Judging Student Work: Differentiated Assessment on Trial By Cady Staff

Alex receives critical feedback from Judge Riley as she questions her first witness. Alex rubbed her sweaty palms against her mom’s blazer as she delivered her opening statement to the twelve student jury members in our Lord of the Flies trial of The People vs. Jack Merridew. She was not nervous about what notes I might be taking or the video camera pointed on her. She was much more concerned with the jury’s opinion and the real judge staring down at her who had just called order to our classroom court with her gavel brought from her courtroom. A smile came to my face as I read Alex’s reflection on the trial: “The trial was a perfect chance for me to get an experience of the real court system since I want to be a lawyer for my backup career. Being the defense attorney, the judge told me and the others when to object and when to end questioning to leave the jury suspicious.” My students took the judge’s feedback to heart. “It’s not every day that you get a real judge in your classroom.” It was easy to differentiate when it came to our trial. Students chose their positions based on their strengths. There were witnesses, jury members, a bailiff and attorneys. In their reflections, they graded themselves and wrote critical comments. Gideon wrote, “Judge Riley gave me a lot of advice during the trial. Even though she sounded like she was bossing us around, her criticism was really helpful.” It was the experience and their reflections that were meaningful and I knew the

grade I put into my grade-book was secondary. It was liberating that my numeric assessment was not what they cared about. When it came to assessing my students on their five-paragraph essays, I did not feel so liberated. As a defense attorney in our trial, Alex naturally wrote her essay arguing that Jack Merridew was not responsible for the murders of Simon and Piggy. She had plenty of evidence to draw on to back up her claims after her extensive preparation for our trial. Yet, while her reflection on the trial brought a smile to my face, her essay felt heavy in my hand when she turned it in along with the fifty-three other essays I received. I was the judge now. They were not writing for Judge Riley, the jury or the 6th grade audience that came and watched our trial. My feedback was what they cared about. I scratched the rubric I had created for grading, given to them when they received the prompt, by the time I finished trying to use it to grade the second essay of the bunch. Rubrics are timesavers for some teachers, but for me, I cannot seem to get my comments to fit into them. I naturally give comments to kids in the form of letters, so I have recently stopped fighting this natural tendency and started delivering comments in letter-form to my students. With each essay, I wrote all over the paper, correcting grammar mistakes and making suggestions in the margins. I hesitated writing all over my students’ papers, at first, but that was how I best learned to write my Spanish Literature papers in college when I was struggling with Spanish grammar. So, I returned my students’ essays with the disclaimer that I have always learned best when my teachers wrote all over my papers. I even showed them an old example of one of my college papers drenched in red pen. I told them I would never use red pen on their papers. My students agreed that the color was important. I asked them to please tell me if they would rather I not write directly on their papers. No one asked me to write on a separate paper or reflected negatively on their first drafts covered in ink. One student wrote in their reflection, ““I also liked how you wrote all over the paper, so people could correct their mistakes instead of getting “you did good” and stuff, because that doesn’t help anybody.” Only one student wrote about feeling discouraged by all of the marks on her paper. “What discouraged me was the fact that I had made so many mistakes, but there’s nothing you can do about that. One thing that encouraged me was the letter. It shows me that you care.” Along with comments all over their essays, I also wrote a letter ending with a checklist and a specific skill-based grammar exercise attached. Here are two examples of the letters students received with their essays, one to an advanced writer and one to a struggling writer in my class: Dear Student A, What an amazing hook you have in your introduction! You drew me in right from the start and your whole essay was strong. Each of your strong body paragraphs has solid evidence from the book to support your claims. What I would like to see you focus on in your next draft is making sure that the major claim that you started with in your first paragraph shows up throughout the rest of your essay. How does each murder connect with this idea that there is a breakdown of order happening on this island? How could your conclusion help summarize why the breakdown in order caused these murders, rather than any particular person or event?

