Published on Edutopia www.edutopia.org/article/bump-it-walls-make-learning-progress-visible
14/5/22

Bump-It-Up Walls Make Learning Progress VisibleTeachers can use this visual rubric to help elementary students reflect on and evaluate their own learning as they move through the curriculum.



A good teacher uses formative assessment data to improve their teaching and address student learning needs. Isn’t it time we let our pupils in on the secret too?
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Bump-it-up walls are linear visual rubrics that clearly show students how they can progress in their learning. The walls can be used for any subject and work best when they are narrow and specific. Model work samples are displayed with annotations in a progressive continuum. Through formative assessments and student-teacher conferences, students learn to be reflective and evaluate their own learning.



BUMP-IT-UP WALLS AS FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT TOOLSEducation researcher Dylan Wiliam explains that for formative assessment to be effective, students should have a clear and visible understanding of their learning target, the assessment should relate directly to future instruction, and teachers and students should review success and progress together. A bump-it-up wall accomplishes all of these goals, while also promoting student agency. Through the use of this tool, students experience power and autonomy in the classroom as they track and measure their learning growth.

Goal setting is the number one high-impact teaching strategy for student learning. My classroom’s bump-it-up wall establishes differentiated and challenging goals for my students. They can track their progress and identify where they might need help. We use student-teacher conferences for students to evaluate their own learning. Students also provide evidence to show when they’ve achieved a goal. Through the use of this tool, feedback is authentic and purposeful because students understand the purpose of their learning tasks.


BUMP-IT-UP IN MATHTo create a math bump-it-up wall, I first administered a counting preassessment. I aligned the results to the various curriculum levels. I then created five leveled examples with annotations that demonstrated counting achievements and possible goals to progress students’ counting abilities. For example: The first level demonstrated the ability to count forward and backward by ones. The next level showed skip counting by twos, fives, and 10s. Each level was a little more challenging, and the fifth level asked students to be able to identify the rule for any counting pattern and complete patterns that had missing numbers.


I took time to confer with each student, showing them their test papers and helping them to identify their strengths and stretches. They placed their name under the example that best described what they could currently do. They studied the adjacent annotated example to see what they needed to do to progress to the next level.


Throughout the unit, I conferred with my students regularly, and they came to me with their work when they thought they were ready to move to the next level. The levels of the bump-it-up wall became my differentiated success criteria for assessing student progress in the counting unit. This directly informed my teaching and the tasks I provided to students. It further created student agency opportunities by giving students the choice of which level of activity they wanted to work on in each lesson.


BUMP-IT-UP IN WRITINGAfter my success with using this tool to set goals in mathematics, I created a new bump-it-up wall for writing. I chose the 10-week term when we were focusing on narrative and persuasive writing genres. I quickly came to realize the necessity of narrow and specific goals, since there were so many aspects of writing that could be analyzed and scrutinized. I knew that it would take considerable time to progress in writing and that a whole term would be needed for students to see some progress.


I selected the “ideas trait,” as identified in Ruth Culham’s book 6 + 1 Traits of Writing, as the focus for the bump-it-up writing wall. Using Culham’s book, I found example writing pieces and attempted to annotate these pieces in student-friendly language. As I conferred with my students about their own writing, I soon realized that the pieces on the bump-it-up wall showed a logical progression of ideas. However, the annotations were not accessible or easy to apply to the students’ own writing.


I adapted my approach and worked with the students to create annotations that made sense to them. We looked at each writing piece over a series of days, and together we discussed what we liked or didn’t like about each piece. The students told me what they noticed about each piece and what they wished to see more of. As the facilitator of this activity, I was careful to keep them on course with “ideas” as their analyzing lens. This process proved to be much more effective, and students were able to evaluate their own work and set themselves goals using the wall.

The strategic use of a bump-it-up wall has been a success in my classroom. Not only can I accurately report student progress back to parents, but students themselves are able to understand and discuss their progress. It also has made goal setting a much more authentic experience for my students, which has increased their motivation to challenge themselves.

Published on Edutopia: www.edutopia.org/article/3-ways-get-young-students-excited-about-revising-their-writing April 25th, 2022

When I used to ask my students to revise or edit their writing (and I was mistaken back then to believe those were the same thing), the response was either a groan or a glazing over of the eyes. My students felt nervous about and resisted editing because they didn’t know how to make their work better. I had no tools to teach what I now understand to be the meatiest components of the writing process.


