Metaphor presented at NTRC Visioning Conference Allen, Texas July 21, 2015

1. Writing Workshop as a Shoreline
by Kimberly Hicks
Multiple Measures of Assessment​asks teachers and administrators to move beyond test scores
and utilize multiple measures of assessment to examine genuine student growth.
Reading and writing workshops achieve this by focusing on craft, rather than product. Students
are constantly assessed by peers, teachers, and themselves throughout the workshops with the
ultimate goals of the assessment, in the form of feedback and critiques, being the growth and
development of a strong reader, writer, and thinker.
Take this metaphor:
The workshop experience is much like a shoreline. Students are the shore, the sand. They
are impacted by storms; they house lots of memories. They are marked upon by
strangers, and families, and friends. Then, in comes a teacher, the wave. The teacher asks
much of the student - read, write, and think. Through the classroom instruction and
workshopping, they converse. They get to know one another. The teacher leaves and
comes back stronger, with more knowledge about the student, better able to meet her
needs. The teacher reaches deeper and farther into the student’s education, asking the
student to do more and more, until one day, the teacher leaves. But the shore is not
empty; rather, it is full of shells and artifacts from the sea, each one representing
something the student learned about reading, writing, and herself. The student no longer
needs the teacher to make sense of something. The student is capable and able. And the
sand did not need a test to know that it would make it, that it would grow and develop
and attract others. It didn’t need to be like every other shoreline.