The beginning and Base-line Data

Hello, I know I haven’t blogged for quite some time.  I have had difficulties this year with finding balance in my life.  When I began this process of finding a sensed need for my class and framing it around a question, I was thinking of the first grade students I had last year and the first grade writing curriculum.  A lot of that has changed this year.  I am now teaching second grade.  I have several students who are taking much of my time in regards to behavior management and I need to constantly think of new engagement strategies to add to my lessons in order to keep things exciting and new or they loose interest and behaviors escalate.  Also, the curriculum has changed from first grade to second grade.  In first grade there was an emphasis on narrative writing.  In second grade there is an emphasis on nonfiction writing.  The part about that change that has been difficult is that my districts report card rubric for scoring writing supports narrative writing so, I have had to look at the rubrics for reporting to the district and decide how to formulate them in a way to show a correlation in my students learning and performance.

I have collected and scored writing samples from a Writing on Demand (WOD) that I gave to students the first week of school.  A WOD is when students are asked to write a personal narrative small moment story with a scripted prompt and no direct pre-teaching.  I also gave an eight question survey to my students to see how they felt about their writing and writing in general.  I have also collected and scored students personal narrative stories from late October.  After scoring the writing myself, I had a colleague of mine score the writing samples as well.  We discussed the scores we both gave and the criteria for scoring based on our districts rubric.  This initial data will give me a great base-line for determining later growth and progress around meeting the writing standards on the district rubric and the rubrics the students will help to create.