UHCL students provide STAAR tips to area 4th graders
When University of Houston-Clear Lake College of Education students provided fourth-grade students at Bonner Elementary School in the Houston Independent School District with personal feedback and writing tips before their STAAR testing, both groups emerged winners.
The literacy project was the brainchild of Roberta Raymond, UH-Clear Lake assistant professor of Reading and Language Arts. She was assisting Bonner Elementary in the development of a school-wide writing plan. Special emphasis was placed on assisting fourth-grade students who were about to take the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness test, with its focus on composition. Raymond saw an opportunity for future teachers to get involved.
“A lot of our students haven’t worked with children’s writing yet. This project would give them a chance to gain valuable, first-hand experience working with authentic, elementary school writing,” Raymond said.
The Bonner leadership team loved the idea but there were challenges, notably the need to quickly assist 140 fourth-graders. The UH-Clear Lake spring semester didn’t begin until late January and the fourth-graders were scheduled to take the STAAR test in March. Everyone agreed the young writers needed the input at least a month or more ahead of the testing to give them an opportunity to work with the input.
With a just a three-week turnaround, Raymond collected the fourth graders’ compositions. She recruited Reading and Language Arts Professor Lillian McEnery and Visiting Reading and Language Arts Lecturer Rose Toman – along with their literacy students – to work on the project.
At Bonner, the young students were on pins and needles by the time the compositions got picked up, Principal Sharon Carpenter said. “The kids were asking, ‘Did you get anything. Is it in yet?’,” Carpenter said.
Meanwhile, the UHCL students were working in pairs; each pair had three young writers to critique. But before they could begin, the students themselves needed instructions.
“Our students wanted to look at the fourth-graders’ grammar and spelling,” Raymond said. “I think this is just how people’s brains are. That’s not the most important part. We need to look at the content and see how we can build their content up. That part is revision. Spelling? That’s editing, that’s the easy part,” she added.
Raymond, McEnery and Toman developed lessons for the UHCL students on how to give effective feedback, illustrating what it looks like, sounds like, and the process to follow. The three worked closely with the students as they began to evaluate the fourth-graders’ writings.
The students not only critiqued the compositions, they also wrote individual letters to each fourth-grader, detailing first what they loved about the student’s composition, providing specific examples and then including one or two suggestions that the young writer could use to improve the piece. The students then took the additional step of preparing a folder and personalizing it with artwork or words reflecting elements of the child’s composition along with a little added bling. They included snapshots of themselves, as well.
Raymond delivered the folders to Carpenter and her leadership team, teacher specialists Angela Allen and Sharon Zallis-Youngblood.
“The feedback given was so personalized,” Carpenter said. “I think that was the first thing that jumped out at us here as the administration team. When the children received it they were ecstatic. They were in awe that someone that didn’t really know them had taken the time to read their composition and give them some pointers and feedback about what would make their composition better.”
At this time Carpenter has not received the STAAR test results. But she is anxious to see if the young students acted upon the input they received.
“We do know it was a definite boost in confidence for our students, most definitely – that last boost right before we got ready to take the STAAR,” she said.
For the UHCL students it was a meaningful learning experience and one that provided valuable insight for their future work.
Among the reflections about the project, Toman said one of her student’s wrote: “When writing [to] the student, I learned to look at what she was saying and not how she was spelling it.” And another wrote: “Instead of ‘do this,’ I wanted to find my ‘try this, it might help’ voice.”
For McEnery, the Bonner project was a winning initiative.
“Our UHCL teacher candidates came away with a much deeper knowledge of what it means to approach writing from a strengths perspective,” she said. “On the other side, the Bonner writers were able to receive personalized feedback in a fun yet very effective way. It’s our hope we’ll be able to work on other collaborations such as these in the future.”
Also published on Medium.
