I believe it is very important for teachers to be regarded as intellectuals who can assess their students and respond to students’ needs effectively. I am passionate about teaching writing, and I want my students to appreciate the craft of writing and the liberation it provides to express oneself. To that end, one important source of formative assessment data is student writing.
Let me provide two examples of how I have used student writing as formative assessment data to inform classroom practice:
1) Responding to writing skills:
As an English teacher, reviewing student writing provides insights into their strengths and weaknesses with written expression. A recurring weakness that I have assessed with many students has been with the quality of body paragraphs when writing essays. Students often struggle with selecting relevant evidence to support their thesis, contextualizing the evidence properly, and analyzing the evidence in deep and meaningful ways. To address this, over the past couple of years, I have consulted with mentors, reviewed literature on the teaching of writing (especially Teaching for Joy and Justice), and continually reflected on my instruction. This process has led to the following exercise that I now work on with my students:
Making Your Writing Meaningful - Direct Quote Analysis
By practicing this process with students, we learn to how to access deep thoughts that all the students are capable of producing. Body paragraphs become more robust, and our problem becomes crafting and carefully selecting the best out of how much they have to say rather than not having much to say at all.
2) Responding to writing content:
An equally powerful way to use student writing as data to inform class instruction is by reading what they have to say about the course and the curriculum. In a critically engaged classroom, topics we cover can be controversial, and students need chances to express their thoughts on the content and have their perspectives heard. Towards the end of a unit, creating space for students to simply respond to the following prompts can elicit valuable data about how to adapt the curriculum moving forward:
- What part of the previous unit resonated with you the most? Why?
- What would you want to explain to others who have not had this course?
- What questions do you still have?
Recently, I asked these questions to my seniors in our Gender and Literature course. We had just spent the previous month discussing perspectives on gender around femininity, masculinity, and other gender identities. Any one of these topics could have merited an entire course. Nevertheless, introductions to these topics accompanied with selected Ted Talks provided a meaningful foundation for students to enhance their “Critical Gender Lens” when reading literature. (A “Critical Gender Lens” asks the question, “In what ways does this story reinforce, critique, or challenge existing definitions of masculinity, femininity, or androgyny?)
The responses I received from students revealed a variety of questions, anxieties, inspirations, and perspectives that are important for me to understand and navigate as we continue the course. I read the perspectives of deeply religious students who have a strict adherence to gender as binary; I read the perspectives of transgender students who wanted to learn more about gender ambiguous identities; I read perspectives of young women who saw the importance of men being part of the feminist movement; I read perspectives of young men who realized ways in which their emotional identities have been stunted.
All of this is invaluable information for me to continue the curriculum and manage the relationships in the classroom. To respond to their writing, a strategy I often use from the Philadelphia Writing Project is to select one sentence from each reflection to write out into a paragraph. I will present this paragraph to the students for them all to see the variety of perspectives in the classroom. I know that each student gets excited to hear their sentence when we read it aloud, and it lets them know that I value their voices in the classroom. Going forward, I know the types of topics and questions that would be highly engaging for the students to design lessons around, and I am looking into inviting experts on gender into the classroom to interact with the students.
