Tab 6: Assessing, Planning, and Designing Contexts for Learning

I designed, planned, and implemented a personal narrative writing unit in my student teaching classroom. Each of the five lessons of the unit included a mini-lesson with the I Do, We Do, You Do model of instruction. I planned instruction around the learning objective that I had for each lesson. I wanted to intrigue the students in the unit by beginning with an engaging hook by reading the book Ralph Tells a Story by Abby Hanlon, and then sending the students on an “Idea Hunt” around the classroom to hunt for story ideas. I planned multiple types of assessment: informal, formal, summative and formative throughout the unit. I analyzed the data from the assessments to inform and adjust my future instruction within the unit. My artifact is the rubric I utilized to assess published personal narratives at the end of the unit, including feedback I provided to an individual student on their writing.

I developed a formal summative assessment rubric with inspiration from Lucy Calkins, which I then altered to meet the needs of my own students (Calkins, Hohne, & Robb, 2015). I designed my lessons, learning objectives, and assessments within the unit to reflect the expectations I had for students to succeed according to my rubric. For example, my learning objective for the fourth lesson of the unit was “Students can add a topic sentence, concluding sentence, and relevant details to their personal narrative” and the rubric specifically lists “I have a topic sentence,” “I have a concluding sentence,” and “I added details to my story” as expectations for an excellent personal narrative. Over the course of my graduate program, I have learned how to plan a unit with the end in mind, in this instance a personal narrative writing rubric. I planned the unit so that it followed a sequence, and each lesson built on the previous one to guide students towards constructing a personal narrative of their own. One student in the class struggled to generate ideas for writing and to put his ideas to paper, so I provided sentence stems on his Flee Map to scaffold his learning and construction of a personal narrative that follows a sequence of events. This demonstrates how I learned to differentiate instruction for students who require scaffolding to achieve the objectives I set.

This artifact demonstrates how as an educator I hold high expectations for all of my students and provide them with the scaffolds and support necessary to help them succeed and reach the goals I set for them. As a learner, the rubric for the summative assessment of the personal narrative writing unit taught me how to set goals for the end of my unit and plan my lessons and learning objectives for students accordingly. I have learned to refer to the grade-level standards first, determine how students will demonstrate proficiency by the end of the unit through the creation of a rubric, and then develop lesson plans that lead all of my students to success through scaffolding where I see fit.

I will utilize this rubric in future personal narrative writing units because I feel that the expectations and goals are clear and appropriate. However, I would like to add “my personal narrative is a true story from my life” to the rubric because I found that by the end of the unit multiple students had written fictional stories that included themselves as characters as “personal” narratives. Adding this goal to the rubric will also prepare me to incorporate this expectation and distinction between personal narratives and narratives more clearly into my lessons.