Under the auspices of Sierra Leone's Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, SELI is running several writing clubs conducted as writing workshops, in selected junior secondary schools during the 2008-2009 school year. The two goals of the clubs are to improve the written communication skills of participating students, and to attract interest among language arts teachers in using process writing to teach English communication skills. Assessments of learning growth are matched to what we teach. The leader/facilitator for the clubs is SELI's director, whose teaching specialty is teaching English as a Second Language and who has substantial experience teaching writing in Sierra Leone.
In both schools where clubs are being offered during this term, a primary school fully occupies the classrooms during the mornings. The junior secondary school that occupies the compound in the afternoons is an entirely different entity from the primary school and also fully occupies the facility. Since the school day ends for the junior secondary schools at 6:00 pm, our clubs are held at 11:00 and 12:00 am, before school begins and during the time the primary school is in session. Clubs meet two times a week in classrooms provided by the participating schools (pictured here) at no cost to the student or to the school. Schools were selected according to need.Our writing workshops operate on a set of beliefs about writing and learning:
• writing and reading are recursive activities--we go back and in and out and revise and re-see and re-think things
• our language and literacy develop best when we are carrying out real-life activities
• our backgrounds and experience shape the way we learn and can enrich the learning of those around us
• language and literacy learning is social, and workshops promote it because they are collaborative and supportive
We all need formative evaluation tools to improve instruction in the classroom. They're best when they're descriptive, so students can use them to improve, too. SELI has been consolidating the West African Examinations Council competency expectations for writing with ERB's WrAP rubric, and NWREL's Six Traits writing rubric. The result is the four-trait, five-point analytic SELI Writing Rubric, which we'll refine as we go.
