Chapter 10 Refections

How do I best assess my first grade students’ writing?  Should I judge their writing based on the six traits – ideas and content, organization, sentence fluency, voice, word choice, and conventions?  After all, this is what the majority of teachers have been taught to be “best practice” for evaluating writing.  I now understand that improving just one of these traits doesn’t necessarily mean that the child will become a better writer.

The use of rubrics was also discussed in this chapter.  Regie Routman contends that teachers use checklists (or rubrics) only when needed because they can cause the teacher to focus on the checklist as opposed to what the writer is trying to do. 

I did like the suggestion of creating a child-friendly rubric with my students.  The following is the rubric my students and I recently completed together:

First Grade Writing Rubric for Mrs. Burdiek’s Class I write about one idea. My introduction makes the reader want to read more. I use interesting words and details. I write like I talk. I do my best with capitalization and punctuation.

Our 1st grade writing rubric

I intend to review this rubric frequently with my students before they go off to their desks to write their stories.  As we are approaching the end of the year my students understand this criteria and the importance of using it to improve their writing.

Additionally, Routman discusses the importance of schools making the commitment to improve the teaching of writing.  I would love for my district’s teachers to receive professional training in writing.  We have put so much emphasis on passing the standardized tests that I feel we often overlook the importance of teaching writing effectively.  Routman states that there is no shortcut to helping students become effective writers, and there is no program you can buy that will do it for you. (pg. 240)  As teachers, it’s time for us to stop looking for that “magical” program; instead, we must invest in the time and energy to develop an effective writing program to help all of our students more forward as writers.

Questions & Thoughts:


I love the idea of conducting the quickwrites (using the same prompt) at the beginning and ending of every school year at all grade levels to document improvement, note strengths and weaknesses, and provide information to teachers and children to improve instruction and learning.  Our students have writing portfolios that contain a beginning and end of the year sample (different prompts) that is passed from one grade level to the next at the beginning of the school year.  Unfortunately, there is no discussion amongst the teachers about the students’ writing and this data is not used to help improve writing instruction.  We definitely need to do more with these writing samples than to just pass them on to next year’s teachers!

Teachers, have any of your districts participated in professional training to improve your writing program?  If so, what has or hasn't worked?  I would love for all the teachers in my building to read Writing Essentials by Regie Routman.  I think a book study on this book would be a great beginning as we work together in becoming a staff of effective writing teachers . . .