November 1996 Second Edition Continues 'Creating Writers'
Think back to your earliest days of writing for a grade. Chances are, your paper came back with a few red marks noting errors in punctuation, grammar, and spelling. Maybe a cryptic comment or two in the margins. And, at the top of the front page, the teacher had emblazoned a blood-red grade that moved through you like heartache.
It's a wonder that anyone continued writing.
Fortunately, times are changing. Teachers have a growing list of resources at their fingertips to promote and nurture good writing in students. Creating Writers: Linking Writing Assessment and Instruction, by Vicki Spandel and Richard Stiggins, provides a bevy of tools and practices that make assessment an integral part of student learning and teacher growth.
In the second edition of the highly popular Creating Writers, Spandel and Stiggins not only show teachers how to teach children to write well, they also show teachers and their students how to use explicit criteria to evaluate and improve writing. The book takes the mystery out of both writing and revising, and provides teachers and students the common language that helps them to think, speak, assess, and plan like writers.
As the authors note, Creating Writers is about assessing student writing with learning in mind. "In order to assess writing performance intelligently and consistently, we have to get up close and ask, 'What makes writing work?'"
Creating Writers turns the six-trait model—ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions—into a living process that helps teachers to empower students to take charge of their own writing process. Delightful gems of student writing start each of the 10 chapters. A sampler:
- Chapter 1: Creating A Vision. A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it would be for another.
- Chapter 2: Assessing to Learn. It took Brad the rest of his school years to wake up and smell the gym bag.
- Chapter 3: Getting Inside Student Writing. OK, let's jump to the conclusion.
- Chapter 4: Putting Assessment to Work in the Classroom. I know I went well off the subject, but I have good spelling.
The second edition includes a host of fresh elements, such as a newly revised version of the analytical scoring guide; all-new practice papers—elementary through high school—with suggested scores; a revised, student-friendly scoring guide, plus a Spanish translation; ideas for adapting the six traits to the teacher's grading system; and tips for bringing parents into the process.
"Creating Writers reminds me of the sun," says Donna Flood of Educational Service Unit No. 3, Omaha, Nebraska, in the foreword. "It casts light in dark places, warms what it touches, and causes things to grow." She goes on to say that the book bolsters writing instruction by fostering student understanding of what makes good writing, giving them the necessary tools to write and revise.
Spandel, the author or co-author of 17 textbooks for teachers and students, is a senior research associate with NWREL. Stiggins is founder and president of the Portland-based Assessment Training Institute.
Creating Writers, second edition, is available from Longman/ Addison Wesley. Personal orders are $30.07 per copy, including handling, shipping, and insurance; credit card orders can be placed at 1-800-822-6339. District orders are available at 1-800-552-2259 at $22.36 per copy.
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