Cal State San Marcos Writing Project Conference

Writing Project Conference

I attended the Cal State San Marcos Writing Project Conference on May 3, 2014. The purpose of the conference was to bring together writing professors from the GEW classes and other college level writing classes with high school English teachers. Together we looked at samples of student work and discussed what kinds of things we noticed about the prompt, directions, and the essay itself. We were asked to respond as if we had the opportunity to respond to the actual student writer about his/her essay and to think about how we would respond, what we would say and why we would say it. We took a look at writing from a Fall semester freshmen in a GEW class and we took a look at a college prep high school sophomore’s writing.

It was a great experience talking with college professors as colleagues and seeing what their expectations of students are and discussing how we can best prepare students in high school to meet those expectations in college.

Personally I also found it extremely valuable to see how a table full of English teachers grade an essay. I was able to use this opportunity to kind of calibrate my grading with theirs and I pleasantly found out that I notice all or most of the same issues and good points that they did. I was concerned about my grading scales and so this made me feel more confident in my essay grading skills. I am still very slow but at least I appear to be accurate and thorough.