Hope sent this:
Hi Ben,
Corinne suggested you would have insight to grading free-writes. What are your thoughts?
Hi Hope:
I learned about bar graphing from Carmen via the moretprs listserve some years ago. We all took what we wanted from that discussion (around 2004 – you might search the list for some of those posts). So what does it look like in my classroom?
I keep it really simple. The kids make a bar graph in the back of their composition books. Each time they do a freewrite (my goal is two per week this year), they immediately count the words they wrote and graph it and date it. The bar naturally goes up over time.
I have second year kids writing pages of words now. What an opportunity for them to experience that feeling of honest accomplishment at something! I really am proud of them. I tell them that. I ask them to let me read what they wrote to the class. I sometimes make an entire class of CI around what I see. Like Jim said recently here, the best stuff seems to always come from stuff they make up (a lot of that came out of Alaska – Michele and Jenny).
How to get the bar graphs into the grade book? On improvement! If the graphs go up (and they always do because free writes actually, for real, result in very concrete gains in the same way that reading results in very concrete gains) then that is reflected in the grade book. (as long as they are not forced to write too early, before they have heard a ton of the target language.)
Another thing I do to feed the gradebook is to just stack up their composition books every once in a while and go through them at lunch or whenever and eyeball their writing and award points out of ten and put that in the book as a freewrite grade.
One thing about the bar graphs that Hope mentioned in an email about this to me is very important to my personal view of teaching – that the child needs to be encouraged at every turn to take responsibility for their own relationship with their learning. Hope said it this way:
“I love the idea of a bar graph because then they are self-reflecting and it’s not all in my hands.”
Not only that, but the graphs give us a way to measure the kid on improvement against their own efforts, and not by comparing them to the kid in the next desk, which, to me, is loathsome and stinky.
Hope this helps. Maybe others will weigh on this as to how they do it, as well.
Ben