Best Practices

The grading and assessment session was packed with just what I needed.  I have always felt so overwhelmed having to grade writing and this past year was the worst.  Instead of the 100-120 students I usually have with one grade level, I had two grade levels with about 220-230 students.  I used rubrics before, but wasn't sure how to incorporate that into journalistic writing.  Some of the grading best practices I heard from Alan Weintraut and the other participants can be easily incorporated into my grading scale.  I plan to revise it and share it with my students right away.  I'm interested to see what grade they will choose for themselves, if they can contract their own and decide how much work they want to do.


The Journalism Best Practices I heard were equally helpful.  It affirmed for me that I was doing some things right, but it also gave me ideas for what to do more.  "Modeling means they can't be it if they don't see it," said Weintraut. I need to use my easel and my SmartBoard more to give examples, to show students how to do things and explain what is expected of them.  From anticipatory sets, to current events, inverted pyramid paragraphs, and newspaper scavenger hunts, I actually got excited about how to approach my class this coming school year.  I'm not a big fan of assessments, even though I know they are necessary, but I would like to collaborate with the social studies teacher to use current events quizzes in both of our classes.  Even the use of Google Docs to grade articles seems like something I can do.  Special shout-out to:  David Tow, Kristen Morey, Annie Falkenberg, Bobby Oliver, and Kari Koshiol for sharing!  Your help in advising me has been invaluable.

Kenya Vance

Creative communications Academy

Calumet City, IL