Following the same format as his previous book, What Every Elementary Teacher Needs to Know About Reading Tests, Charles provides a host of strategies and activities for mastering test items across all of the commonly assessed reading standards. He demonstrates how students can learn the language of tests and apply their knowledge on test day.
This is a resource that you’ll turn to again and again as you integrate test prep into everyday reading work, enhancing your teaching of vocabulary development, literary techniques, interpretation, comprehension, and more. It’s available now, and you can preview the whole book online.
Author Rick Wormeli (Metaphors & Analogies, Differentiation) has become concerned with growing criticism of differentiated instruction, particularly from recently published books and articles by Mike Schmoker (Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning) and Daniel Willingham (Why Don’t Students Like School?).
He explains: “Some administrators are telling me that their teachers refuse to implement differentiated instruction or don’t give credence to seminars and books on the topic because of the arguments put forth by Schmoker, Willingham, and others who’ve jumped on their bandwagon.”
In the October issue of Middle Ground magazine, Rick responds to what he views as a mischaracterization of differentiated instruction, especially the generalization of “learning styles” criticisms to the breadth of DI. You can read Rick’s article here.
You can read Mike Schmoker’s September 2010 EdWeek commentary, “When Pedagogic Fads Trump Priorities,” here.
Cris Tovani and her instructional coach Sam Bennett sat down recently to talk about Cris’s new book So What Do They Really Know? Assessment That Informs Teaching and Learning. Watch Part I of their conversation where they discuss what the relevant research on formative assessment looks like in the classroom and the importance of students leaving a track of their thinking every day.
If you struggle with setting up your gradebook or feel like there should be an easier – and better – way of grading, then Rick Wormeli has some sound advice for you! Check out this, and other great videos with Rick on our website dedicated to his book Fair Isn’t Always Equal.
We have been regularly updating the special section of the Stenhouse website dedicated to Rick Wormeli’s book Fair Isn’t Always Equal. After a FREE registration, you will find a wealth of resources assembled by Rick to answer all of your questions about assessing and grading in the differentiated classroom.
In the latest video we posted, Rick discusses how to set up gradebooks:
You can also send your questions to Rick by e-mailing him. He will not be able to answer all e-mails, but check back on our Q&A page to see if your question has been answered.
Looking for support in improving assessment and grading in your school or classroom? Rick Wormeli has created a collection of resources that teachers, administrators, parents, and policymakers can use to tap into the principles and strategies in his best-selling book Fair Isn’t Always Equal.
The free collection, hosted by Stenhouse, features two extensive chapter-by-chapter study guides for Fair Isn’t Always Equal. One is for book study facilitators and includes tips on how to handle difficult conversations about controversial topics; the other is for teachers to use independently or in small groups.
You’ll also find videos and articles in which Rick addresses key issues such as late work and collaborating with faculty members who have different views about assessment and grading. Presently there are three videos:
“Affecting Change” offers advice for leaders on managing change with their staff.
In “Standards-Based Grading” Rick argues against the practice of assigning a zero as the lowest F on a hundred-point scale.
“On Late Work” explains why assigning a failing grade for a missed deadline is not the most constructive way of helping students improve their work habits.
More videos, articles, and podcasts will be added in the coming weeks.
Finally, a Q&A section shares real questions about assessment and grading that Rick has received from educators all over the world, along with his responses.
“Rubrics are a popular approach for focusing learning and for assessing and reporting student achievement,” writes Rick Wormeli is his recent book Fair Isn’t Always Equal: Assessing and Grading in the Differentiated Classroom. “Designing rubrics may be more complex than teachers realize,” Rick continues, “however, but we get better at it with each one we do.” And to help with that practice, he outlines seven steps to designing an effective, useful rubric.
How to Design a Rubric
1. Identify the essential and enduring content and skills you will expect students to demonstrate. Be specific.
2. Identify what qualifies as acceptable evidence that students have mastered content and skills. This will usually be your summative assessments and from these, you can create your pre-assessments.
3. Write a descriptor for the highest performance possible. This usually begins with the standard you’re trying to address. Be very specific, and be willing to adjust this descriptor as you generate the other levels of performance and as you teach the same unit over multiple years. Remember, there is no such thing as the perfect rubric. We will more than likely adjust rubrics every year they’re used.
