Assessing writing : Teacher-led approaches

[Extract] Assessment practices can be teacher-led or student-led. In teacher-led assessment practices, the teacher is responsible for evaluating student writing skills and processes: the teacher decides which assessment tools to use and how they are to be used. Student-led assessment practices, sometimes referred to as 'flipped assessment' or 'self-assessment', involve students taking responsibility for their learning through self-reflections and/or peer reflections and evaluations (see Chapter 16). It is important to include teacher-led and student-led forms of assessment in any writing program. In fact, rather than relying only on teacher-led assessment and standardised assessment such as NAP LAN, there is an urgent need to consider the ways in which we position writers as agentic and reflexive. It is important that teachers enable middle years writers to weigh up both personal and contextual considerations to assist them to make decisions and produce writing that is both satisfying and powerfully intentional (Ryan, 2014). What we want to avoid is young writers simply 'doing school tasks'. Rather, we want them to think of themselves as writers, and to consider how they want to represent themselves as writers. Teacher-led assessment can help to enable this idea of the student as reflexive writer by prioritising the importance of deliberate choices in writing, and the texts that are produced by these choices. That is, while the grammatical forms are very important, it is just as important to consider the functions of the language choices in a text (Myhill et al., 2016).