The On-Demand Writing Assessment…

Gathering data is an important part of the reading and writing workshop. In reading, part of the data we collect is through our benchmark assessments. We give these benchmark assessments, analyze them, look for what each student is doing in decoding words and reading with fluency and comprehending what they are reading. We make notes of what they are doing and we make notes of what they are struggling with so that we have an entry point into conferring and goal-setting with students. We want this goal-setting to be purposeful, transferable and long-lasting so it helps us as teachers to have a “profile” of sorts to start our work with. As the year progresses and our readers progress, we repeat this process many times over in different formats so that our students can continue to push themselves and make reading growth.

In writing, we can use a similar process by using on-demand assessments to help us create student writing “profiles” that can serve a similar purpose. In her book Writing Pathways Lucy Calkins includes an important section on the on-demand performance assessment. She includes some important tips and purposes for using this method that I thought might be helpful as we continue to navigate writer’s workshop using the units of study. Below I have included a few bullet points to emphasize each of the important areas covered by Calkins.

The Rationale

• using on-demand pieces as a way to assess writers emphasizes the fact that we are not aiming to produce great pieces of writing BUT are aiming to produce great writers
• there is great significance is assessing your students and your teaching on the basis of pieces students produce on their own, on the spot
• by knowing that your writers will be assessed on what they can do independently, you and your colleagues will work even harder to get your students to transfer and apply the learning they are doing with your support during the writing workshop to new writing work that you aren’t supporting them on
• on-demand assessments give students a chance to show off what they know how to do as writers and it offers teachers the chance to evaluate the “stickiness” of their teaching (p.20) 

The Logistics

• give an on-demand at the beginning of the year to get a baseline on your students (it is wise to do one in all three genres required by the Common Core at the beginning and end of the year so you can compare a year’s growth in each genre)
• give an on-demand assessment at the end of each narrative unit, at the end of each information unit, at the end of each opinion unit
• use one writing workshop period to give the assessment
• once you collect the assessments, read through them and take notes that will allow you to set goals for whole-class instruction, small-group instruction, and one-on-one conferring instruction…these are meant to show just where each of your students is at in a particular genre of writing and then allow the results to inform your instruction accordingly
• all these assessments can provide comparative data so you can track student growth across the units, across the year, and from one year to the next

The Prompt

• the prompts suggested in the book are set up to be consistent at the K-8 level with specific reminders for the K-2 level and then more advanced reminders for the 3-8 level
• there are three different prompts…one for each of the genres required in the common core
• as students are writing, the teacher should be observing and taking note of things like…who is having trouble coming up with an idea, who stays engaged the entire time, who spends a lot of time planning, who does a lot of starting and stopping…this data can then be a basis for whole-class, small-group, or individual teaching
• by leaving the prompt open-ended, you are emphasizing the important belief, and workshop tenet, that coming up with a topic, then narrowing its scope, and expressing it clearly, are skills that are crucial to the writing process…as Lucy states “Topic choice and development, therefore, are in the hands of students for deliberate reasons” (p. 22)

The Payoff

• the assessment is simple and is not time-consuming…no need to come up with a different prompt per grade level, per genre
• this one assessment provides you with baseline data for each of your students
• you can use these assessments to help students learn to self-assess and set goals for themselves
• once baseline data are collected, teachers can begin to study where students are and where they need to go

Of course this is not the only writing you will be assessing, but it is a critical part of your assessment process in the writing workshop. For your next unit of study, try giving an on-demand assessment the day before the start of the unit (if you have the Writing Pathways book you can find the language for these prompts within each genre section) and then give the same exact prompt the day after your celebration for the unit. Then look across the two pieces and not only look to see what each student has learned to do during the unit but also use the pieces as your own self-reflection tools. You can read these pieces with the questioning lens of What might I do differently next time? How should I adjust my teaching moving forward? What teaching did I do that was “sticky” enough and what needs more attention?  

Until next time…Happy Teaching!