Travelling along the ‘Brightpath’: A writing assessment and moderation journey undertaken by the Year 6 teaching team

SUNATA 4

Kimberley Bachmann Classroom Teacher and Primary Literacy Coach

Travelling along the ‘Brightpath’:

A writing assessment and moderation journey undertaken by the Year 6 teaching team

In alignment with St Margaret’s strategic focus on literacy, a St Margaret’s Innovation Award was granted to the Year 6 team in 2020. Led by myself, acting in a dual role as Year 6 teacher and writing coach, the Year 6 team trialled an online writing assessment and reporting tool called Brightpath.

Rationale

Assessing writing could never be classed as an ‘easy’ part of a teacher’s job. Even after years in the profession, teachers can still find it challenging to assign a letter grade to a piece of student writing. Marking with a rubric alone requires teachers to deeply understand the small yet discernible differences between descriptors such as ‘partial’, ‘effective’ and ‘purposeful’. And they need to understand what these descriptors actually look like in student writing. And on top of that, they need to apply this marking scheme consistently across a large cohort of students. It is most certainly not an easy job. The complexity of writing assessment underpinned the conception and design of the Brightpath Assessment tool. Research in the field of assessment reveals that, 'Teachers draw on multiple sources of knowledge and evidence when making judgements and that the use of standards and criteria alone will not result in consistency of teacher judgements' (Connolly, Klenowski & Wyatt-Smith 2012, p. 596). Therefore, rather than asking teachers to mark student writing solely based on a rubric, Brighpath is based on a ‘pairwise approach’ to assessment (Humphrey & Heldsinger 2020). In the initial stage of Brightpath’s design, a large group of teachers compared pairs of writing samples and judged which performance was of a higher quality. After these 160 student samples were analysed, a rating scale and a set of performance indicators were developed. The result was a set of calibrated student writing examples and performance descriptors that helped teachers understand the discernible differences between writing of varying performance quality. Classroom teachers are supported to make consistent judgements about writing achievement by comparing their students’ writing to Brightpath’s examples, which sit along a rating scale. High levels of inter-rater reliability can be obtained with the pairwise approach, with correlations ranging from 0.897 to 0.984 in a study asking teachers to compare early years samples to calibrated examples (Heldsinger & Humphry 2013). With these quality assessment principles underpinning the Brightpath Assessment tool, the St Margaret’s Primary School saw the potential to increase professional confidence, increase levels of inter-rater reliability, and also foster moderation conversations in the field of writing assessment.

Process

Year 6 was chosen as the trial year level which allowed me to work in a dual role as both writing coach and classroom teacher. Once the Year 6 teachers understood the Brightpath assessment process, the first step was familiarising ourselves with the student examples. As previously mentioned, these were organised in a ranking system that demonstrated increasingly sophisticated writing skills. There were accompanying descriptors (which we came to think of as success criteria) that sat alongside the different levels of the rating scale. While we did familiarise ourselves with these descriptors, the Brightpath creators did emphasise that these were not to be used like a checklist. As teachers, this was one of the most difficult shifts to make in our thinking. But there was a solution. It felt a little silly at first; however, we were encouraged to read the student writing aloud. And honestly, this was a ‘game-changing’ approach. Some of the richest conversations we had while simply reading these writing samples to each other, listening to the emerging author voices and discussing the comparative performances of writing. Reading aloud was the element that helped us shift our mindset to the pairwise assessment approach.

Once we had become familiar with the Brightpath samples, the next step was comparing these to our students’ writing. At moderation meetings, each Year 6 teacher shared samples that they believed sat at the high, median and lower ranges of the scale. Each sample was read aloud and then our team debated where it belonged along the scale. Initially, arriving at a consensus about a student’s rating was time laborious. Rigorous conversations were had about the positive elements of the writing and the perceived next steps for the author. Eventually, I’m pleased to report that we became more efficient and confident with the pairwise comparative approach of the Brightpath tool. If you walked into one of our moderation meetings towards the end of the pilot project, you may have heard someone exclaim, 'Oh, this one sounds just like the "Hot Air Balloon" example. Do you agree that it’s a 320 on the scale?'

