Features
NC Dioceses Assess Student Writing to Improve Teaching
For years, there has been a movement underfoot in not just the Raleigh Diocese, but in the Charlotte Diocese as well. It involves hard work, dedication and several thousand young people striving to do their best.
The statewide Diocesan writing assessment is well known to teachers and administrators in the state’s Catholic school systems. It is also well known to each year’s batch of fourth and seventh graders, who sit down for about an hour to write in response to an unknown prompt.
The writing assessment has undergone many changes since its inception nearly a decade ago. Both Dioceses were interested in a way to assess both students’ and teachers’ progress in the area of writing. At the time, a private publishing company was offering assessments, but then discontinued scoring. While continuing to receive training from this company, for the Diocese of Raleigh that meant a switch to the state writing assessment, but this was also not meant to be a long term change, according to Rosalie Innacelli, the assistant superintendent of Raleigh Diocese schools, and an instrumental part of the writing assessment process over the years.
“The state did not fulfill the purpose of our assessment,” Innacelli explains. “Rather than just provide a score, we wanted to be able to return the assessment to teachers in order to use it to improve student writing.”
In 2005 Raleigh began its collaboration with the Charlotte Diocese, which had already begun using its own prompts and scoring process. Janice Ritter, assistant superintendent of schools for the Charlotte Diocese, had developed a framework for the current scoring process while working with the same publishing company as the Raleigh Diocese. Eventually she realized that Charlotte could take care of matters closer to home.
“We thought we could do something ourselves, by developing rubrics and anchor papers, as well as prompts. We formed writing committees for fourth and seventh grades,” Ritter explains. “We did that for two years, and then Rosalie came and watched and they decided to merge the process.”
For administrators and teachers alike, it is a special collaboration, as Susan Parks, teacher at St. Mary Magdalene School in Apex, and a long-time member of the writing committee, attests. “Working with my fellow teachers from the Diocese of Charlotte has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career,” she says. “I look forward to every meeting with them.”
Ritter sees yet another benefit to working together. “It is important to be able to look at the writing in a broader sense, and see how we measure up,” she says. “Are we keeping up? Can we learn from the other Diocese? It is all about helping each other become better at what we do.”
Each year in early March, after a full school year of preparations and practice prompts, every fourth and seventh grade student in the dioceses of Raleigh and Charlotte sits down to prepare an essay based on an unfamiliar prompt. The results, identified not by name but by a number, are sent off to be graded within the next week or so.
What happens next is unknown to many, even within the school system. Teachers from across the state, who were trained (or re-trained in the case of returning scorers) the previous night, meet early for a full day of scoring papers. It is a challenging process, based on a well-circulated rubric, and the room is quiet other than the sounds of shifting papers and the occasional hushed question, asked of the writing committee itself or the administrators present.
Each paper is read at least twice, and scores are averaged to find a balanced final score. In the event that the initial scores are too divergent, a third reading will take place, with a member of the writing committee taking the helm. If one scorer is noticed to be grading too harshly in any direction, a quick re-training may take place, and if the entire room as a whole is not scoring accurately, based on what the administrators are seeing, scoring will be stopped entirely for a few moments.
Unlike many other writing assessments currently in place throughout the country, both scores and tests are returned to teachers in a very timely manner, to be used in the classroom throughout the rest of the year. There are even plans to include comments made during scoring as teachers notice particular patterns with punctuation, spelling or word usage.
It is this liberty to make changes as needed that Christa Rhodes, a teacher at St. Mary Magdalene, and a member of the writing committee, feels is integral to the process of working at the Diocesan level. “Working with the Dioceses allows us to have the freedom to make our own changes and proceed in a way that we see fit, not just what the state mandates,” she explains.
One thing that becomes clear upon entering the scoring room on any assessment day is that everyone involved is happy to be there. Before beginning the scoring and during lunch, colleagues from across the state chat about classroom projects. Administrators check and recheck for accuracy and consistency among scorers. People are proud to be a part of something so positive.
Nowhere in any description of the assessment is a word dreaded by many: test. The assessment, while one way to measure writing aptitude, is just that; one method of measurement. While the purpose of the assessment is to, “determine the ability of a student to plan and write a well-organized essay, which progresses logically, addressing a specific prompt, within a 50-minute block of time,” it is natural that in an era of high stakes testing, more weight than necessary may be placed on the results of these assessments. According to the Raleigh Diocesan office, its challenge in conducting this assessment is, “for parents to understand that this is one piece of writing in their child’s portfolio.” The office also goes on to add that, “student grades are not dependent on this The office also goes on to add that, “student grades are not dependent on this one piece of work, but rather it is intended to help the teachers identify trends in writing, improve instructional techniques and ultimately improve student writing.”
Lynn Magoon, the principal of St. Mary School in Goldsboro, and a long-time member of the writing committee, agrees. “A writing assessment is important as long as people take it as one measure on one day. It is part of standardized grammar scores and student portfolio writing over time. Put that together with an on-demand writing experience and together it forms a picture.”
That isn’t to say that scores are not taken into account. A writing teacher who produces strong scores may be used as inspiration to help others, while a teacher whose scores are not as strong can take that information and seek out opportunities to improve.
The assessment and its component parts will continue to change as necessary. The role of texting and e-mailing, with their inherently informal styles, is something that will need to be examined in the years to come, according to Magoon. “We have to be moving because if we are standing still that’s a problem,” she says. “It’s always a work in progress.”
- Amanda Cadran