The No More Marking Writing Progression – a case study
Progression statements with precision at Penkridge Middle School
The No More Marking Writing Progression
In September, our new Writing Progression sequence will be available to all of our UK schools. It consists of a series of statements about writing which schools can use to assess their students. Crucially, each statement is attached to a 10-question quiz, which eliminates the vagueness and inconsistency of traditional progression statements. We’ve written about the problem of vague progression statements in more detail here.
Here is an example. One of the statement in our sequence is: “I can identify a verb”. This statement is capable of being interpreted in many different ways, but in our sequence, we provide schools with a short lesson, a lesson guide, and ten simple multiple-choice questions that follow on from the lesson content. Here is one example.
We’ve been trialling the sequence this year with a small group of schools. In this post I’ve written up my conversation with one teacher, Alison Gutteridge, Head of English at Penkridge Middle School, about how the trial went.
My questions are in bold and Alison’s answers are underneath.
How often did you teach each of the progression statements?
We taught one statement a week with our Year 5s.1 In other lessons we would refer back to the concepts and language to help reinforce them.
Every statement comes with a video lesson and a quiz. How long did it take you to teach a lesson including the quiz?
About an hour, which is the length of our lessons. We would spend that hour introducing the task, doing whiteboard work, discussing, and then completing the quiz. The quiz itself took about 15-25 minutes, depending on the students' reading abilities.
Which topics did your students find particularly challenging?
Students still find "being verbs" particularly challenging, despite spending a lot of time on them. Comma splices and run-ons are hard too!
How have you found the transition of these skills to their writing?
The transition isn’t fully there yet, but during proofreading and editing, students are starting to recognize and correct errors. One of the biggest benefits of the lessons and quizzes is establishing a metalanguage that you can then use when giving feedback – eg, can you check your work for run-on sentences? Does that sentence have a verb?
How did you find the feedback and data analysis on the quizzes?
The original graphs were a bit complicated and overwhelming! The best feedback was the misconception analysis. They allowed us to address specific misconceptions, identify clear next steps and discuss them with both students and parents.
The Writing Progression consists of paper-based quizzes that are then scanned in and uploaded. How did you find the process of printing, scanning and uploading the quizzes?
We found that it was better to download and print them all in one batch than to do them week-by-week – it allowed for better planning and preparation.
Is there anything you’d like to change or add to improve the program?
It would be good to have a pupil-friendly checklist at the end with all of the concepts. Students could use it to help proofread their writing.
You can now view our Writing Progression here. The full sequence is available for subscribers, but we have made the first 3 statements available for everyone. You can also watch a recording of a Writing Progression information webinar by going to the “Previous” tab at this link.
Aged 9 to 10