You should be very proud of your work on this essay! You are a talented writer! Keep revising and make this even stronger than it already is! Sincerely, Ms. Staff Complete the following items on the checklist to an earn an A on your essay: _____ Make the suggested changes on your essay as you revise. _____ Complete the Comma Usage Rule Sheet and Worksheet for grammar review. _____ Post your revised essay on your Weblog (Essay tab). Dear Student B, You have gathered some excellent evidence from the book to build a strong essay! Your thesis is clear about Jack’s and Roger’s guilt and you prove it well. You should be proud of your work! What I would like to see you focus on in your next draft is rewriting your introduction. Right now, your introduction has all of your evidence jam packed into it. That’s great evidence, but you need to save it for your body paragraphs. Your introduction should briefly introduce the setting and characters involved in your thesis statement. The hard facts and evidence should come later to prove that thesis statement. It’s important to establish your background information first. Also, when you are writing an essay, you don’t need to announce what you’re going to do. Instead of writing, “In this paragraph, I will prove…” you need to just jump right in and start proving it. Keep up the great work! I look forward to reading your next draft! Sincerely, Ms. Staff Complete the following items on the checklist to earn an A on your Essay: _____ Make all suggested changes on your essay as you revise. _____ Complete the Compound Sentence Worksheet for grammar review. _____ Post your revised essay on your Weblog (Essay tab). Both students had the opportunity to earn an A on their next draft (or, in some cases, with their third or fourth draft). That is the opportunity I wanted to make available to all of my students and I could not seem to make it a possibility within the confines of the rigid rubric I had created. In the end,

both of these students earned an A on their essays. On a rubric, they would not have both been A’s, but the work they put into the grammar exercise and their response to my suggestions and comments earned them equal grades in my grade-book. When I asked the students if the grammar exercises were helpful or seemed disconnected from their writing, I got mostly positive feedback in their written reflections, surprisingly. I did not expect to have my 8th graders respond positively to grammar exercises on targeted skill practice. When I met with seven students to ask questions and video-tape a reflection on how they felt about their essay assessment, I asked them again about the grammar exercises. Three of the seven students had done the comma exercise and they gave each other high-fives when they discovered that connection. One student shouted out, “I learned that there are rules for commas instead of just putting them where you want to pause.” Another student suggested that instead of grammar exercises, we should do a new, hip School-House Rock Project where they perform songs about grammar rules to the songs they like. I got excited about that suggestion and so our conversation went off on a tangent of planning out that future project. As we got back on track discussing differentiated assessment, I asked my students if they had suggestions for me on how to improve my feedback to them on their writing and how to help them give each other meaningful feedback. The biggest set-back to the approach I took in grading these essays was the fact that it took me nearly three weeks to give their essays back with the typed letters, grammar exercise and written comments. The students said they did not mind the gap, especially because the 8th grade retreat and our Proposition Project fell in between the first and second draft. I did mind how long it took, though. I talked about the differentiated assessment with my director and she asked me a question I did not know how to answer, “How can you make this form of assessment sustainable?” The students and I came up with some abbreviations I could put in the margins of their papers that they could use when revising. They are ready to use them in peer critiques before I receive their first drafts on their next paper. I much prefer inviting a judge into my classroom and having the students care about her assessment, over mine. A larger audience makes the experience more meaningful for my students and more manageable for me when it comes to grading. Yet, at the same time, giving my students meaningful feedback that they cared about made me feel a little bit like the judge. My gavel was a grammar exercise to pound on their desk, though, my style is not to pound, but rather deliver in a letter. Alex wasn’t nervous when she was waiting for feedback on her essay, but the class was quiet and attentive as they opened their envelopes with comments in letter form, grammar exercises and edited essays. More of my students did a thorough job on their revisions and earned A’s on their Lord of the Flies essay than on any other piece of writing. I was proud of their work, and they knew it. Unlike a judge, it is every day that my students have a real teacher in the classroom. They know I love them and I am not intimidating or novel. For those reasons, I do not like to be their main audience most of the time, but when I am, I want to challenge them and make them work hard like the judge did. I want “my criticism to be helpful.” Yet, how do I judge my own practice? I have found that it is easier to judge student work than it is to judge my assessment practices. In that department, my students are my jury and I must remember to spend time in the deliberation room to listen to the reasoning behind their verdict.