4. At this point, you’ll have to make a decision: holistic or analytic? If you want to assess content and skills within the larger topic being addressed, go with analytic rubrics. They break tasks and concepts down for students so that they are assessed in each area. Analytical rubrics also require you to consider the relative weights (influences) of different elements. For example, in an essay, if “Quality of the Ideas” is more important than “Correct Spelling,” then it gets more influence in the final score. If you want to keep everything as a whole, go with holistic rubrics. Holistic rubrics take less time to use while grading, but they don’t provide as much specific feedback to students. In some cases, though, the difference in feedback is minor, and the work inherent with an analytical rubric doesn’t warrant the extra time it takes to design and use, especially at the secondary level where teachers can serve more than 200 students.
Another way of looking at the difference is this: The more analytic and detailed the rubric, the more subjective the scores can be.
The more gradations and shades of gray in a rubric, the more the score is up to the discretion of the teacher and is likely to differ from teacher to teacher, and even from day to day. The more holistic the rubric, the fewer the gradations and shades of gray and thereby, the more objective and reliable the scores can be. Of course, the more detailed the rubric, the more specific feedback we get for both teacher and student. It’s very rare to generate a rubric that is highly detailed and analytical while remaining objective and reliable teacher to teacher and over time.
Here are two examples: In a holistic rubric, we might ask students to write an expository paragraph, and the descriptor for the highest score lists all the required elements and attributes. With the same task in an analytical rubric, however, we create separate rubrics (levels of accomplishment with descriptors) within the larger one for each subset of skills, all outlined in one chart. In this case, the rubric might address: Content, Punctuation and Usage, Supportive Details, Organization, Accuracy, and Use of Relevant Information.
In a chemistry class’s holistic rubric, we might ask students to create a drawing and explanation of atoms, and the descriptor for the highest score lists all the features we want them to identify accurately. With the same task using an analytical rubric, however, we create separate rubrics for each subset of features—Anatomical Features: protons, neutrons, electrons and their ceaseless motion, ions, valence; Periodic Chart Identifiers: atomic number, mass number, period; Relationships and Bonds with Other Atoms: isotopes, molecules, shielding, metal/non-metal/metalloid families, bonds (covalent, ionic, and metallic).
Remember how powerful this becomes when students help design the rubric themselves. After working with a few rubrics that you design, make sure to give students the opportunity to design one. Determining what’s important in the lesson moves that knowledge to the front of students’ minds, where they can access it while they’re working. This happens when they have a chance to create the criteria with which their performances will be assessed.
5. Determine your label for each level of the rubric. Consider using three, four, or six levels instead of five for two reasons: 1) They are flexible and easily allow for gradations within each one, and 2) a five-level tiering quickly equates in most students’ and parents’ minds to letter grades (A, B, C, D, F) and such assumptions come with associative interpretations—the third level down is average or poor, depending on the community, for instance. The following list shows collections of successful rubric descriptor labels. Though most are written in groups of five, which I advise teachers not to use, they are provided in such groupings because that is what educators most commonly find on their district assessments. Look at the list’s entries as a sample reservoir of word choices.
Exceeds standard, meets standard, making progress, getting started, no attempt
Exemplary, competent, satisfactory, inadequate, unable to begin effectively, no attempt
Descriptor terms need to be parallel; it’s important to keep the part of speech consistent. Use all adjectives or all adverbs, for example, not a mixture of parts of speech. Notice how this sequence on a rubric could be awkward for assessment and confusing to students:
Top, adequately, average, poorly, zero
6. Write your descriptors for each level, keeping in mind what you’ll accept as evidence of mastery. Once again, be specific, but understand that there is no perfect rubric. Alternative: Focus on the highest performance descriptor, writing it out in detail, and then indicate relative degrees of accomplishment for each of the other levels. For example, scoring 3.5 on a 5.0 rubric would indicate adequate understanding but with significant errors in some places. The places of confusion would be circled for the student in the main descriptor for the 5.0 level.
In my own teaching experience, this alternative has great merit. When students are given full descriptions for each level of a rubric, many of them steer themselves toward the second or third level’s requirements. They reason that there’s no need to be “exemplary”— the top level—when they’d be happy with the label “good” or “satisfactory.” These students either don’t believe themselves capable of achieving the top score’s criteria, or they see the requirements as too much work when compared with the lower level’s requirements. To lessen the workload, they are willing to settle for the lower-level score.
