After reading book club plus, I found it difficult to determine what aspects of the “assessments” and “classroom management [for book club]” are actually used in my placement. As I mentioned previously, much of our academic day is consumed by MEAP preparation; and because of this, it is difficult to picture what a “normal” literacy block will look like until MEAP testing concludes. That said, instead of observing these Book Club Plus elements in action, I simply asked my CT some questions and looked more deeply into our classroom reading and writing curricula in an attempt to find connections.
In terms of assessment and clarity of the literacy standards and benchmarks, my CT has mentioned that she would like to make an effort to make “working towards the big ideas in literacy” a norm in our classroom environment. In my own experience with making the standards and benchmarks a common and well-known goal, it has helped to write the goals in a visibly accessible place (for each lesson) and to say them aloud. This focus on clarity in working towards goals was actually a feature of my TESOL program. In fact, each lesson plan we wrote had to include a language goal along with the content goal and was required to be written in an accessible place (on the board) for students to refer to as well as explained orally. Just as we design our lessons along the lines of meeting clear standards, students should be able to refer to these same benchmarks to mark their progress towards meeting these goals. This in turn helps students to self-evaluate their learning progress within the same set of standards that teachers work within. In other words, we all need to be on the same page – learning goals should not be a secret! I mentioned the “I can…” statements (derived from the standards/benchmarks) to my CT in our discussion, and we are going to try and begin incorporating these statements in our everyday lessons (both in writing and verbally). To her credit, I feel that my CT is very skilled in terms of making her expectations clear (four phases of assessment) - she is very good at explaining the importance (verbally) of being a successful reader/writer and what a successful reader/writer “looks like and sounds like”.
With regard to assessments, the only rubrics/official assessments I’ve observed have been DRAs and a few brief writing samples. Because my CT has mentioned her preference for more “scripted” reading and writing programs, I am interested to see whether or not she ventures to create her own rubrics or writing/reading assessments outside of those prescribed in Making Meaning and Writers Express. The writing samples we’ve collected thus far were mostly short paragraphs based on a writing prompt (i.e. talk about a fall memory using descriptive language). These writing samples have been evaluated very casually using the “six traits of writing” as general rules (not in a rubric form).
At this point, it is really difficult to make any observations on classroom management as it relates to Book Club Plus. We are still in the phase where we are trying to determine which students are at what level. Based on the DRA scores from last year, it appears that we have a group of very low students [for literacy] – one student with a DRA of 28 in fifth grade! We are considering using the Soaring to Success program for book club with these students which focuses on scaffolding reading comprehension, as well as making inferences and summarizing (this program is focused heavily on students “thinking about their own thinking”). In terms of the reading then, differentiated instruction as described in Book Club Plus is well supported by the diversity of reading and writing programs used within our classroom. I hope to be able to draw more connections from my placement as MEAP testing concludes.
Similar to your experience in your class- assessments in my classroom are not really used, or have not been used yet. Informally, my teacher uses the 6 traits of writing to think about and assess the students writing, based on what he reads. However, due to MEAP-- I have not seen my teacher formally assess any students' writing. I asked how he assesses them, and the way he keeps records. He keeps their writing in a file, each student has a file. But currently the only thing in this file is their Diebels/ score. Which is assessing reading, not writing. There is nothing that has been collected or assessed when it comes to writing. The students write often, and are working on the publishing and process of writing their personal narrative- but that has been the only thing done for writing thus far- and nothing has been collected, so no formal assessments have been done. I find it really difficult for myself to assess their writing, because the only thing I have collected for writing samples- are similar to you. I had my students do a response to a writing prompt. I find it challenging with these scripted literacy curriculum because it leaves little opportunity for us to assess our students in other ways besides for using the materials given by Making Meaning and Writer's workshop. I also hope to see more connections to formal assessments and record keeping based on students' writing once MEAP ends.
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