Purpose:  All teachers who assign writing have acquired a great many artifacts which represent your approach to assessment.  Looking carefully at these artifacts  (i.e., rubrics, comments on student papers, bulletin boards with editing advice, student handouts, etc.) can help you think through, perhaps, why you assess writing in the ways you do.

1. Take some time to “dig” for evidence of how you assess writing.  Work your way through your classroom, concentrating on items like student papers, handouts, bulletin boards, etc.
2. Take a day or two to expand the dig by focusing in on the strategies you use to assess—and to teach your students about assessment.  Do you use rubrics?  Peer groups?  Conferences?  Try to take a few notes on the strategies you have used in these couple of days.
3. After collecting the artifacts and strategies, divide a piece of paper into three equal columns.  In the first column, simply list the artifacts; in the second column, write the purpose the artifact serves in your overall approach to assessing student writing; in the third column, write about the approach and where you learned about it.
4. Share your artifacts, purposes, and backgrounds with the colleagues. 
5. Reflect on and record the insights you have gained regarding the assessment of writing through this process.  What do you now understand about your own approach to assessment?