(Re)designing Narrative Writing Units for Grades 5-12. Kathy Tuchman Glass

excluding obvious line items that your students have mastered. You might include some generic ones as reminders; others will be specific to the genre and assignment students will complete.

      • Concentrate on what you expect to actually see in the paper rather than strategies students use while composing. For example, avoid this kind of statement: I use print and digital resources to check that my spelling is correct. Instead, enter on the checklist the evidence of application, such as, I spell all words correctly.

      • Generally keep line items brief unless you feel examples are necessary. Students can refer to resources or handouts if they need a reminder about what something means. For example, include this item—I write using different types of sentence structure—rather than something more involved like, I write using various sentence structures, such as simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex.

      • Organize related line items under categories for easy readability such as these options for narrative writing. Combine those that make sense as shown in some areas in figure 2.2 (page 33).

      • General

      • Development of ideas (or idea development)

      • Content

      • Context

      • Focus

      • Incident significance

      • Genre characteristics

      • Story elements

      • Narrative techniques

      • Literary devices

      • Organization

      • Organizational structure (or text structure)

      • Description

      • Figurative language

      • Word choice

      • Language and style

      • Tone and style

      • Vocabulary

      • Sentence structure

      • Transitions

      • Grammar usage

      • Conventions

      • Format

(Re)design a Narrative Rubric

      Like checklists, analytic rubrics can serve as effective instructional tools, but they also function as scoring mechanisms. Rubrics include the following three components.

      1. Scoring criteria: These are specific elements to assess—such as point of view, central conflict, dialogue, and so forth—grouped under overarching categories, like Story Elements and Literary Devices. Each element includes a brief overview of the skills associated with it—for example, this under Suspense and Climax: “Build tension through well-crafted suspense; present the climax to show the turning point.”

      2. Criteria descriptors: Each scoring criterion includes descriptions along a continuum of quality to indicate performance at different levels.

      3. Levels of performance: Levels—represented by numbers, words (for example, advanced, proficient, partially proficient, and novice), or a combination of both—indicate how well students have performed. Four- or five-point rubrics are common; however, some use three-and six-point scales.

      Checklists and rubrics are valuable albeit different instruments that students and teachers use. Refer to The Fundamentals of (Re)designing Writing Units (Glass, 2017a) for more information about function, rationale, and suggestions for using a checklist, and also a thorough explanation and instructional suggestions for using rubrics, how to differentiate between analytic versus holistic rubrics, ways to write descriptors for levels of performance, and more.

      In figure 2.6 (pages 39–43), I present a complete narrative rubric as an example. The end of this section includes an exercise you can use to devise a narrative rubric for your unit, or adapt the one I share. Like the checklist, my featured rubric reflects characteristic elements for a generic narrative, so you will not find genre-specific items. To arrive at a single score using the rubric, see figure 2.7 (page 43) for information on determining mode and median.

       Figure 2.6: Narrative writing rubric.

      Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy for a free reproducible version of this figure.

       Figure 2.7: Process to determine median and mode.

Exercise: (Re)design a Narrative Writing Rubric

      Design (or revise) a rubric to assess the narrative genre students will write making sure it aligns to the checklist. Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy to download and alter the rubric in figure 2.6 (pages 39–43), revise one you already have, or create a rubric from scratch. You might gather feedback from colleagues or create this scoring guide with them. The following is intended to guide you in this exercise; if you need more direction, consider accessing the information about rubrics in The Fundamentals of (Re)designing Writing Units (Glass, 2017a).

      • Include scoring criteria and group them under categories: Write elements for the selected genre along with those for general writing that you included on the checklist because they are companion pieces. Also use the same overarching categories on both assessment instruments; for suggestions, refer to the list of category options within Exercise: (Re)design a Student Narrative Writing Checklist (pages 37–38) or the 6+1 Trait® Writing Model of Instruction and Assessment from Education Northwest (www.educationnorthwest.org/traits/traits-rubrics).