Tuesday Tip - Transcription at Student Level

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss encouraging students to represent their knowledge at their current transcription level, rather than forcing them to write full texts.

Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to this week's Tuesday Tip. When we're working with our young writers or writers of any age at all, it can feel like there's a huge amount of pressure to get everybody writing a full text, whether they have the transcription skills for that or not. One of the ways that you can shift the lens on this is to think about representing rather than writing.

So if a student is able to listen to the sounds in words and write the initial phoneme, have them do that. If they can write single words, have them do that. If they can write simple sentences, have them do that. So it's not about every child producing the same piece of text, but about children being able to represent what they know at the level of transcription they currently have.

Of course, that means that you may need to adjust the way that you record students understandings of things, but you can do that with an iPad and many other ways. That's our tip for this week. Thanks a lot.

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