A common concern among parents who home school is whether or not their children are performing at grade level. But what does that mean, especially for writing?
There are tools on a computer which will calculate the grade level readability of a text. But, is this what we want for our aspiring writers? Is it as simple as running the text through a calculator?
Parents can reference the state education grade level expectations, but these are different from state to state. What if as a parent you want to prepare your child to attend an out of state college? Will your child be ready to compete with students from that state?
Luckily, the government is publishing national standards, expectations that all students are held accountable for. The challenge with these are that they are descriptive and can be interpreted in a variety of ways.
The other challenge is to keep our perspective when evaluating writing.
A common practice for public school teachers is to grade each other’s student papers as a way of staying objective. I am guilty of seeing Vanessa’s name on the top of a paper, thinking about how hard she is working and how much her writing has improved, then grading the paper with those biases in mind. Now, think of the bias we might carry for our child’s writing.
Add to these challenges the complexity of different writing assignments, the nuances each requires to be effective. Language must be used much differently when a child is writing a narrative or story compared to writing a persuasive essay or a research paper. The specific needs for each type of writing must also be accounted for when deciding if a child is writing at grade level.
With all these considerations, there are three steps to making sure your child is meeting grade level expectations for writing assignments.
1. Look at sample writing for grade level expectations. The Reading and Writing Project has sample student writing for all grade levels. The California High School Exit Exam provides student samples and scoring with a clear explanation of why each paper received the score. Reviewing other student writing and how these samples were scored can help a parent to provide valuable feedback on his or her child’s writing.
2. Begin the writing assignment with clear expectations. Reviewing samples of writing can be helpful for writers as it gives them a target to aim for. Be warned though, it can also act as hurdle for some writers who will feel overwhelmed with trying to compete with the example. To solve this, I use professional writers as samples, not other students. If we are working on writing personal essays, I might review Joan Didion essays. By looking at these essays, there is not the pressure to write like Ms. Didion because she is a professional, but we can still use the essay to review for structure, use of language, and conventions.
3. Finally, allow for time between revisions so the writer has time to contemplate changes and improvements. Many of us believed that writing happened in one session. We showed up to class with paper and pencil, were given an essay question and turned in a completed essay an hour later. What a shock when we found out that writers spend days, weeks, months, sometimes years to write an essay. Some of the best writing advice is to put your writing in a drawer for at least two days, a week, or even more before trying to revise. This might be difficult with a school schedule, but writers can write on Monday, then work on reading other writing samples and practice with writing conventions then return to the writing piece on Thursday and Friday for revisions.
Helping writers perform at grade level is important for many reasons: to ensure they are prepared for university, to help them keep pace with their peers, and to provide them with appropriate instruction. By teaching them how to write by using examples, clear expectations, and models, all writers will be able to successful complete writing assignments.
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