RATING THE DISTRICT WRITING PROMPTS

Image by opimentas via Flickr

I will get a bit good natured ribbing for writing this one from the other teachers, but that’s okay – I have broad shoulders .  Today we rated the District Writing Prompt and I actually rather enjoyed doing it.  Weird huh!

We used Maine’s 4-8 former MEA scoring rubric to score the student’s answers to the writing prompt.  Luckily I have used the rubric before as a part of my previous school’s English curriculum, it was what we used to score classroom work. 

The thing is I had always wondered was how my scoring interpretations compared to public school teachers.  Today I found out that I matched up very closely to how other teachers in my building rated the same piece of work.  So I feel much more confident about how I grade my student’s writing in comparison to the rest of the building.

Another reason I wanted be a part of this was to see examples of regular education student’s writing.  That way I would know how much of a difference there is between my Special Education classes and regular education.  Actually, I was fairly impressed with how well my students did in comparison to the regular education students (I can’t take the credit, the test was given 2 weeks after I got there). 

I had a larger percentage of my students in the Partially meets category than my regular education counterparts, but I expected that.  There are some that I will have to really work with and others who showed that they are capable of writing more/better than they have shown in the classroom.

Overall, I thought this was a very critical activity for my professional development in the classroom and to increase my confidence that what I am doing is in line with other teachers in the building.

This scoring session also gave me a chance to meet some of the other teachers in more than just passing in the hallway. 

I am glad that I had the chance to score the District Writing Prompt today, I did learn a lot.  This was to me one of those win-win days, we got valid data to use as a baseline for scoring the student’s work and I was validated in the way I score my student’s work in the classroom.