Grading the Writing Process

My department team was planning our standard alignment plans - basically figuring out what standards from the Common Core we'd cover each year and each semester a student is in high school.  The rest of my department (which is filled with brilliant educators who are ten times better at their job than I am, so this isn't a jab at them, just a disagreement) felt that the writing process (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.5) isn't a standard that should be graded, but discussed frequently with students.

And I'm all for discussing.  And showing them examples of my own writing that went through 10 drafts.  And showing them examples of great published writers who went through 20 drafts.  And probably doing some other stuff that showcases the awesomeness of the writing process.

But I'm also for grading it.  And I don't think it's a hard thing to do.

As it stands now (as this isn't refined or anything), a student who turns in an essay needs to do four things when they turn in their final paper in order to get a passing grade:

1. Turn in their prewriting, in whatever form it was, with their final draft.
2. Turn in their "zero draft," their initial attempt at starting/outlining their rough draft, with their final draft.
3. Turn in their rough draft with the final draft.  The rough draft must be a complete draft - no first-half-of-the-paper rough draft.
4. On their final draft, highlight all the changes between their rough and final.  (I stole this idea from Linda Christensen.)  Revisions must be significant - this isn't editing for spelling and grammar, it's revising.

On number four I "help" them out some (they would say "make them do extra work") - I make them write three different kinds of hooks and three different types of conclusions, then choose the best one.  Next year, I imagine I could do it with all sorts of different things.  Rewrite your thesis.  Reorder your introductory paragraph, trying the thesis statement at the beginning and the end.  Reorder your paragraphs in another logical way.

To exceed on this standard, students have to schedule a meeting with one of our peer writing tutors and show the changes they made after meeting with them.

I also let student revise their essays, often multiple times, which could be a grading nightmare, except for two things students need to do before I will grade their revisions:

1. Turn in your original graded rubric returned to you (I scan my stack of graded rubrics and save the final, because about half of the students will lose their graded one).
2. Highlight all the changes you've made between your final and the revised paper to be graded.  Turn in everything you turned in before.

Then I just look at what they added and determine if it addresses the concerns recorded on the original rubric.

But maybe this is foolish and silly.  Please correct me in the comments.

Narrative Essay - Step Two: Rewrites

Last week Last month Eight months ago, I wrote a post about my new approach to narrative writing.  This is the follow-up.

After students have written writer's notebook entries for about a month, I ask them to go back, reread their entries, and choose around five they like or would want to revise.  Then I hand them a glue stick and a copy of the rewrite square to the right (here's the file if you want a copy).

This gives students a place to start and helps them identify what's good, rather than misspellings, grammar issues, or poor organization.  None of these things matter when creating the bedrock for mining.  Identifying what works is the vein of gold we're looking for.

When they've finished marking up this first one, I introduce Graves and Kittle's (2005) concept of the heartbeat (p. 10-1).  The heartbeat is the writer's wish for the piece or what they want the reader to take from it.  Often there's a line that embodies this.  I may ask students to look for the heartbeat in that first piece, or to go on and re-read their second selected entry, using the second rewrite square in the file above.

Here's an example straight from my writer's notebook:

[I met Noel at summer camp.]  She was the manager at the ranch office across the highway and pretty forward about where she saw our relationship going.  "I want you to play your guitar for me," where the first words she ever said to me.  Never having a girlfriend before, at 18 years old, I was more than happy to oblige, and follow it up with a 30-minute make-out session afterwards.

Weeks later, I left notes in the various pockets of her duffel bag, "I love you" written on each one.

The heartbeat is underlined.  What the piece is mostly about is in brackets.  The bolded words are words that I liked.  As we'll see in the next post, my heartbeat changed, as they sometimes do as one writes more.

Once students have done this with the five pieces, they choose one to rewrite.  They keep what they like, move the heartbeat around, and try to bring in more of what they liked in the original entry.  All this is still done in the writer's notebook.

In the next post, I'll showcase the narrative essay outline I used with students this past year.  There's nothing five-paragraphy about it.

Works Cited

Graves, D. H., & Kittle, P.  (2005).  Inside writing: How to teach the details of craft.  Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Narrative Essay - Step One: The Writer's Notebook

Photo by Grassroots Group on Flickr, some rights reserved.

Writer's notebooks are the first step I took towards changing the way I teach all writing, including moving away from five-paragraph essays.

Over the last year, I've been thinking a lot about writing instruction that is authentic and closer to the process "real" writers go through¹; the non-prescriptive² pre-writing that creates a solid bedrock of thoughts ready to be mined for high quality topics to be refined into short stories or cut and polished into poems.

