2 posts tagged “writing assessment”

Two years ago, when I was on sabbatical (and this blog was dedicated to my learning and research), I read a lot about "agency."  How can we make students the agents of their learning?  How does our curriculum promote agency? Much of the research I read centered on video and online gaming as exemplars for agency.

I had a great moment in my second block, ninth grade class last week.  I had just worked my way through a sentence variety lesson I've used for years (I think I got it from a Diana Hacker writing handbook).  Afterward, while students were revising a piece of writing for sentence variety, one student said, "Doing this makes me feel like a professional writer."  He became an agent of his own learning, rather than a student just answering a teacher's questions in writing to get the points.  I love it when students remember that writing is an art, not just a chore.

Here are a couple of examples of great revisions for sentence variety from class that day.  Students were responding to a portrait by Xavier Tavera.

Original Sentences

Their body stance is indicating that they won't back down from a fight.
The artist is showing how buff and big they look.
It is indicating that they are criminals.

Revised Sentences

Shoulders up, arms tight with tension, their body stance indicates that they won't back down from a fight.
Artist Xavier Tavera show how buff and big they look.
Dark and mysterious, ski masks hide something they want no one to know about.

Particularly Effective Use of a Short, Simple Sentence in Revision

In the picture to the right, it shows a white guy standing very tense and uneasy with eyes filled with anger wearing a sleeveless shirt, ski mask, and casual pants.  In the next picture, a black man stands behind the same brick wall as the white guy wearing the same ski mask as the white guy with a hand extended out wanting something.  the man wears a white shirt and black pants.  Both are dangerous.  [my italics]

I’ve just finished reading a chapter from a tutoring guide  and Muriel Harris’ rationale for why writers need writing centers.

I was a writing center tutor in college and a writing assistant for several professors.  Maybe that’s why I entered the classroom prepared to conduct writing conferences in a way that calms student writers and maintains their sense of control and ownership of their work.  Jen Budenski, draft whisperer.  Really from all that I’ve observed at Hopkins High School, I think most writing teachers are dedicated to using a conference and workshop model to improve student writing.

As usual, as I read, I realized that I don’t know everything there is to know about teaching writing.  What the articles did make me wonder about is the potential incompatibility of all the roles I (we) have to take on in these conferences.  No matter how skillful I think I am at presenting myself as a consultant or reader, will my students always perceive me as an evaluator?  What’s the connotative difference between “teacher,” “tutor,” and “reader”?  A teacher imparts knowledge, makes assignments, and assesses products.  Above all, a teacher “gives” grades.  A tutor knows something you don’t—and in fact need help with—about a subject area or concept.  A reader interacts intelligently with and responds to, even finds a way to appreciate, a text.  While these distinctions may not be true in denotation, I’m fairly certain they are in student perception.

Writing “consultants” in writing centers can freely inhabit a variety of roles, but teachers ultimately have to assign grades.  Students know that, and perhaps too often what they take away from a classroom conference would be something like a to-do list from their teachers in order to get the A they think they so desperately need.  Despite the teacher’s best intentions, students probably leave their classroom conferences armed with the tools they need to make a better paper (a fish, as it were), but the ethos of a writing center is to make better writers (or fisherpersons).  Relieved of the power imbalance inherent to the teacher-student relationship—not having to assign grades—the writing consultant can work with students as more informed readers than their friends, relatives, or even checklist-bearing peers, in both practical and affective domains.

Here’s why I’m thinking about this.  In working with my special population of loveable underachievers, I’ve found that the writing conference works to motivate them to produce and revise.  And that’s great in many ways, but it can be paralyzing for me when it comes time to assign a grade.  I want to build upon the relationship we’ve begun in the conference and reward students for their revision, so I tend to assign points based on particular skills and strategies that arose in conference and were addressed in revision.  Students are motivated by these successes to keep writing and experimenting with revision.  However, as critical as this kind of motivation is, I worry that I’m harming students by building a false impression of their actual abilities.  As their teacher, the one who is accountable for their literacy instruction, I need the freedom to step back and say, “This paper isn’t good enough. You haven’t learned how to write, yet.”  I try to communicate this necessary criticism through a 6 traits rubric score, but it doesn’t speak to them with the same force as a letter grade does.  Grades need to motivate, but they also need to be actual measures of ability.

That’s where I think a writing center filled with competent, ethical consultants can offer classroom teachers a sort of healthy triangulation.  Or given all the roles of writing teachers...healthy septagulation?

It’s a mad, mad rush to find time to support 19-26 student writers in understanding an assignment, brainstorming ideas, drafting, revising, and editing—let alone teaching them how your expectations for written discourse are discipline specific, that the way Ms. Lucking teaches how to write a DBQ is great, but doesn’t quite work for rhetorical analysis or Ms. Kleinman’s template for research writing works well in the sciences but doesn’t cut it with the MLA.  Not all the time, or sometimes, but a disquieting number of times in a nine week quarter, I’m herding students through these process steps without time for reflection, much less true metacognition.

Personally, the idea of sacrificing even one stage of the writing process to an outsider, some consultant, makes me feel crabby.  Honestly, I don’t want to share.  I love this part of my job.  Love it irrationally, paradoxically, passionately.  But at the same time, it might be best for my students to stop being a miserly control freak and learn to be willing to outsource some stages of composition.  Or else, maybe I should leave the classroom and teach in the writing center...