CKS Roars! Again

Take a moment and think back to your time in school.  Whether your fondest memories are of your time in elementary, middle or high school--imagine that someone at that time told you in the future you would walk around with the world's information in your pocket. Younger me would have thought no matter how small writing gets for encyclopedias or how many pockets they add to cargo shorts,  that is crazy talk. We all know, however, with cell phones, tablets and the internet, our students have exactly that--a world's worth of information in their pockets.

As we prepare our students for the future, it is not enough to simply KNOW information.  They must be able to evaluate which information is worth knowing and how to use it. Enter CKS Roars. CKS Roars is a school-wide writing assessment of our students' opinion and argument writing--see the featured post at the left where I explained the difference between the two different types of writing. In both of these types of writing, students must take a position and use information to support their position. Tomorrow, all of our students will participate in this writing task through their language arts class.

The complexity and expectations vary by grade level, from an EC4 student drawing or telling the teacher that God's greatest gift is _________ because of __________, to 8th graders using 45 minutes to support a claim about the appropriate amount of screen time for teenagers. Our teachers worked together to create common rubrics and will double score student writing pieces. Much of this first round of writing is to help calibrate our teachers and set a standard for what great writing looks like. It will help them plan instruction for the second semester and our next prompt in the spring. After both prompts, we will share information with parents about what we learned from the writing assessments.

I am proud of the work our teachers have done to create this program and feel it will be key to the continued success of our students. This type of demand-writing helps prepare for the writing expectations in high school and college. Most importantly, though, the type of thinking required by these tasks will prepare our students to become more discerning consumers of information, helping better prepare them for life.