Literacy, Week 9

Elbow describes in his article Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting out the Three Forms of Judgement how evaluating students work can be more beneficial to the student than grading or ranking the student. On page 191 of his article he gives 6 points for evaluating criteria. While reading Elbow's six points of criteria I could not help but see the parallels between that and the six traits for writing described by Spandel which are ideas and content, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. The six points of evaluating criteria address every trait.

In Routman's Writing Essentials she gives model rubrics that can be used in grades 1-3 and give the students a chance to see what they are being graded on and what is expected of them. I really like the idea of having a rubric that the teacher can go over with the class. I think that giving students a clear idea of what is expected of them will help them understand why they received the grades that they did. I was just recently in a 2nd grade parent/teacher conference and one of the parents I observed had commented on how her child is very competitive and knows all the grades of his classmates and where he falls on the continuum. This student gets very upset with himself because he is a lower reader and feels like he is as smart as his classmates. While my teacher never told the other students what their grades were, this student just simply asked his classmates and they told him. I am even guilty of this, I like to know where I fall on the grading scale, and often get upset when I find out people did better than me, and of course feel better when I hear people did the same or even worse than I did. Grading is hard, I have always hated receiving my grades on tests, papers, and homework. Getting a bad grade can mess up your day or even week. I completely agree with Elbow's ideas of how grading is not positive for students and I really like the ideas that he presented in his paper. I think that evaluating student work, and taking the time to like what they write before reading it, and having the students like their work first before they feel like they have a ton of things to change can help make them better writers and make the classroom a more positive place for students to learn and grow.

Giving the students a clear expectation by using a rubric and evaluating their work as well as teaching them to like their work first can make more some powerful writers and will help these student more than giving them a passing grade.