Don’t let them do this; don’t let them lose sight of full mastery. When all that is provided to students is the detailed description of full mastery, they focus on those requirements—it’s the only vision they have. All of their efforts rally around those criteria and, as a result, they achieve more of it.
7. “Test drive” the rubric with real student products. See whether it accounts for the variable responses students make, ensuring those who demonstrate mastery get high scores and those who don’t demonstrate mastery earn lower scores. Ask yourself: “Does this rubric provide enough feedback to students to help them grow? Does it assess what I want it to assess? Does it help me make instructional decisions regarding students’ learning?” If it doesn’t do one or more of these things, the rubric may need to be reworked.
In this age of testing, school campuses with a history of performing well on high-stakes tests may get through the first month of a new school year without a single mention of “the test”—they very well may make it through the fall and winter without mentions of an upcoming spring assessment. That’s refreshing, because the sad truth is that this will not likely be the case for the school campuses that have been deemed “low performing” by recent test results; instead, anxiety is felt on these campuses and preparation for a spring assessment begins almost immediately.
Teachers know that students cannot do their best work when they are encultured to view “the test” as something to be feared and something that requires year-long preparation via worksheets. Therefore, practices that will ultimately help students on tests need to be more seamlessly integrated into the teaching of reading. Here are some ways of doing that:
Translate “classroom speak” into “test speak”
The language of tests has been called formal English or hyper-English. It’s more like funky English. Certainly, it’s much too polite for the ways in which students (and teachers) talk about skills in the reading classroom. Because tests have a certain way or a couple of ways that questions are posed about reading skills, teachers might want to do a bit of digging around in released tests and supplemental materials authored by their state department of education. These sources provide information about how students are expected to recognize and respond to questions about reading and can be used to guide and assess classroom talk. For instance, a review of released tests might tell you the word “conflict” is used to ask about story problem. And yet you may hear students repeatedly use the word “problem” to discuss story problem. Seize the opportunity to help students cross the bridge from “classroom speak” to “test speak” by discussing that “problem” and “conflict” are synonyms. For younger students, especially, you may have to be explicit about your purposes for pointing out the association. You might have to say, “So if you see the word ‘conflict’ on a reading test, just know that the test maker means ‘problem.’” Embedding test language into classroom discussions in this way provides students with nuggets of test-taking wisdom over the course of the school year and can help students feel more confident about the questions they will be asked.
Teach students to be reading skill “name droppers”
We all have experience with name droppers—those acquaintances who infuse their dinner party conversations with the important people they know. At parties, these people are annoying, but in the reading classroom, we like name droppers! By that, I mean, we want students to label and name the understandings they voice. Teachers often have to model how to be a name dropper. For instance, if a student says, “Paragraph 3 tells about how bats are nocturnal,” then the teacher can label that student’s talk by saying, “You’re helping us to understand the main idea of paragraph 3. You explained what paragraph 3 is mostly about. It’s about how bats are nocturnal. That’s what the author wants readers to know about bats in that particular paragraph.” Because a test will use the words “main idea” and “mostly about” to test the reading skill main idea, your labels will help students learn to “name drop” when talking about this reading skill. That way, the names and labels that test makers use will have become part of students’ everyday vocabularies.
Gather and publicize test knowledge
As students are learning “test speak” and to become “name droppers,” keep public records of students’ understandings by having students make lists and charts of their growing knowledge of test information. Then, closer to the spring assessment, students can review this information so that it is on their minds come test day. For instance, students can create “Classroom to Test” dictionaries in which they “translate” classroom speak to test speak and share them with their peers. Another useful exercise is to have students work together to host a test-taking workshop in which groups of workshop leaders share their top five (or more) tips. Such engaging activities provide a review before a test without the need to resort to worksheets.
Help students build their reading stamina
Reading tests are long. Let’s just put that out there as fact. Even “accomplished” readers, if you will, can have a tough time of getting through the text-dense test pages in the spring. That’s all the more reason why students need time to get used to facing multiple pages of dense text in one sitting long before the day of the reading test! Here are some ways teachers can help students build reading muscles:
Increase time spent in self-selected reading gradually
Asking students to stay focused on one text for a bit longer each month in the fall will certainly help students focus their minds on test passages in the springtime. Try to make the increases unnoticeable to students. (Having great books available in the classroom library will help with this too!)
