OVERVIEW

The School Wide Write (SWW) is a required Writing Assessment in Central Okanagan Public Schools for Grades 4-9.

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Why School Wide Write:

• We can determine where students are at with their writing skills, where they need to go, and how best to get them there

• We can provide ongoing descriptive, written, and/or verbal feedback to support deep, meaningful learning

• We can provide evidence of student learning at the end of a learning cycle

• We can support differentiated/personalized learning

• We can seamlessly intertwine with instruction and ongoing classroom assessments as an essential part of effective planning guided by clear performance targets and criteria

• We can enable students to articulate their learning goals and to make informed decisions about how to progress towards these goals, understand criteria and develop effective self and peer assessment skills

IMPLEMENTATION

School Wide Write (SWW) is to be administered twice per school year for students in Grades 4-9.  The timeline is intended to be a recursive cycle of assessment and instruction.  All specific dates of assessment will be determined at a school/classroom level with the intention of having one write near the beginning of the school year and another write closer to the end of the school year.  This allows educators to be responsive to the needs of the students and the school-based schedule.  The only requirement for data entry is a summative entry at the end of the school year into EdPlan Insight.  It is however encouraged to enter the data for the diagnostic write in the fall and for the final write in the spring, in order to support decisions around instruction and school-level support.

In response to feedback from educators and in order to provide the opportunity for educators to gather authentic, meaningful writing samples, there are now four options for implementation:

1. Allow students to choose their own topic (i.e. individual student-generated topic).

2. Generate a classroom topic (i.e. the whole class writes on the same topic).

3. Generate a school-wide topic (i.e. the whole school writes on the same topic).

4. Continue to use the existing topics in the booklets that include a writing topic.