"If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
-Toni Morrison
Why Writing?
After continuous assessment over the course of the school year, I discovered that my students needed to improve on writing. In January, I gave my students a writing assessment based on the story prompt, “Describe a time you were happy.” The students had twenty minutes to respond to the prompt. Overall, 16% of students scored at beginning, 53% below basic, 21% basic, 5% proficient, and 5% advanced. As determined by using my district's narrative rubric. The rubric had the following traits: ideas, organization, word choice, voice, sentence fluency, and conventions. Two teachers scored the assessment and then the scores were averaged. In this assessment, the data showed that students struggled the most with word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. When looking at word choice, 26% were at beginning, 32% below basic, 21% basic, 21% proficient, and 0% advanced. For sentence fluency, 42% scored at beginning, 21% below basic, 16% basic, 16% proficient, 5% advanced. In the conventions category, 26% of students scored at the beginning level, 26% below basic, 26% basic, 11% proficient, and 11% advanced. This data showed that my students needed to improve their writing.
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Improving writing is vital for my students’ educational career. Writing is a part of everyday life. Individuals need to use writing in their professional, community, social, and civic activities (Graham et al., 2012). Students need to be able to be successful in writing at a young age to help them later on in life. Additionally, in 2002 a standardized test showed that 72% of eighth-grade students could not write at the proficient level (Koenig, Eckhert, & Hier, 2016). I wanted my students to master second grade writing skills which would prepare them as they went on in their educational careers. I knew that I needed to help my students improve so that they can be successful writers later on in life. It was my hope that the implementation of writing conferences would increase students’ word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions.
