Kate Johnson

Situation

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Prior to my placement all 24 children in the pre-primary classroom knew all their single letter names and sounds. The children were already into phase 3 of Letters and Sounds (program used at the school) which includes digraphs such as oo, igh, ow, and oi. Children wrote a ‘weekend recount’ each Monday which provided the largest piece of writing the children completed for the week. However, there was no assessment format in place to assess this piece of writing.

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Action

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To assess children’s writing for their recounts, I utilised the judging standards (aitsl, 2017) to create marking rubrics and I also used those as a basis to create a simplified rating scale to assess their recount writing every few weeks. I then assessed their final recount for the term in week 10 using the marking rubric. I also used the information collected from the rating scale to create writing goals for children. I placed them into goal groups depending on their areas for improvement and this was put up in the classroom to show the children and help them remember their groups. Goal setting is a high impact teaching strategy and encourages students to take responsibility for their own learning (Groundwater-Smith et al, 2011). It also acts as formative feedback to students by helping them identify areas for improvement and work to improve them. I also referred to the goals during different writing activities to remind them what they are focusing on. Significantly, as these goals were linked to the judging standards, the aim was to focus on areas that would push up children's grades. I also linked this to our health lessons by having the children write about their strengths, how they can help others and to set goals for themselves.

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I also created goal sheets for children to glue into their writing books. The children selected which goal/s they were working on. We then reflected on this each week. My mentor and I decided that it would work best to reflect on their writing each month and decide whether or not they have reached their goal. If they had, I would write a comment congratulating them and they were able to write a comment themselves along with their parents. This was to keep parents informed about children’s areas for improvement and progress and be involved the educative process. I also had children sit in their goal groups during recount writing to enable myself and the education assistant to provide more effective formative feedback, provide mini-lessons where appropriate and specific targeted support to improve their writing. For example, I always said something positive about their writing before offering some feedback about how to improve such as by reading it aloud and asking, “does that make sense” or “What are you missing here?”. I would take the time to remind them of their goal and support them to achieve it. I also gave ticks when they did things we were focusing on such as a learned digraph, full stop or conjunction.

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Outcome

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My assessment formats for recount writing were very effective and my mentor teacher has requested copies. The rating scale was a reasonably time-efficient way of assessing and the rubric worked well to track children’s progress and show children’s work against the judging standards, which would be particularly useful if this was conducted each term of the year.

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Utilising those assessments to create writing goals made it easier to differentiate effectively and focus on children’s particular areas for improvement, especially those who had reached a plateau with their writing as it gave them a particular area to improve on and something to strive toward. Children were aware of their goals and would comment on how they were “neater” or “look how much detail I have”. The writing goals proved to have a significant impact on some children’s writing. As the goals were only in place for 4 weeks, I believe a longer period of time would result in increased improvement across the cohort. I would like to include more explicit lessons to teach children some of the strategies involved in the goal groups. Additionally, I should have assessed children’s recounts at the beginning of the term with the marking rubric to compare with the rubric at the end which would show progress in a more comprehensive way.