SVVSD’s on-demand writing tasks are designed to be completed once each quarter to give students an opportunity to showcase their abilities to comprehend, analyze, and write. The tasks are meant to be completed cold in order to gauge what students are capable of doing without guidance and scaffolds.

For most quarters, three article choices are provided from CommonLit. These are curated to align thematically with each module. They are completed cold, but can be useful to inform student understanding of each module’s essential question after the initial administration.

Timeline of Administration

Because the on-demand tasks are designed to inform instruction and show student progress at a specific point in time, it is recommended that all students within a grade level complete each quarter’s task at the same time and at the same point in each quarter.

With the affordances of the Team Grade function within Writable, it is highly recommended a school’s grade level team set administration windows together. This can provide more useful school-level data.

Help from Writable:

• How do I assign team grading or calibrate teacher grading?

• How do I set up a Shared Assessment?

• How do I track students' growth over time?

Prompt Selection

Just because there are three prompts connected to each on-demand task, it doesn’t mean all students need to see all three prompts. There are a few possible approaches:

• Give students the texts for all three prompts and let them decide which they’d like to write to.

• Similar to the above, show the students two of the three options.

• Choose the one prompt from the three that best meets your students’ needs as well are your academic trajectory for the remainder of the quarter. Again, while the task is meant to be completed cold, the work need not “go cold” following completion.

Whatever your approach, the best way to generate reliable school- or grade-level data will be to be certain the approach is uniform across the grade or school.

Extension Opportunity

Consider treating the initial writing as a rough draft. Using the workshop model and/or the peer review mechanisms in Writable, you can then help students to improve upon their initial writing by self-assessing, setting goals, getting peer feedback, and connecting their writing to other works within the quarter.

The Rubric

The rubric for the on-demand writing is adapted from the SAT writing rubric. It measures student comprehension, analysis, and ability to write to a specific prompt on their own. Given these multiple measures, the rubric can appear a bit unwieldy at first. The best guidance is not to spend as much time scoring each draft as you might scaffolded writing assignment. If you engage the extension opportunity outlined above, there will be time for more detailed response afterward.

Similarly, each section should be considered as its own four-point score rather than a 12-point aggregate. This will allow you to better understand your students’ abilities and growth on each on-demand task.