Each semester, at this time, we get together and do some writing moderation as a whole staff.
This task, this year, is very significant as we have a new curriculum and there are new work samples to judge our writers against.
Our Prep- 2 students are being asked to include more content, better sentence structure, improved spelling and control over editing amongst other skills.
So as teachers we have needed to change our expectations, our way of teaching and again come to a common understanding the language in our curriculum documents and supporting material.
Across the school we did a task - Are computers a waste of time? We had the same approach from P-6 and timelines.
All students picked a side to argue and wrote about their point of view.
The teachers then were to add a progression point from our curriculum documents and bring three samples they were finding hard to place to our meeting.
I then paired staff up with someone from a different teaching level and they had to agree on the placement of each piece of writing.
Our point was to have a discussion around the writing, have an agreement about pieces of writing, explore what the samples looked like and how we could use them to assess our student work.
This is a tricky process as we are very conservative and often find it difficult to place students too far ahead of their expected level - even with evidence in our hands.