Offer a range of reading opportunities—and follow-up activities
Reading silently from magazines. Reading a chapter book with a book club or partner. Preparing and reading aloud a poem. Listening to the teacher read and following along. Then writing about their reading. Talking to a buddy. Acting out a scene. These are ways for students to spend meaningful time with texts and increase stamina. Nancy Gregory, supervisor of secondary English language arts in a San Antonio, Texas, district, once told me, “Stamina comes from being fully engaged in reading and being a good reader. Stamina is not built by reading test passage after test passage in test prep booklets.”
Allow students to be accountable for their reading work
Lucy Calkins suggests asking students, before they begin reading, to place a post-it note on the page they would like to reach during a particular reading session. She contends that doing so helps students stay focused on their task and push to reach their goals.
Test scores from a previous year shouldn’t interrupt or halt the “real” work of the reading classroom in favor of skill-building workbooks. When the preparation for tests that students need is incorporated seamlessly into the teachers’ instructional decisions all year long, students can grow to feel powerful over the test instead of anxious about it.
In this webcast, recorded recently with a small group of teachers, Mark talks about how he reads student work “to admire,” to take the focus away from strictly grading the work, to consider opportunities for helping students become stronger writers. During the webcast, he walks participants through the final draft of a picture book by a third-grade student, Veronica, to demonstrate how he focuses on her strengths as a writer.
(Note: this is a large file and might take a few minutes to load. Click here for a lower resolution version.)
“When I think of what to admire about Veronica’s piece, I can do so much more than when I think of grading or evaluating…. When I choose something to admire first, I not only stifle the editor in me but also find ideas for conferences,” Mark writes. By reading to admire, teachers will become familiar with each student’s individual strengths, will be able to select possible topics to begin a conference, and will find possibilities for using student work as a model during a mini lesson.
You can preview Mark’s book online and see Veronica’s completed picture book, along with more of Mark’s comments in Chapter 6.
About the webcast: When you start the webcast, it will launch in any media player installed on your computer (Windows Media Player or QuickTime). Make sure the sound is turned on on your computer. You will hear the audio from the presentation and you will see the slides Mark presented during each part of the presentation.
On the first stop of the tour on the Creative Literacy blog, hosted by Katie DiCesare, Mark talked about how not being an expert on assessment helped him get a fresh perspective on the topic as he wrote the book: “As I mention in my book, I do not take the stance of any kind of expert, but more just a teacher who has a lot of questions about what works for teachers and students in real writing classrooms. I spent two years listening to students talk about their writing processes and teachers talking about their assessment practices. If I had felt like an ‘expert’, I do not know if I would have looked and listened in the same way. I learned so much, and I hope the best of what I learned is presented is practical and helpful.”
Sarah Mulhern, host of The Reading Zone, posted a question from one of her readers about how to manage writing assessment with a large group of students. “My first piece of advice is to carefully plan your instruction with some built in places for you to read short samples of student work for very specific purposes,” advises Mark, then he sketches out a suggested framework through a unit of study to demonstrate his answer.
On the blog Teaching That Sticks, hosted by Keith Schoch, one of the questions Mark tackled was how to stir students away from “write what you know” towards less “egocentric” writing. “My advice if you are working with fourth graders through high school is to NOT begin the year with personal narratives. Try out a completely different genre — maybe begin the year with personal essay or commentary. In my experience for the last five years, new genres bring out new topics, and new excitement.”
Over at Two Writing Teachers, hosted by Ruth Ayres and Stacey Shubitz, Mark answered a question about grades and missing assignments. “Most of my missing assignment issues came with homework,” writes Mark. “Some years, I literally spent hours each week tracking down students who did not turn in homework, calling parents (most of these years were in the ‘dark ages’ before e mail), keeping students in at lunch or after school, and determining fair percentages to dock students if their assignments were not turned in on time.” He then shares five tips for making grading and assignments less painful for both students and teachers.
Mark’s book is now in our warehouse and available for purchase! Stop by these great blogs to find out more about it, ask questions, and join the discussions!
How can you empower your students to do well on standardized reading tests without sacrificing quality instruction?
Author Rick Wormeli (
This week Charles Fuhrken, author of 
