Practical Strategy from an Expert

At the 2013 “Reading for the love of it” conference, I was lucky enough to hear Mary Bigler speak about her experiences assessing student writing.

She echoed one of the main concerns of many teachers: Reading all that writing takes forever.

She said that because many teachers cannot possibly mark all the writing students produce, they do not have students write. This, she said, is ridiculous. She argued that just because she couldn't mark a class worth of student writing every day, that didn't mean it wasn't worth doing. Students benefit from writing, and so they will write!

One of her suggestions really resonated with me. To solve this problem she had students write a journal entry every day, but only marked one page of it per week. In addition, she allowed each student to select which page she assessed, which gave them the power of choice.  In a class of 30 students, with 150 entries per week, she only had to mark 6 journals each day. Talk about taking a daunting task and making it doable!

I love hearing this kind of advice. Practical strategies that work, that I can definitely see myself doing in my future classes.