Adjectives to Anecdotes: Writing Better Report Card Comments
Brenda Power and Kelly Chandler-Olcott
If your report card allows you to write only a few sentences about each student, a bit of advance planning helps if you want to be specific and concrete. Try to begin at least two or three weeks before report cards are due. If you put in just a few hours of prep time in the weeks before the report comments are written, you will find you save yourself lots of stress the final days before report cards are due.
Begin by using a class list to help you think about each student before writing. Brainstorm two or three adjectives to describe each student as a learner in your class, challenging yourself to make them different for each learner in the group. It usually doesn't take teachers more than thirty minutes to go through an entire class list, filling in adjectives for each student. A few students will remain enigmas to you, and you will need to pay special attention to them in the weeks before you fill out cards. That's another good reason to plan ahead - writing assessments the day before they are due makes it impossible to plan some extra observations of these mystifying students.
Then make brief notes during class time in the two or three weeks before you fill out report cards to support your choice of adjectives: an observation from workshop time, a specific piece of writing, a direct quote from a discussion. We've found it's much more effective to provide parents with one or two narrowly focused and relevant comments about their child than it is to make broad, generic statements.
You might consider brainstorming a list of sentence "stems" that will help you generate meaningful comments. For example, you might provide yourself with the following prompts if you're stumped for something to say about a child:
- Jessica's best work of the quarter was...
- Jonathan has shown improvement in...
- This term I was glad to see Erin...
- Ask Melissa to talk about...
- This term Connor challenged himself by...
Varying the stems you use may help you vary your narratives and remind you of the different options available to you - even in such a small space as a comment box.
Freewriting provides a helpful beginning for some teachers in writing brief narratives. These quickly written, uncensored thoughts about a child often yield a kernel of an idea that is appropriate for the comment box. As you become more experienced at writing assessments, these freewrites may become the skeleton of a lengthy narrative, rather than just the source of a few sentences.
Missing Kids
No matter how diligent you are about observing and assessing your students, there will always be some students who, for a variety of reasons, get left out of your notes. In his book, A Fresh Look at Writing (1994), Donald Graves suggests a written exercise in which teachers list from memory all the names of the students in a particular class. He then instructs his reader to write in another column something about each student's interests and experiences. "Note which names you remember first," he writes. "I find that they are often the students I enjoy most and those about whom I worry the most. Some children I won't remember. The missing children are often those who don't stand out, who get lost, or who are noticed only after three days of absence" (p. 25).
As teachers, we tend to gather a lot of information about students at the extremes. If you despair about Jamie ever learning to read or you think Chris may become the next William Faulkner, those students probably show up in your notes. If Lindsay is most likely to be found anywhere but in her seat, you've probably written about your frustrations with her - or it's close to the front of your brain when you sit down to write her assessment.
The kids we tend to miss are often less distinct characters in our classroom casts. They mind their own business, do their homework, and recede into the background. In our experience, girls make up a large percentage of these students who are, to use Myra and David Sadker's phrase, "missing in interaction."
In order not to miss certain students in your observations, build in times when you quickly scan your thoughts on each student. Review your notes on a regular basis - say, every other Thursday while your students are in gym, or while you're writing in writer's workshop on Wednesdays - and note how much information you have for each student. Some teachers even like to use a class list to "tally" the pieces of data they've collected over a few weeks. When you identify the three or four students about whom you know the least, you can focus on them in your notetaking over the next few days.
Since many of the students we "miss" in our notetaking tend to be reticent about speaking up during large-group discussions, make sure that some of your notetaking occurs in situations when they will feel more comfortable participating. Observe their participation in small groups, their behavior during independent work time, and make sure to schedule individual conferences frequently with those students.
More Strategies for Meaningful Comments Once you've carved out some time to observe, write, and comment on the work of all your students, there are a few additional strategies to use that will help you write meaningful comments for students and families:
Focus on the positive. Students who struggle or exasperate you will have those needs revealed by other notations on the report card (i.e., a letter grade or code for behavior). Many negative adjectives can be reworked to suggest strengths. "Restless" or "easily distracted" students can often be characterized as "very energetic." If you focus on what students can do well in the comments, you and parents can build from these strengths.
Learn to ask for help from colleagues. We work too much in isolation in schools, and nothing is more solitary and oppressive than that stressful feeling of everyone scribbling away frantically the day before report cards are due, alone in their classrooms. Once you've brainstormed adjectives and incidents, you may want to elicit the support of colleagues in describing your students. Art, music, and physical education teachers have often observed your students for years, not months - one of them might be willing to observe a couple of your students during their class to provide material for fleshing out your narrative on a "missing kid" or two.
Write the easy comments first. You will build your skills in writing assessments if you start with the students who are easy to describe. You can probably think of an incident or two for at least a small number of your students that would be appropriate for the report card box, right off the top of your head. Write these first, saving the most challenging comments for last. As your confidence in writing specific comments grows, you will find you have more to say about these enigmatic students than you realize.
Tie your recommendations to classroom-based information. One of the most important goals of the comment section should be to strengthen links between home and school. You can do this most effectively by pairing recommendations for home activities to your observations. For example, you might write:
Chad has recently moved into reading chapter books. You might ask him to read a book from the Henry and Mudge series to you.
If you're not sure what to recommend for a student, you might consider starting with the students' own goals. If you've asked students to set their own goals, you can use organize your report card comments around them. This template also involves parents in the goal-setting process:
http://www.choiceliteracy.com/studentgoals.pdf
Using the goals as a starting point will help you decide what to focus on, as well as provide feedback to the students about how they're progressing towards those goals.
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