![]() In “educational buzzword” speak what I’m describing is known as spiraling. Not only does shortening their writing assignments shorten my grading commitment but it also means that when they do write full essays, I find myself making fewer notes. It might be November before I’m asking students to actually put these various elements together into a simple three paragraph essay response. (Let’s say I need to cover the Mongol conquests but we also need to talk about thesis statements? Great! Let’s evaluate 10 different thesis statements answering various writing prompts about the Mongols.) We work our way through the rubric this way: an entire day (or more) explicitly teaching Contextualization, etc. In addition, I will spend an entire lesson on each part of our writing rubric. If my students can clearly Answer the prompt with a specific piece of Proof and their own Explanation (we use the acronym A.P.E.) then they can extend that practice to any length of writing. In AP History, we call these SAQs but they’re just 3-5 sentence paragraphs addressing a specific question. Most of my fall semester is spent working with students on short writing assignments. I’ve found that my writing results have improved dramatically once I slowed down and focused on the basics. A good sentence becomes a good paragraph, which combines into a good essay, which ultimately could be a chapter in a good book. (Which means we don’t need to be grading piles of essays from Day 1.) But, we don’t need students to write entire essays right away. Getting kids writing and keeping them writing consistently is the single best way for them to become better writers. ![]() Our tendency is to feel like we need to get students writing right now. Step 1 Slow down and “deep dive” on the key rubric points. Over the years I’ve developed my own strategy for scaffolding the grading process throughout the year so that I can give students’ effective feedback while still getting through the pile as efficiently as possible. In AP classes this rubric is essentially provided for us (although I often edit the expectations to earn each point based on what I want my students doing in my class.) Whatever you use, just be as consistent as you can all year so that students always know what is expected of them on a writing assignment. It should be noted that the foundation of all of these strategies is having a clearly established writing rubric you use consistently throughout the year. I often spend more time staring at the stack of essays while I avoid grading them than I do actually grading, but still… Consistent Rubrics I think I speak for many teachers when I say that grading essays is the part of my job I dread the most.
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