Assessment: What's the right way to do it?

Data notebook. I had been asked to keep a data notebook over the course of next year as one of my personalized goals to measure how students might score on our new end-of-grade testing. "I think keeping data notebook would help you to track your students' progress and plan lessons accordingly," says my vice principal.

I pause for minute. My vice principal has been instrumental in guiding both my first and second year teaching. She was not afraid to help me with anything from cleaning my desk and reorganizing(yes, this was slightly terrifying) to getting the mouthy student back in line. So when she asks me to complete a data notebook, I am more than willing to listen to her suggestions. She is a former math teacher so I reason that maybe she has a data-driven approach that will help me to raise my test scores. Because its all about test scores and teacher evaluations, right?

Thus begins the elusive quest for the mysterious data notebook. I begin asking numerous Language Arts teachers who have more experience than years I've been alive. How should I approach this data notebook? Most of my answers are highly opinionated leaning toward the idea that data notebooks were created by math teachers and administration to try and put a number on writing and this can not be done! Who knew I would spark such intense debate? Most Language Arts teachers had no idea how to approach this concept of a data notebook and were highly offended that we were asked to use one. I mean numbers and words don't go together, right? When I finally located a Language Arts teacher who had a successful data notebook, I discovered she had called on the help of one of our math teachers to design this notebook. This led me to question if the notebook reflected true student learning or only test scores and grades.

"I'm glad you kept a data notebook this year. I like to see data driven lessons," I hear at my end-of-the-year evaluation. "For the summer, would you mind talking with your mentor teacher about assessments? I think that if you two could collaborate on how to create accurate assessments for writing that it would be wonderful."

Here we go again.. I'm stuck. I used all my ideas for this data notebook! How do I create an accurate assessment for writing? No one seems to know.

Summer Institute to the rescue! Needless to say, I was pleased to discover that the lunch convo today would be on assessment. I found the articles interesting, particularly one that pointed out writing improvement takes well over ten to fourteen weeks! For the past two years, I found that parents' immediate need to know how their child is doing within the first progress report was a little unsettling. I thought that I had only started teaching. How can I give them accurate feedback about their child when I was still getting to know his or her personality and strengths? I found that other Language Arts teachers also thought this was a daunting task no matter their experience level.

It was refreshing to be able to ask these questions about assessment without administrators attempting to smooth over the need for data. Lil and Lacy mentioned how the best way to help a student is by giving them individual goals, a personalized editing checklist, and conferencing. Lil mentioned that if you do not have time to conference as much as you would like that you can create class experts on a certain grammar topic or literary feature. This way the class is learning to identify their mistakes and be confident that the student feedback they receive is helpful. I found the idea of comparing student writing throughout the year based on their individual struggles would be far more effective at helping students to understand and improve their writing long term than simply keeping track of their grades. I know that once I learned how to identify mistakes that I typically make, it was a lot easier to edit my own paper. I think this helps them see that writing is approachable and more like a dialogue than an hard and fast rule book. I even believe I could use Tiffany's idea of journaling to show students that brainstorming is just as important as the final piece. This concept of comparing their writing throughout the year so that both I and the student sees individual improvements appeals to me much more than simply slapping a grade on the assignment and entering it into NCWise. I think it dawned on me today, oh, this is the missing factor. This is how experienced teachers get their students to do things that I could only dream about accomplishing. Well, they do claim that the third year is the year of enlightenment for teaching!