Well, it has been a week and a few days since I (Thomas was there too!) returned home from helping 44 other high school teachers score approximately 4250 student essays. Needless to say, the process was incredibly demanding and rewarding. I am looking forward to using what I learned in my classroom.
The process by which we graded these thousands of papers involved an introduction to the rubric, which is based on the 6 traits, but adapted to the Writing Project by NWP people for research purposes. following the introduction we spent nearly an entire day looking at anchor papers and talking about why each recieved the score it did. This calibration was the basis for beginning the actual scoring. For the next two days, we began the day recalibrating by looking at samples, and then we got very busy.
Of course the evening consisted of shopping on the 16th Street Mall, eating really good food, and drinking fine wine. What more could a girl ask for? ;)
Anyway, the HS room had the most papers to score, and we were done the fastest, finishing Saturday morning before lunch.
Personally, I am excited to find a rubric that meets most of what is important in a good piece of writing, and I know that if I use this in my clasroom (which I will), it will make writing more pleasant for my students and grading more efficient for myself.
Having said all this, it will be necessary for our site to find a way to train teachers in the OWP to use this rubric in their own classrooms. (NWP requires the training before use of the rubric.) This kind of scoring will make collecting data on the success of having Writing Project teachers in the classroom an easy task.
This probably all sounds very confusing. So please ask if you have a question, or talk to Keri about attending a scoring conference for yourself. I know that I would like to do it again!
I hope that the 2008 Summer Institute is going well. I can't wait to hear about it from Debbie, Dana, and Rachel. Go BHS!!!
Take care.
Julie Schreffler
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