Making progress and having fun

Francine, Cheryl and I had a productive day. It was surprisingly fun to work together, even though it was a 25 degree sunny August day! We met at St Mary's High School early today and worked through the entire day without a break.

We managed to complete a rubric for the teacher moderation process, by looking carefully at the OWA, the French curriculum for Immersion, the English curriculum for language and some sample rubrics from the internet. It was very interesting to see the different approaches towards assessment for writing.

Next we worked together to create the first writing tasks for each grade (SK to 8). This involved looking at other on-demand tasks, the Board's writing plan, the OWA, a writing assessment plan from Kawartha's school board and lots and lots of creativity. I have to say that using accents in French definitely slows down the typing! We used a template that I had created over the weekend.

At the end of the day we typed up the final copy of the rubric, made a short Powerpoint presentation for the principals and teachers of each school, wrote a preliminary table of contents for the first tasks and filled in our mileage forms. WHEW! It's no wonder I'm ready for a nap.

Next steps include: working on the second set of on-demand writing tasks, communicating our progress to the teachers and other staff, fixing any errors to our first set of tasks and planning our first teacher moderation session for October.