The Memoirs of a "Failing" Teacher

My third grade students responded to a constructed response prompt based on a poem by Emily Dickinson. This constructed response asked the students to dissect Dickinson's very complex use of the English language by determining the narrator's intent. It was a first draft based on a poem that generated a great deal of discussion and disagreement among many educated adults including English teachers, English MAJORS and other college graduates! The poem they were given was certainly developmentally inappropriate for third grade students who are still learning how to read and write well.

The second constructed response prompt was based on a nonfiction article about the current state of eagles and how laws passed by the government helped to save them.

One, the two constructed response prompts did not require the same type of thinking nor evidence. Two, the second passage, as was the first, was taken from the benchmark assessment given by the school district and was also a first draft. Three, I did not teach the article or poem, nor did the children have an opportunity to write anything but a rough draft.

If authentic and meaningful assessment of teaching and learning is the goal and measuring children's writing progress is the means to that end, I'd suggest viewing samples of writing from the initial planning stages to when those same pieces are considered by students to be final drafts and therefore publishable copies of their work. If students drafted writing pieces, then received further instruction on improving their writing, were given a chance to rewrite their pieces, we'd truly be able to gauge to some degree if the teaching was effective. Even then, teaching is cyclical, an ebb and flow of considering what worked and what did not for the class as a whole and for particular students. I constantly self-evaluate, collaborate, and reteach.

From what was submitted, we can only barely determine if the students even understood the pieces they had to read in order to respond to the prompt. Writing conferences with students would help determine that. I cannot even determine whether or not it was the way the question was phrased that gave them some difficulty. Writing conferences with students would help determine that as well.

Comparing the results of rough drafts of two different writing tasks, one of which is beyond the zone of children's proximal development, further comparing the results of said drafts without any teaching associated with either task and to suggest that I, as a teacher, failed them in some way is offensive and irresponsible.