PORTFOLIO

Turning Points is a school-based essay contest. Representatives of Turning Points come into the classroom and teach lessons about the importance of persevering and acquiring values. Then students write an essay about a time they had to persevere and connect it to the values they learned. Students then have the choice to submit their essay. 

 

I served as a Tier 1 Judge for the essay contest. In my English specialization we were divided up into groups and given a set of 9-10 essays. We were tasked with reading the essays, assessing them based on the rubric, and ranking them first to last. 

 

This was the first time I had the opportunity to mark an assignment. I was able to find a strategy that worked well for me; I assigned percentages to each category on the rubric and calculated their final score based on the weighting of each category. 

 

A couple days later, the groups met back together to collaborate and discuss the marks they assigned. I was pleasantly surprised to find that our rankings were very similar. 

 

Overall, I learned a lot from participating as a judge, and I think this might be a program I bring into my classroom in the future.