The past year has disrupted teaching and learning routines in ways too numerous to count, different for every subject. For teachers who rely on student writing as a means to develop and assess thinking, or whose teaching objectives include a focus on fostering writing development, perhaps the most significant disruptions are the lack of in-person opportunities to facilitate rich discussions about ideas and texts, and to check in with students about their progress on assignments.

But a bright spot to emerge among all the chaos and turmoil has been renewed attention to the importance of focusing assessment on what students can do, instead of what they cannot, and of finding ways to customize feedback so that it meets students where they are, right at the point where they are most ready to learn something new. The forced shift to remote learning has affected all students differently, some for the better but many for the worse, and for the remainder of this school year and into next year, a major challenge for teachers will be figuring out where students stand with their literacy development while also rebuilding relationships with the students themselves. 

Dialogic writing assessment is an approach to conducting writing conferences that is uniquely well-suited to these present challenges. In my work as a teacher educator and researcher concerned with developing better ways to conduct formative, instructionally useful ways of assessing writing, I’ve helped teachers discover new insights about their students’ writing and about their students as writers. In dialogic writing assessment, a teacher asks a student to compose aloud as they work on a writing assignment, verbalizing their thoughts and, especially, any struggles they have with the assignment.

Depending on the teacher’s focus, and how easy it is for the student to verbalize their thoughts, the teacher may listen quietly, offering minimal prompts and asking few questions, or the teacher may be more directive and involved. Observing a student struggle, they may ask about the reason for the struggle (e.g. “What’s going through your mind right now?”). If a student is at the stage in their process where they are just getting started and haven’t written anything, the “composing” will look more like jotting down loose words and phrases, or even sketching with shapes and arrows.

The important thing is that the teacher is there to witness the early phases of creation. For students who do not typically plan or brainstorm, but labor under the misconception that beautiful, fully-formed paragraphs emerge fluidly from a writer’s mind, this is an opportunity for teachers to support the importance of planning. Regardless of the focus, the teacher can use this individualized assessment opportunity to provide encouragement along with the instructional support.  

Dialogic writing assessment has several of the essential hallmarks of good formative assessment practice. First, it provides students with immediate feedback on their writing process, feedback that can be customized to advance the writing rather than only pointing out a flaw or a shortcoming. As the teacher observes a student struggling with some aspect of a writing assignment, they can provide support that will allow a student to overcome that struggle. In this example, Helen Stanley, a high school teacher in New Jersey, supports Laura as she struggles with how to use an extended metaphor in writing about the representation of Eliza’s character in Pygmalion:

Laura: Initiation… what do i write now. Initiation. … Eliza sprouts [8 SECOND PAUSE]. Because it could be better.

Ms. Stanley: What if you just left a placeholder for yourself like, put plant metaphor in. To get yourself unstuck. Put plant metaphor later.

Making this suggestion allows Laura to become unstuck in her writing process and move forward to compose more fluently, and to return to the idea later with a clearer mind. Ms. Stanley’s comments, she said, “allowed me time to think and regather my thoughts rather than just scratching the whole idea in general like I was going to do initially.” This made her more conscious of how she needs to rely on drafting more in her writing process, and not expect everything to be perfect the first time. 

Previously on TG2, blog posts by Miriam Plotinsky, Andrew Burnett, and Koralie Mooney have discussed the necessity of feedback for learning. Timeliness is everything when it comes to feedback for learning, and, because dialogic assessment enables feedback during the writing process, it is more quickly taken up and understood than when delivered in written comments on a rubric or on a student’s essay. Students learn not just about their writing, but about their traits and tendencies as writers. Laura learned about the importance of drafting, and another of Ms. Stanley’s students, Ramona, became more aware of how indecisive she tends to be, as she noticed that Ms. Stanley repeatedly gave her encouraging feedback on the progress of her essay.

Second, as a group of assessment scholars from the University of Colorado has recently recommended, it is not designed to be graded and does not lend itself to this kind of measurement. Teachers who are concerned about being systematic and standards-based in their conversations with student writers can still do so. Teachers can create record-keeping sheets like the ones used by Helen Stanley and English teacher Simon Gale, which specify the writing skills they want to assess with this writing assignment, with space for their own jottings about what they notice in the dialogic assessment session. 

