Christensen and Hawley Hicks + Turner
This weeks readings were interesting, and I feel were really helpful in my thought process of grading, and working with my student's writing.
I'll start with Hawley Turner and Hicks. They say "When it comes to writing, we serve as coaches or as judges." This really stuck with me, and is so true. We can either help coach our students, guide them, and do it in a decent way, to help better their craft and hopefully motivate them to write more, or we can sit and read their work, judging it. Sometimes, judging their work isn't as extreme as it sounds, but when it comes to writing, I think it is. Even seniors in highs school need some motivation to not only keep them writing, but to push them to write outside of their comfort zones. Coaching and encouraging practice is different than reading to judge and just criticize.
We need to help them understand and develop their own learning targets, and show them how important and helpful it is to set goals. These of course need to be realistic goals, that can be completed within a decent time frame, but they need to be something that in a way challenges them as writers. No more writing a paragraph or two to describe something. Push yourself and your skills. In the same sense, we want to encourage students to respond with reinforcement. No simple, short, lame answers. Back up your thoughts and feelings, back up your writing, and stick to it firmly. That will help them become better writers.
Now, on to my favorite. Christensen. In chapter 6, she talks solely about responding to student work. She says, "We start by telling them what they're doing right.". This also stuck out to me. It's important to help guide them to the right formatting or spelling and grammar, but we don't want to tear their work to shreds. Don't focus on just negative. Point it out in a positive way, and help them figure out how to correct it. That's also when as the teacher, we need to be sure to "watch out for patterns in errors." If a student it constantly making the same mistake in their writing, we need to work with them to help fix it. Then, we need to hold them accountable. We should see a difference in writing if we work with the same students over the span of a year, even a few years. Help them learn how to self edit, and enforce it.
To help stay positive, we can say things like "What I love about your writing is...." or "What you need to work on is...." Include either or, but regardless, keep the tone of your suggestions positive.
In chapter 7, she talks about letting go of grades. She wants to "focus on creating meaningful work". This was a challenge for me to do while working on my MWP. I've always been used to grading, and being graded. Trying to create ways to give students grades without "grading" was hard. Thankfully, I was able to do it.
"Students need to feel that their work is important, relevant, and meaningful. If not, why should they spend time on it?" This goes in to what I was saying about positive feedback, and positive ways of giving corrections. If you just tear their work apart, why should they bother to fix it, or write anymore? That's the exact opposite of what I want to do as a teacher. I want to motivate, and inspire and drive them to write more, edit more, and develop ideas in an entirely new way. They need motivation, not a literary critic.
REVISION! It's never done. UGH. So true. I'm always revising my work. Changing works, moving paragraphs around, and doing whatever I need to in order to improve a piece. My work, and my students work, will always be a work in progress, and there are always changes to be made.
Following Christensen's grading policy, it excites me to think about creating my own. While I will use a lot of her suggestions, I won't use all, and that's the beauty of it. You can adapt and make it your own, all while following similar standards. I think this was a nice way to end the class, because it's got me even more excited than I already was to teach, read my students work, and help them grow.
I'll start with Hawley Turner and Hicks. They say "When it comes to writing, we serve as coaches or as judges." This really stuck with me, and is so true. We can either help coach our students, guide them, and do it in a decent way, to help better their craft and hopefully motivate them to write more, or we can sit and read their work, judging it. Sometimes, judging their work isn't as extreme as it sounds, but when it comes to writing, I think it is. Even seniors in highs school need some motivation to not only keep them writing, but to push them to write outside of their comfort zones. Coaching and encouraging practice is different than reading to judge and just criticize.
We need to help them understand and develop their own learning targets, and show them how important and helpful it is to set goals. These of course need to be realistic goals, that can be completed within a decent time frame, but they need to be something that in a way challenges them as writers. No more writing a paragraph or two to describe something. Push yourself and your skills. In the same sense, we want to encourage students to respond with reinforcement. No simple, short, lame answers. Back up your thoughts and feelings, back up your writing, and stick to it firmly. That will help them become better writers.
Now, on to my favorite. Christensen. In chapter 6, she talks solely about responding to student work. She says, "We start by telling them what they're doing right.". This also stuck out to me. It's important to help guide them to the right formatting or spelling and grammar, but we don't want to tear their work to shreds. Don't focus on just negative. Point it out in a positive way, and help them figure out how to correct it. That's also when as the teacher, we need to be sure to "watch out for patterns in errors." If a student it constantly making the same mistake in their writing, we need to work with them to help fix it. Then, we need to hold them accountable. We should see a difference in writing if we work with the same students over the span of a year, even a few years. Help them learn how to self edit, and enforce it.
To help stay positive, we can say things like "What I love about your writing is...." or "What you need to work on is...." Include either or, but regardless, keep the tone of your suggestions positive.
In chapter 7, she talks about letting go of grades. She wants to "focus on creating meaningful work". This was a challenge for me to do while working on my MWP. I've always been used to grading, and being graded. Trying to create ways to give students grades without "grading" was hard. Thankfully, I was able to do it.
"Students need to feel that their work is important, relevant, and meaningful. If not, why should they spend time on it?" This goes in to what I was saying about positive feedback, and positive ways of giving corrections. If you just tear their work apart, why should they bother to fix it, or write anymore? That's the exact opposite of what I want to do as a teacher. I want to motivate, and inspire and drive them to write more, edit more, and develop ideas in an entirely new way. They need motivation, not a literary critic.
REVISION! It's never done. UGH. So true. I'm always revising my work. Changing works, moving paragraphs around, and doing whatever I need to in order to improve a piece. My work, and my students work, will always be a work in progress, and there are always changes to be made.
Following Christensen's grading policy, it excites me to think about creating my own. While I will use a lot of her suggestions, I won't use all, and that's the beauty of it. You can adapt and make it your own, all while following similar standards. I think this was a nice way to end the class, because it's got me even more excited than I already was to teach, read my students work, and help them grow.
Lila,
ReplyDeleteGreat point about revisions never being done. That's exactly how I feel about it too. I think there's always limitations in a classroom to how much time can be devoted to such an open-ended way of handling revision because we can't give students an assignment that is never submitted an assessed. That's just how the world works when we're talking a structured environment like school. Even if students can't spend all the time they want on their writing, our goal is to make them want to pursue greater and greater achievements and changes even after the grades are in. There's always something that can be experimented with or improved on and the hope is that students will make their own goals instead of us setting up the goalposts for them and having them kick at the spot we tell them they need to aim for. At first that's arguably necessary, but if we're teaching them to write, we need to teach them to write independently because there won't always be a teacher over their shoulder to tell them how to write an email to their boss.
Keep revising is something I learned from this course and I became too obsessed sometimes. Whew! I revised my papers for this course one million times to the point when Dr. Johnson said to stop. LOL. You made a very good point about how to limit the time of revising and be sure that they submit their work. I face challenges with my students. They DO NOT WANT TO REVISE. They keep saying they are done, period. That's my new challenge, convincing them to want to write more and be motivated to revise their work.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy your blogs very much and I can follow you easily because you make many good points about certain things that I never thought of or didn't notice until you mention them. Thank you for your wonderful comments throughout the semster. Cheers.