Establishing Criteria in Writing

I had been feeling fairly ineffective when it came to writing this year. In order to address this area of struggle, Erin and I decided to create a writing unit to help guide students in a step-by-step writing process.

A key part of this unit was a focus on establishing criteria. While this isn't groundbreaking work, it was something that was lacking in my writing instruction and has already had some significant impact on my students.

To begin, we introduced a rubric that is posted on a prominent bulletin board.



Afterwards we introduced how the rubric works, using keywords that appear throughout the guide, as well as levels of achievement that match our reporting terms: Exemplary, Proficient, Developing and Beginning.

Once students had some familiarity with how the scoring guide was used, we marked one story together, the students were then put to work and asked to score an exemplar. Many of my students surprised me. After only one short lesson and group practice they had already begun accurately scoring the story and were using the same key terminology in their discussions that appears in the rubric. Though there is lots of work to be done, I have a feeling that using this throughout the school year that my students will become even stronger at assessing their work and work of their peers.
They were even beginning to assess and score storybooks that we were reading aloud in class using the writing rubric.

To finish, I have already had a brainwave (careful, this doesn't happen too often) and am looking forward to applying this practice throughout my writing units and teaching skills like self-assessment and peer-conferencing in the next few months and next year.