Outcomes

Focusing on a range of authors across the four different classes allowed the Year 6 team to develop shared understandings about what quality narratives ‘sounded like’ and the next required teaching steps. Conversations were had about the future learning needs of individuals, classes and the whole cohort. Towards the end of 2020, we were impressed with the ambitious vocabulary and the range of sophisticated sentence structures that the authors were demonstrating. It appeared the VCOP (Vocabulary, Connectives, Openers and Punctuation) framework adopted by the St Margaret’s Primary School had positively impacted on these areas of their writing development. However, many students found it challenging to build suspense and resolve a problem within an allotted time. The teaching team took this feedback onboard and, as a result, adapted our narrative teaching unit for 2021. This year we read a range of short stories, profiled their plots, and gathered ideas for possible narrative complications. We also privileged time during lessons to generate plot ideas within groups and share planning strategies, and the students were explicitly taught strategies to end stories. As a result, during the first term of 2021, the team observed significant improvements in the students’ plot development skills. This conclusion was reached by considering both the Brightpath assessment data and other more informal teacher observations. The students weren’t the only ones to have improved learning outcomes as a consequence of the Brightpath project. Although the assessment process seemed time-consuming at first, personally, I came to value this time as a very practical form of professional development. Each piece of writing was another opportunity to practise and strengthen our close analysis skills. By comparing each student’s writing to the ranked examples, we had to think deeply about the interrelated elements of quality narratives. Consequently, we are now better equipped to read a piece of student writing, discern their unique strengths, and identify the next key steps to move them forward as a writer. Another professional learning outcome occurred as a result of the ‘read-aloud’ approach suggested by the Brightpath creators. By listening to each student writing sample, the teachers were encouraged to view it holistically rather than focus on surface-level features. Primary school teachers are cautioned against feedback focused solely on revising the surface features of writing (i.e. grammar, punctuation and spelling). Instead, researchers encourage them to discuss deeper text features in order to improve the content and organisation of student writing (Parr & Timperley 2010; Peterson & Portier 2014). The more we heard our students writing read aloud, the more we could hear their emerging author voices and appreciate elements that aren’t typically privileged (e.g. realistic characters, interesting turns of phrase, the flow of sentences). Throughout our moderation meetings, we discovered that many of our students had a clear awareness of how to write for an audience. They knew just how to capture the audience’s attention and imagination. After embarking on the Brightpath assessment journey, I’ve found that so many more of my feedback dialogues have focused explicitly on this essential concept of author voice. Evidently, the Year 6 students and staff benefited from the Brightpath project. The question was – where to next?

Next steps

In accordance with Standard 5 of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers, St Margaret’s Primary School staff are currently focusing on quality assessment, moderation and reporting practices. We are currently establishing a ‘photo album’ approach to Mathematics assessment through which progressive assessment tasks build up a picture of what students know and can do. Regular feedback about these tasks is delivered so that students can take ownership for setting and monitoring learning goals. As the Year 6 team become increasingly efficient using the Brightpath tool, it will be a means for us to apply this ‘photo-album’ approach to the English learning area. Teachers will be able to regularly track writing progress and give students explicit next steps for moving forward as an author. No matter how hard the work is, assessment is at the core of a teacher’s role. The Brightpath tool is a means of giving teachers more confidence to talk about writing with each other, assign consistent ratings and, most importantly, plan how we to move each student forward in their writing journey.

References

Connolly, S, Klenowski, V, & Wyatt-Smith, C 2012, ‘Moderation and consistency of teacher judgement: teachers’ views’, British Educational Research Journal, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 593-614. Heldsinger, S, & Humphry, S 2013, ‘Using calibrated exemplars in the teacher-assessment of writing: an empirical study’, Education Research, vol. 55, no. 3, pp. 219-235. Humphry, S & Heldsinger, S 2020, ‘A two-stage method for obtaining reliable teacher assessments of writing’, Journal of Educational Measurement, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 505-520. Parr, J & Timperley, H 2010, ‘Feedback to writing, assessment for teaching and learning and student progress’, Assessing Writing, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 68-85. Peterson, S, & Portier, C 2014, ‘Grade one peer and teacher feedback on student writing’, Education 3-13, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 237-257. SUNATA 5