been able to assess your students’
reading.
In order
to model, I’ll start by sharing one of my assessment routines. When students complete
a Talk to the Text, I always make explicit what my one or two reading strategy
focus(es) are. They are encouraged to do what they need to in order to make
sense of the text, but I ask them to especially focus on what I have selected
to be the critical strategies that piece of text (based on genre, goals,
previous T4s, etc). Then, when I collect their T4, I scan through their
annotations, trying to answer or comment on a few questions they ask, and leave
them a note on the top of their page. This note is in code and might look like
this:
S √+
Q √
C-RW
√
U
√+
In this grading
system, I identify the strategies they have used (S – Summary, Q – Questioning,
C-RW – Connections to the Real World, U – Underlining) and rank how effective
they seemed and were engaged in this text (ranging from a √- to a √+). Students
then record these notes on a chart I give students at the beginning of the
year. Over the range of assignments, they are able to see trends in which
reading strategies they are using and which ones are most effective in each
genre.
This is not
extensively time consuming, but by the end of the 2nd quarter, I
start to fade to student independence where they will self-assess by the end of
the year. We practice this in the 3rd quarter with more peer assessment.
In terms or numerical points, I follow the compliance-practice-expertise
model based on the T4 focus and where we
are with student experience per strategy for each genre.
I hope this model
clarifies the possibilities of sharing our experience. There’s no one right
answer to this question, but with our collective thoughts and anecdotes, we can
put together a more comprehensive understanding of the question at this stage.
