Tracking Progress on Writing

I am a member of three PLC teams at my school. I am assigned to work with our school's third grade team, fourth grade team, and our ESL team. (Yes, I am often seen running between meetings! Okay... maybe not running...) In past years, I have supported the grade level teams as they work toward their grade level goals. This year, however, was the first year that our ESL team had to write our own goal in the area of writing. (I wrote more about this earlier in May in another post.)

Last August, we were a little perplexed on how exactly we should tackle this project! After all, the grade level teams had goals in the areas of reading and math... it had been YEARS since any of us had worked with a writing goal.

It's May now (see ***** NOTE below!), and I am happy to report that we figured it out! I have to give Penny, my coworker who works with kindergarten and first grade ELLs credit for our tracking form. She devised a really creative way to track the students' writing progress through the year. I thought I'd share it in case any of you could borrow the idea for your own data tracking next year!

We used those colored circle stickers to track our students' progress in the quarterly assessments! Take Carlos for example- the student who probably made the most progress this year... on his pretest assessment in August he scored a Level 1 (he didn't understand the directions and wrote in Spanish- I wasn't too concerned since it was a pretest). Do you see his name on a red dot? On the assessment at the end of the first quarter (blue), he jumped all the way to a 5! His second quarter assessment he got a bit off-topic and slipped down to a score of 3 (green). At the end of the third quarter, he scored a 7 (pink). Finally, at the end of the year, he scored a 9 on his final third grade writing assessment (yellow). (He exited ESL, by the way.)

Ideas on tracking writing progress throughout the school year on quarterly writing assessments.

This is my third grade tracking form. I was tracking the progress of seven students. You will notice the color code at the top of the paper indicates which quarterly assessment score each color represents. Red was for first quarter timed writing results, blue indicated second quarter results, etc.

As you can see, my students were all at Level 1, 2, or 3 in August, as indicated by the red dots. However, check out those yellow dots! Yellow indicates their scores on the final writing assessment! Look at that growth! The dots show other interesting things, too. You can probably imagine how worried I was at the end of the semester when Maria was still performing at Level 1. However, she showed some progress in the second semester.

There were many more first grade ELL students to track, so we used smaller dot stickers for the first grade sheet. However, we also used larger dots (like the dots on the third grade sheet), and split the students and have a chart for each first grade classroom that shows individual progress.

These pages went into our data wall binder (a requirement in our distict).

Each student had an individual folder, as well, where we kept their assessments. This photo shows Carlos' August and May assessments side-by-side. (If you open these pages at the middle, you would see his three middle-of-the-year assessments.)