Through research and professional development, I came to understand that although different researchers have slight variations on the essential phases of writing, key elements were consistent in every literacy expert’s model. Jennifer Serravallo, for instance, describes the writing process in The Writing Strategies Book as follows: generating and collecting ideas, choosing an idea, rehearsing (talk or sketch), drafting, revising, editing, and finally publishing. Ruth Culham recommends similar steps in 6 + 1 Traits of Writing, describing the process as prewriting, drafting, sharing, revising, editing, and publishing.


After studying these models, I realized I wasn’t distinguishing between revising and editing.  Editing is in fact all about improving how writing looks, whereas revising is all about improving how writing sounds. This means that when we edit, we look at spelling and punctuation. When we revise, we look at organization, sentence fluency, and word choice. It’s the revision element that students ultimately didn’t understand. I also wasn't giving my students enough opportunity to publish their work, which made the revision and editing process feel redundant and inauthentic. Here are three ways I transformed how I taught the revision process.


1. FOCUS ON WRITING TRAITSStudents don’t know where to start with revision, so it is imperative that educators break the revision phase into small achievable chunks. To do this, I use Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey’s gradual release of responsibility (GRR) instructional framework. This approach is never more useful than when teaching students to revise their writing.


First and foremost, to break the onerous task of revision into more manageable chunks, the teacher should identify a writing trait to focus on. Culham identifies ideas, organization, voice, word choice, and sentence fluency as “revision traits.” Narrowing the focus to one of these when teaching students to revise is essential in helping them to succeed.


2. MODEL THE WRITING PROCESSIn my year 2/3 class (second- and third-grade students in the United States), I chose to focus on the ideas trait. We had already spent considerable time brainstorming ideas for narrative writing, and my students had many possibilities for writing a narrative piece. Following John Hattie’s high impact teaching strategies (HITS) of explicit teaching, I modeled a narrative that lacked depth. I took a simple student text and simplified it even further. I wrote the bare bones of the story, ensuring that the organization was correct (introduction of characters, problem, resolution, and ending), but the nouns were plain and there were no adjectives or detail.


In the past, if a student had presented such a story, I would have accepted it, knowing that they’d followed a narrative structure. In my mind, I would have thought it was boring, but I had no tools to provide feedback to help them improve. Now with my knowledge of the writing traits and the phases of writing, I was ready to help my students expand on their ideas.


I began with the introduction of my modeled story and pointed out to my students that although I had a main character identified, they knew nothing about her personality or the setting of the story. I used sticky notes and the think-aloud strategy to show my students how I would change parts of my sentences, or even add in sentences that gave my character more depth or led my readers to understand the setting. I was showing my students that a messy first draft was normal.

The next paragraph was also basic, and now it was time to move into the “we do” part of the GRR model. I read the paragraph aloud and asked for the students’ input into what details might be missing. With their questions about where and what was happening, I again modeled inserting and exchanging words to give more depth to the story. We also used sticky notes to add entire sentences. By now the students were very engaged.


Then it was time to hand over the reins. I asked my students to go back to their tables with a partner and read their introductory paragraph to each other. They worked together to improve just this one paragraph with sticky notes and colored pencils at their disposal. Riss Leung of the Oz Lit Teacher blog says “progress not perfection,” so I was extremely satisfied to see that each student had been successful in making at least one small change to improve their writing piece.


3. HOLD WRITING CONFERENCESAlongside the HITS of explicit teaching and worked examples, feedback through writing conferences was another invaluable tool that helped my students get over the line from feeling overwhelmed and uninspired to excited and knowledgeable about the revision phase.


During the one-to-one writing conferences, I read their story with them, using an admiring lens to praise them for anything that worked well or sounded good. I chose one point that could improve the story and coach them through revising this one point. For example, I asked one student, “As the reader, I wish I knew more about this resolution. Can you add more about the adventure your character had at this point in the story?”
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Now when I ask my students how they feel about revising their writing, I rejoice to hear that they feel confident to reread their writing and proud that they have created something interesting. With carefully planned lessons, revising writing can be engaging and rewarding for both the teacher and the students. It means that students are ready and confident to publish their work, and we can all be satisfied that their published pieces demonstrate progress from their first drafts.