Writing Asessment

After reading through Gallagher's chapter on assessment of student writing, it came to my attention how important proper assessment of student writing truly is.  Gallagher highlights in the beginning about how the main goal for us as teachers is to make sure that everyone improves.  There is always room for improvement in writing and our first drafts will not be exactly what we envision for the final product.  Gallagher's point here is that the focus should be made upon how to help our students as writers rather than place them in the categories of winners and losers.  Gallagher gives many helpful tips for assessment for us as teachers and to be readers of our students' writing and not so much as graders.  We need to reflect positivity and praise for our students' writing but also finding room for critique and looking to help our students grow in areas that they have not yet mastered.

An important section from the chapter that I really appreciated was when Gallagher talks about the "I like" conversations.  This is a great opportunity for students to see the good parts of writing and see where the strengths are in a paper.  Often times students have a lot of pressure and anxiety to turn in writing that will be graded and this might cause them to hold back their creativity.  In figure 7.4 from the chapter, Gallagher gives an example of what an I like conversation might look like.  This involves an entire class conversation but the writer of the paper is kept anonymous.  In the example, you can see comment like, "vivid description" or "nice detail."  For the anonymous writer, they can see the good things in their writing and feel confident in the fact that his or her peers can see this too.  There is so much vulnerability in writing and the positive approach through these whole class discussions gives students a chance to not only see some examples of good writing, but give the writer of the piece some feedback to go forward with.   I see it as a good opportunity to give perspective to the teacher and motivation to the student writer.