There has never been more work invested in a curricular calendar than that which has been invested into this year’s fourth-grade calendar. The changes between last year and this year are too extensive to detail in this overview. Many of the changes are the result of the adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the new at- tentiveness this has brought to informational and argument writing.
The first two units support students moving along a progression of narrative work. The revisions in these first two units are fairly restrained. Some of you may question whether undue amounts of attention are being placed on narrative writing, but we do not think so, for a few important reasons. First, the exemplar of narrative writing in- cluded in the appendix of the Common Core suggests that expectations for narrative writing are extremely high. Your students (that is, almost all of them) will not reach these ambitious levels unless you teach an ambitious sequence of narrative work. These standards are not for the weak of heart! Then, too, it is during this work with narrative writing that students learn to write with fluency, with a command of conven- tions, with detail and structure. Later, all these skills can be transferred to other genres.
A CURRICULARPLAN FOR THEWRITINGWORKSHOP, GRADE4, 2011–2012 3
You will see that after two units that spotlight narrative writing, we recommend a unit on personal and persuasive essays, followed by one on informational writing. The unit descriptions for both of these units are almost completely new, and the units have been carefully designed to take students to the level of expectation described in the CCSS. These two months are then followed by a month on poetry: we’ve re-imaged this as a chance for students to practice some of the work with themes and perspec- tive from reading workshop through creating thematic anthologies.
We’re suggesting a content-area reading and writing unit in May. Students will again write informational texts. Whereas the first time they did this they wrote on top- ics of individual expertise, now they will write on a whole-class research topic. At the end of the year, we return to lift the level of narrative writing through reflection and new text structures in a unit on memoir.
We are aware that you and your colleagues may well make choices that are differ- ent than those we present here, and we welcome those choices. A year from now, we’d love to hear your suggestions for variations on this theme! If you devise a new unit of study that you are willing to share with other teachers, please send it to Lucy Calkins at: [email protected].
Assessment
Who was it who said, “We inspect what we respect?” It will be important for you to assess your students’ growth in writing using a number of different lenses to notice what students can do. The Project recommends you use the continua for assessing narrative, informational, and argument writing, three tools we have developed and pi- loted to track student growth in those modes of writing. These tools are works in progress and the newest versions of them are available on the TCRWP website (www .readingandwritingproject.com). We invite you and your colleagues to tweak and alter these instruments to fit your purposes. We hope they can help clarify the pathways along which developing writers travel. It will certainly help you identify where a stu- dent is in a sequence of writing development and imagine realistic, doable next steps for each writer. This can make your conferring much more helpful and your teaching clearer. What began as an assessment tool has become an extraordinarily important
teachingtool!
You will want to exercise caution, however, while assessing a writer against any de- velopmental continuum. If you bypass listening and responding to a writer, using a continuum rather than the writer’s intentions as the sole source of your instruction, then the tool will have made your teaching worse, not better. Conferences always need to begin with a teacher pulling alongside a writer and asking, “What are you working on as a writer?” and “What are you trying to do?” and “What are you plan- ning to do next?” Then the teacher needs to help the writer reach toward his or her in- tentions. We do this drawing not only on our knowledge of good writing but also on our knowledge of how narrative, argument, and informational writers tend to de- velop. This is where the assessment tool can be a resource.
A CURRICULARPLAN FOR THEWRITINGWORKSHOP, GRADE4, 2011–2012 4
It is crucial that your first assessments occur at the very start of your year. Your stu- dents come to you with competencies and histories as writers. You cannot teach well unless you take the time to learn what they already know and can do. Then, too, if you capture the data representing what writers can do at the very start of the year, you will be in a position to show parents and others all the ways in which they have grown as writers over the course of the year. In autumn parent-teacher conferences, bring the writing a learner did on the first day of school and contrast it with the writing he or she did just before the conference. Having the “before” and “after” comparison makes this conversation productive.
Even if you are not going to use the continua to assess growth in writing, we think you will want to get some baseline data on your writers. At the very beginning of the year, devote one full day’s writing workshop—specifically fifty minutes—to an on- demand assessment of narrative writing, another full day to an on-demand assess- ment of informational writing, and ideally, a third day to a similar assessment of opinion (or argument) writing. We cannot stress enough that you cannot scaffold kids’ work during this assessment. Do not remind students of the qualities of good narrative writing, do notshare examples of powerful texts, and definitely do notconfer with writers. This needs to be a hands-off assessment. The exact words that we sug- gest you say to your students are available on the TCRWP website. You will want to repeat these on-demand assessments several times across the year, after finishing some work in that mode of writing.
If you worry that saying, “Welcome to a new year. I want to begin by evaluating you,” might seem harsh, you might soften this by saying that you can’t wait until the end of September before having some of your students’ writing to display on bulletin boards. Tell your youngsters that they won’t have a chance to work long on the piece because you are so eager to have their writing up in the room. This is why they need to plan, draft, revise, and edit in just one day. The only problem with this approach is that sometimes the idea that these pieces will be displayed has led teachers to coach into the writing, ruining the power of this assessment tool. The alternative is to tell students that this writing is just for you to get to know them and then to store it in their portfolios.
In any case, you will want to study what your students are able to do as writers at the beginning of the year. This will help you establish a baseline understanding of what your students know about the qualities of good writing. Take note of whether students have been taught and are using essential concepts. Look, for example, for ev- idence that children are writing focused texts.