The New Art and Science of Teaching Writing. Robert J. Marzano

       Figure 1.11: Self-rating scale for element 2—Tracking student progress.

      This section illustrates the following concrete examples for writing instruction associated with strategies about tracking progress. (For all the strategies related to this element, see figure A.1, page 156, in appendix A.)

      • Designing assessments that generate formative scores

      • Using different types of assessments

       Designing Assessments That Generate Formative Scores

      Using a proficiency scale or analytic rubric line item as a learning focus, teachers design formative assessments to gauge students’ level of understanding. As a guide to generate them, teachers can implement a variety of instructional strategies from other elements featured throughout this book. For example, they can conduct a concept attainment activity (element 7, page 39) or ask students to write a summary or complete a graphic organizer (element 8, page 46). The detailed suggestions in chapter 3 (page 37) illustrate these particular strategies and how they can function well as formative assessments. As readers go through the book, they can consider other strategies that serve as effective opportunities to formatively assess students’ progress and incorporate those strategies into their lessons.

       Using Different Types of Assessments

      Teachers can administer different types of formative assessments—unobtrusive, obtrusive, or student-generated—to check for students’ understanding of targeted learning goals. Together these assessments formulate a picture and reflect student growth toward learning.

      Unobtrusive assessments, as the name implies, do not interrupt the flow of a lesson as students barely, if at all, realize that teachers are assessing them. Informally and unobtrusively, teachers watch and listen for time on task, group work involvement, or students who are stuck and those speedily finishing a task. During whole-class discussion and interaction, teachers also pay attention to the quality of students’ responses and their engagement levels. For specific examples, teachers can notice and gauge students at work, making entries on a recordkeeping sheet to inform future planning. For example, teachers might notice what parts of the text a student annotates, where a student places a prepared, labeled card on a student writing sample that indicates a characteristic of a genre (for example, thesis, reason, or evidence), a student’s detailed drawing that reflects an author’s sensory details about a character, or the organization of a student’s notes while he or she listens to a lecture.

      Obtrusive assessments are actions teachers take that interrupt an activity as students stop to participate or complete the task. Some are relatively quick and simple, for example, exit slips or cards (see element 19 in chapter 6, page 109) and active-participation activities such as hand signals or response cards (see element 24 in chapter 7, page 120). Others require more intense attention and investment of time for students to address either in or outside of class. After delivering formal instruction on a skill, process, or subject, teachers collect the work, assess it, provide feedback, input a score or notes, and plan next steps in instruction. Here are examples.

      • After leading instruction about how to construct a sentence with parallel structure, the teacher asks students to practice finding examples in a complex text and write their own sentences with parallelism.

      • To assess how well students know the characteristic elements of a genre, the teacher distributes sample papers and asks students to circle and label parts of the paper (for example, in a mystery identify detective, suspect, clue, and red herring). The teacher would also expect students to indicate those elements that are missing.

      • The teacher instructs students to annotate a paper for an express purpose, such as highlighting instances of figurative language and interpreting the meaning. Or, students underline examples of evidence and annotate in the margin the degree to which each piece supports each reason.

      • To determine understanding of content, the teacher asks students to draw a diagram of the digestive system and write an explanation about how it works.

      • When targeting forms of verbs, the teacher provides students with a list of verbs to conjugate. Students then write sentences with proper grammar using the words.

      • After instruction on a specific grammar or convention skill, students review a peer’s paper and make corrections based on what they have learned. They use standard proofreaders’ marks when editing (for further elaboration and a chart of proofreading marks, see chapter 6, page 89).

      Using scales and rubrics as instructional tools allows students and teachers to track progress and celebrate student success, the focus of element 3.

Element 3: Celebrating Success

      Once a strong system for tracking student progress is in place, the teacher and students have a great deal of rich information with which to celebrate success. Figure 1.12 presents the self-rating scale for this element.

       Figure 1.12: Self-rating scale for element 3—Celebrating success.

      To instill a sense of pride in accomplishing goals, teachers orchestrate situations to celebrate students’ success. At any moment when students do well or when they have exhibited growth along the way from one point to another on a proficiency scale or rubric, classmates and teachers can take notice verbally, in writing, or by other means, such as by ringing a bell, standing to snap fingers or applaud, or playing an upbeat current song and dancing to it. Teachers and students can do this for one student, a small group, or the whole class. When celebrating the whole class, teachers—with the help of students—can organize a get-together and invite parents or school administrators to attend. Students can even write about their own accomplishments in their gratitude journals to mark the occasion (see element 32, chapter 7, page 135).

      When celebrating, cultivate a growth mindset (Dweck, 2006/2008) by encouraging students to celebrate the persistence, hard work, dedication, and risk taking that earned improved results for them. For example, a teacher might say, “I see you continued to work hard when the assignment got tough. That persistence seemed to pay off for you,” “It’s clear you got the hang of it by taking risks and learning from your mistakes,” or “You showed that you can grow your intelligence through hard work.” Comments about the preceding characteristics spur learning and contribute to achievement much more than those that focus on praise, such as “Good job,” “Exactly right,” “Superior work,” or “You are one smart kid.” In fact, research has shown that praise can discourage effort and produce a negative effect:

      After seven experiments with hundreds of children, we had some of the clearest findings I’ve ever seen: Praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance.… Yes, children love praise. They especially love to be praised for their intelligence and talent. It really does give them a boost, a special glow—but only for the moment. The minute they hit a snag, their confidence goes out the window and their motivation hits rock bottom. If success means they’re smart, then