Writing can be a very difficult thing to teach and an even harder thing to grade objectively. Making sense of planning, teaching, and assessing writing is a challenge at every grade level. The purpose of having Norma Jackson come and work with us was to provide you with practical tools for the writing process and to begin building vertical alignment with our approach to writing at Walker Creek. The focus is on excellent writing and not on STAAR. We want excellent results on STAAR of course, but we are really looking at something much bigger. We want to develop life-long writing skills in our scholars that will continue to build throughout middle school and high school. As I listened in the afternoon session yesterday, I thought about two things. If we all have the same framework for the writing process and if we use the same tools for assessment, our scholars will be better equipped to write as they move into fourth and fifth grades. While we don't have a writing crisis at Walker Creek, there is room to improve. I believe this is a matter of getting on the same page with instruction and assessment and not about more, more, more writing. What are your thoughts about the tools from the Norma Jackson's workshop and how they apply to us?