The mold for where this bedrock can be formed, I'd argue, is the writer's notebook (WNB) as opposed to what some classes call the journal or diary.  It's different in the type of writing that goes in.

What I refer to as a journal contains writing on prompts selected by the teacher, or, when it's an option, whatever the student wants to write about: their weekend, or the basketball game the night before.  This is good - getting students to write daily or multiple times per week is research-driven good practice and will make students better writers.  But there are some disadvantages to this model³.

Journals don't contain what students value.  They get the student to write, or they act as a primer connecting yesterday's lesson to today's.  But at the end of the year (or a month in), the student asks themselves, "so why am I doing this?"  Beyond the grade they get and the lessons we teach⁴, the journal isn't valued by our students.  It isn't something most of them will want to save.

Journals aren't connected to a long-term process.  The work that goes into a journal rarely extends beyond that day's warm-up.  Warm-ups are good.  But maybe student-writing time should be at a different time⁵.

Journals don't assess students' writing ability.  Journals judge a student's ability to write about something they don't value (see above) because we tell them to.

Journals aren't authentic.  Journals aren't where published writing takes place.  Students don't take their responses to these prompts and revise them into polished pieces.

So here's how I set up a WNB this year.  All those journal prompts?  You still need them, because students coming into class at the end of the summer aren't going to churn out a lot of writing.  They need to work up to it.  So the first day I give them some of those journal prompts to choose from, and I ask for just four lines (from my 10th graders).  The next day, I ask for 5 or 6.  We continue this until we're at half a page.  I may take a breather here, ask for half a page for a week.  Then start to ratchet it up to a full page.

This is what Aimee Buckner calls the Daily Page - students writing a full page each day.  In her book Notebook Know-How: Strategies for the Writer's Notebook (2005), Buckner offers a couple strategies for students to use to come up with their own topics.  Some of my favorites:

Writing from a List  I use this one in my class frequently.  Students make a list of the top ten best things that have happened in their life and the top seven worst.  Then star the ones they could write about.  Then choose one to write about that day.

Observations  What do you notice using your five senses?  The sweaty smell of the kid who had gym class last period.  The grinding pencil sharpener next door.  Write about it.

Conversation  Write a conversation between you and someone or something else.  Here's part of my conversation with a pen:

Me: Hello, pen.
Pen: I don't talk.
Me: Um . . . you just did.
Pen: No, I didn't.
Me: Yes, you did. You just talked again.
Pen: No, that's just a figment of your imagination.
Me: But if I look back, I have what you said. See?
Pen: . . .
Me: See? . . . See?
Pen: Okay, okay. So I talk. So what?
Me: I just wanted to see how you were doing.
Pen: Fine.
Me: Oh. That's good.
Pen: Is that all?
Me: And I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your continuous ink flow.

So those are great, because students can choose the topic, but it's not something like "This weekend, I . . ."  A conversation with a pen might not produce something that goes to the next step.  But a conversation with your father who left you when your were 10?  That could go somewhere.  That's something I'd want to read.  These prompts create bedrock for mining - not everything will be good.  But some of it will be.

In addition to those options, I give students a list of prompts from Inside Writing (2005) by Donald Graves and Penny Kittle.  One of my favorites: Think about a photograph you feel a strong emotional connection to, one of: a family gathering, you and your grandfather, your first communion, a day at the beach.  Tell who is in the photo and why you treasure it.

These prompts are different from the typical ones we write on the board at the beginning of class.  This prompt got me to write a coming-of-age story about a friend and mentor I worked with at summer camp and who greatly influenced the person I became.  It's something people want to read about.

That's the point of the writer's notebook.  Push back in the comments.  Next week I'll write about how I got students to choose a topic and rewrite it - but it's straight out of Inside Writing, if you'd rather get it from the source.

1. Everyone's a real writer, but I'm talking about professional writers, in this case.  I guess. Go back.

2.  So here's my prescription of how to do it.  Geez. Go back.

3. I am looking for a fight on this, because I'm moving away from journals myself and I others to force me to think about this deeply.  So bring it on in the comments, please. Go back.

4. Which, in many cases, are more dear to us than to our students - at least for me. Go back.

5. Full disclosure: this is an idea that just came to me.  I'll try it out and let you know how it goes. Go back.

When We Lost the Love

The way I teach writing now is so different from the way I taught writing when I started this gig¹.

