If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It

We just finished administering the first quarter writing prompt, a demand-writing situation used to measure growth in writing skill during the school year.

Up to now, the process for grading the prompt was:

1. Turn the prompt in for delivery to the district office.


2. District office makes a list of dates each grade level is to be graded, and the grade-level teachers who will be attending the grading sessions each day.


3. On the days of scoring, substitutes are arranged for most of the English department.


4. We sit around a conference table with teachers from the other high school, talk about the prompt, the scoring rubric, agree on scoring, talk some more about what skills are foundational and what trends we're seeing in student work, etc.


5. Teachers from each school separate; stacks of essays are distributed.


6. We sit, score, confer around the table, and generally keep each other from going insane whle scoring giant stacks of hurried essays.

It's an all-day affair, and since I teach two grade levels, I'm usually on the list for two days. A pain, but we all saw the point.

Well, here's the new process:

1. Turn the prompt in for delivery to the district office.


2. We show up to the district office as individuals on a specified day to take a stack of essays (we never score our own).


3. We score the essays on our own.


4. We return the scored essays.


5. We receive our own students' essays once the district tabulates all the data.

So now teachers don't confer at all, which was half of the whole point of arranging for us to sit around the table together. We're isolated from each other, and we're paid something less than our daily rate for taking time outside of our regualr duties to score papers from students we don't know and have no interest in.

If you think this new process is less than popular among teachers, you're right. There was nothing wrong with the way we did it before, and although it was tedious, we were able to get something out of it by talking to each other and seeing what the common mistakes and skill levels were around the table. It worked.

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Oh, this morning in the faculty meeting we were asked what we could to do increase teacher collegiality and inter-department conferring. How about letting us sit around a table and score the writing prompt all together?