Assessing Writers

When it comes to writing assessment, there's no better judge of what your students know and are able to do than you. And when it comes to advice on best practices for assessment, there's no better source than Carl Anderson's Assessing Writers. Like he did in the popular and highly acclaimed How's It Going?, Anderson offers smart, ready-to-use ideas for assessment. Assessing Writers offers practical methods for gathering information about every writer in your classroom and shows you how to create writing lessons that address the needs of individual students as well as the whole class.

Anderson's straightforward approach helps you imagine an ongoing assessment program that takes you from meeting new students to designing curriculum. In Assessing Writers you'll find out:

• what you need to know about students to assess them as writers
• how to uncover and make sense of this information
• how to make an individualized plan for each student
• how to use these plans when you confer
• how to structure units of study to meet classroom-wide needs.

Carl Anderson is one of the nation's leading experts on teaching writing to students in grades K-12. Carl was first an elementary and then a middle school teacher. He taught students of diverse backgrounds in city, rural, and suburban schools in New York City, Bardstown, Kentucky, and Northbrook, Illinois. In 1994, Carl joined the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University, which was founded and is directed by Lucy Calkins. As a Project staff developer for eight years, Carl worked side-by-side with teachers in elementary and middle school classrooms in New York City and in its surrounding suburbs, showing them how to establish writing workshops for their students. While at the Project, Carl began an intensive study of writing conferences. This study led to his first book, How's It Going? A Practical Guide to Conferring with Student Writers (2000), and later to his second book, Assessing Writers (2004) and his series Strategic Writing Conferences: Smart Conversations that Move Young Writers Forward Grades 3-6 (2009). Today, Carl works as a consultant in schools across the United States. He continues to spend most of his days in classrooms with teachers and students, where he concentrates on helping teachers learn to have effective writing conferences that change students' lives as writers.