Third, because dialogic assessment aims to elicit students’ composing processes, it lends itself to fostering self-regulation of those processes, along with student agency. Teachers can use dialogic assessment sessions to remind students of specific effective strategies, and ask students to reflect on how they have used those strategies. For Helen Stanley, an important strategy that she values is to have students continually revisit a writing prompt as they write. This strategy, which is relevant and useful to writing tasks in all school subjects and even out-of-school, is one that she can teach dialogically, after identifying that a student is not using this strategy when it would be relevant. The relevance and usefulness of a strategy is determined individually and dynamically. When her student Ramona, writing about Pygmalion, verbalizes the idea that Eliza (the protagonist) doesn’t fit in because she has morals and is satisfied that she can make something of herself, Helen asks her to re-examine the writing prompt to figure out how she will turn that idea into an arguable thesis:

Helen: Go back to the prompt. How are you going to actually make that case now because what you said is really accurate?

And when Ramona loses focus while she’s writing, Helen reminds her several times to return to the prompt with statements like “Go back to the prompt” and “Are you hitting everything the prompt is asking for?” 

With another student, Julia, also working on an essay about Pygmalion, Helen affirms a useful idea that Julia has verbalized: that Henry Higgins’ motive for seeing Eliza become a lady is “for selfish reasons, trying to prove how he's a a phonetics expert,”—and then asks” her “Is there any language in the prompt that you can pick up that talks about that?”

And with a third student, Laura, who pauses after a few minutes of brainstorming examples to say “that’s the last one I’m gonna do,” she says “don’t be afraid to go back to the prompt, too, to make sure you’re picking it up.” 

To foster agency, teachers should begin each session by asking the students what their goals are for the piece of writing they’ll be working on, and what they would like to focus on in the session. English Teacher Simon Gale shows how to do this, asking a student named Martin to elaborate on his answer:

Simon: What do you want to get out of our session today?

Martin: Definitely a stronger introduction.

Simon: Mhm. Say more about that. What do you mean?

Martin: So it's a basic intro and I just start with the poem “O Captain My Captain” and then just go straight to my claim. I don't really build anything up or make it really intriguing so I definitely want to change that.

Unlike a rubric or any other print-centered type of formative assessment the conversational structure of dialogic assessment allows the teacher to press students to elaborate on their goals and, in doing so, articulate a fuller understanding of the direction they want their writing to take. 

As a former English teacher and current English teacher educator, I work mostly with English Language Arts teachers. The examples I’ve shared above are all from sessions where students were working on some sort of literary analysis writing, which is a common type of writing in ELA. However, the dialogic assessment approach is easily transferable to writing in content areas such as Science and Social Studies. Teachers in these subject areas can plan for dialogic assessment sessions by choosing specific aspects of content-area writing to focus on—for example, in History they might focus on analyzing the bias and perspective in a primary source in a written response to a document-based question (DBQ), while in science they might focus on writing a clear and complete explanation of a process involved in a chemical reaction (such as photosynthesis).

Because dialogic assessment involves students verbalizing their thinking as they plan and compose, it can enable teachers to discern whether problems in a student’s writing about primary source texts or about scientific processes lie in the content knowledge (e.g., did they not accurately comprehend the source) or in articulating their comprehension in written prose. Each of these possibilities entails a different instructional response. 

As we navigate the pandemic and its aftermath, we need individualized methods of assessment to help us understand the myriad ways these circumstances have affected our students’ development. And we need methods that will allow us to address these effects in timely and responsive ways. Most importantly, we need to sit beside students as supportive coaches, giving them confidence that they can handle whatever writing challenges they encounter, sending the message that “you’ve got this” when they run into difficulty.

Sarah Beck is a teacher educator and researcher in literacy and English Education at New York University. She has been working with teachers, students, and preservice teachers in New York City for the past 18 years to build more student-centered and instructionally useful approaches to assessing writing. Follow her on Twitter @swbook411.