NCTE offers consultants and services on assessment instruction that when used together, provide extended learning opportunities for teachers and makes a positive impact on learning. These opportunities include the Pathways Program, Web Seminars and assessment books for study groups.
Consultants are available to present one-day or multi-day presentations or provide year-round consulting. All workshops and presentations can be customized to meet your specific needs.
Writing on Demand
Consultants: Leila Christenbury, Anne Ruggles Gere or Kelly Sassi
Teachers will learn strategies for following what they know to be best practices in teaching writing while still helping students prepare for writing tests. These strategies, designed to address specific features of writing on demand, can be incorporated into an existing curriculum. They adhere to the principle that test preparation and good writing instruction are not incompatible. Topics include:
- Read backward from a piece of finished writing to the prompt that produced it
- Learn how processes of writing are adaptable to the testing environment
- Use rhetorical analysis to understand prompts and assignments
- Make assessment—including rubrics from writing tests—visible in the composition classroom
- Deal effectively with time constraints when writing
- Foster sentence-level attention to writing
- Practice scoring writing to understand rubrics more fully
- Analyze the contexts of writing tests
Working with Writers Online
Consultant: Beth Hewett
Ideal for WAC or English professionals, this workshop uses the principles of investigation, individualization, immersion, association, and reflection to help educators respond to student writing in online settings. Beth introduces some of the characteristics of writing instruction through asynchronous and synchronous online platforms, and she provides examples and suggestions for responding to student writing in a variety of settings. Using models and providing online practice with the host institution’s software, she enables participants to work both individually and collaboratively to develop outcomes and to practice useful instructional responses.
- Variations of this workshop can be developed for both secondary and post-secondary audiences:
- Teaching through Text
- Conferencing in Tutorial Settings
- Subject-Specific Strategies for Online Writing Instruction (for example, architecture, biology, or psychology)
- Aligning the Goals of an Online and Traditional Writing Program