Last spring, another teacher and I gathered up notes from our colleagues in grades 3-6 and began the work of creating a cohesive writing rubric for our school that could be adapted by teachers for various projects, with similar lines of focus. It was not easy, believe me.
It turns out that many of us have different focuses, and the way we word things changes drastically from class to class, grade to grade. The rubric project is a push to try to have us all speaking the same language our expectations of our young writers, and also, to provide a line of consistency from one grade to another for all our students.
And the two of us who were working to pull all of the various strands together felt a lot of pressure to represent our colleagues faithfully and not impose our ideas on the school.
We’re still in the process of implementing these ideas but here is what we have so far:
Writing Response Scoring Rubric Grades 3-6
Peace (in the process),
Kevin
Nice and organized. Couldn’t have been easy organizing everyone’s ideas in the way you described!
Just wondering…what about the students who surpasses expectations? My beef with rubrics is that they can keep students from trying something new, from experimenting by keeping them within the boxes of the rubric. Now if one of those boxes has to do with out of the box thinking…that could be another story.
We did have an E at one point, but it was removed this year. I don’t mind. I still challenge those kids in many ways and we ran into difficulties with parents who asked for work samples that showed that we were teaching “beyond the grade level” and what that looked like. I’m not sure if that makes sense, Tracy, but it became difficult to juggle. We still have plenty of problems with our standards-based reporting around student motivation, etc, and now, it will all change with new state standards out and about. Sigh
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