Rubric on narrative writing.

As I remembered, I never had real writing lesson in my school days. If there was, not one that could stay vivid in my memory. Most of the time I felt like I was groping in the dark. I would usually use random grammar - anything that sounded right (I feel thankful I used to read a lot of story books when I was young) and made random sentence structure. I also wrote whatever that came in my mind first, never really about planning and how to make it purposeful. I made so many mistakes and I did not understand why I did them and how to fix it. I tend to get bored if I learn and revise something I already know, so I like fixing my weakness when revising. However, with English, I made little progress or none at all because I only see tick and squiggly lines here and there, some slashed out and certain times cross marks because I don't know why it is wrong. So I know now, in my class with my students, I cannot do what my teachers did back then.

I set writing activity for my students.

These are the criteria:

1. Narrative writing.

2. Based on pictures given (must use all in sequence) - I used Rumpelstiltskin pictures.

3. The story must be creatively designed different from the original version.

4. Organisation use good portion of each elements in plot: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution.

5. Good grammar and sentence structure.

I think this is what my students are facing; they are groping and they are bored with it. They know the form of the tenses during practice because it's practically a drill which is about doing the same thing over and over again. However, the practices are never about usage in various situation for writing and speaking. Then comes the sentence structure to convey their thoughts, they got the passive and active wrong and their direct and indirect speech is haywire too. To make things more complicated, they need to make the story pops out of page by using descriptive words and make descriptions vivid. In a nutshell, there are so many things to fix when writing and speaking a narration. They need formative and detailed comments on how they are doing.

Tracy advised in our training sessions to make feedback meaningful. This I highly agree. But how to go about this when there are so many students to attend to? If I need to go one student at a time it will take so much time and I don't even know if it's effective. Here, I am advised to use rubric. Use one that can show the criteria to get the perfect mark. Make sure to apply self-reported learning (which enhances their reflective thinking in their studies) so that I can learn more of the students' understanding and expectation of their work. Through the rubric they know what more they can do. 

This is the plan we discussed:

1. Introduce the rubric and the perfect criteria to get perfect marks.

2. Let them do the writing, to practice the new information.

3. Get the student to mark their own work. This gets them to analyse the level of strength and weakness. This also get them cognitively prepared to change their initial input with new ones once they know they are weak in the targeted area.

4. Then, I give them the mark. If there is a gap, the students can get to know my real expectation and the things they should do; in further details. I can get them to in sync their expectation with mine.

The rubric can be a bit overwhelming because of the criteria are explained in tiny details. Yes it is student-friendly, but it won't help them if they see it as too much information. So I will:

1. introduce 2 criteria at a time. Each criteria has 5 points scale.

2. introduce the 5th point scale first to set their mind on the type of excellent work I am looking for.

I am hoping the students can come forward and debate with me about their marks. That way, I can get more information about their individual writing tendency and they can get to fix their weakness.

This is my rubric: Narrative Writing 5-point scale Rubric - student friendly