When I started, I taught writing as I was taught.  I did pull in some stuff from college, like awesome 5-3-1 rubrics with points and weights and six-trait writing.  Heck yeah.  But accordion style paragraphs?  Yep.  Fact/Quote/Shocking statement hooks?  Uh-huh.  Five paragraph formulaic writing?  Oh yes.  Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.

I mean, I made this whole detailed outline students would fill out with complete sentences, and then all they'd have to do is string it together.  I was convinced this outline could slay poor organization and vanquish it forever.  But we just broke up.  It's okay.  I was the breaker-upper, not the breakee.

Because when we first got together, I had this image of a graph in my mind.  It came from a teaching writing class in college, so I don't feel too bad about this.  But the idea was that students had to start writing with a formula and then through experimentation could move away from the formula into more independent and innovative styles.

And maybe formula to a certain extent is good.  If students are writing a literary analysis essay where they're quoting a text, they should know that quoting evidence as the first or last sentence isn't typically done.  Maybe even give them a formula for the body paragraphs: transition, main idea, set-up the quote, quote, explain the quote, restate main idea/transition.  Sure.

But a formula for a full narrative essay?  Or placing restrictions on the number of paragraphs a student can have?  Oh no you didn't²!

We all³ wrote five paragraphs essays in elementary school.  And middle school.  And probably, for many of us, in high school.  But that doesn't fly in college, does it?  Nor, I would assume, in business reports, or a firefighter's emergency response logs, or any number of other real world writing situations.  Instead, the length is dependent on the information to be presented.  So let's teach students how to do that.

I was headed in that direction after taking the writing workshop class at PSU last spring, but two professionals finally convinced me that Essay Outline and I had lost the love.  Kimberly Campbell and Kristi Latimer presented at the Oregon Council of Teachers of English (OCTE) Fall Conference, and at this year's NCTE Conference.

Here's an excerpt from their conference handout⁴, if my brief tirade wasn't enough to convince you⁵:

The Myths of the Five Paragraph Formula  

Myth: The five-paragraph formula is an actual form. 

The five‐paragraph essay, “speaks a logic that is important to challenge precisely because this logic perpetuates the commonsense myth that the five‐paragraph theme is an actual “form” and that “forming” in writing is simply slotting information into prefabricated formulas rather than a complex process of meaning‐making and negotiation between a writer’s purposes and audiences’ needs” (Brannon et. al, 2008,16) 

Myth: The formula is just a starting point; it’s a necessary first step that supports students in moving to more sophisticated writing. 

Studies indicate that for most students, they never move beyond this formula. “The FPT (five‐paragraph theme) formula may assist students with proper formatting of papers, but it appears to fall short of helping  them offer a cogent discussion of their thoughts. Worse, strict adherence to the FPT may actually limit students’ development of complex thinking” (Argys, 2008, 99). 

Myth: It is a helpful tool for students who struggle with writing. 

Struggling writers need support in developing their ideas and finding structures that allow their ideas to be understood by a reader. “[B]ut repetitively following the same direction for writing every essay will not help these writers advance beyond a kind of ‘successful’ codependence on teachers who have agreed in advance that this sort of formulaic essay will be what they reward” (Wiley, 2000, 65). 

Myth: It prepares students for standardized tests. 

Although the prevalence of the five‐paragraph formula can be linked to the increase of standardized writing assessments, studies indicate that the formula does not lead to high test scores. For example, a study of the Delaware student testing program found that essays with no organization earned low scores; essays that followed the five‐paragraphformula (FPT) earned middle range scores (score of 6 on a 2‐10 scale), but every essay that earned a high score (8 or better) “used other than the FPT organizational scheme” (Albertson, 2007). 

Myth: It prepares students for college writing. 

College professor, Elizabeth Rorschach notes that when she reads the five‐paragraph formula her students rely on, “I find myself terribly disappointed by how shallow and unthought‐out most of the five‐paragraph essays are (2004, 17). 

Myth: Teaching the five-paragraph formula is teaching writing. 

Donald Murray drew on his own years of experience as a writer in asserting that the fiveparagraph formula “had little to do with the exciting, mucking‐about process of real writers (Romano, 2000, 74). 

A study of high school students and academic writing confirms Murray’s assertion in finding that the “fill in the blank” structure of the five‐paragraph essay “did not allow students to do what real writers do, develop compositional goals, make plans to reach those goals, and address rhetorical and pragmatic concerns that develop during composing, or to practice making strategic decisions as writers must do” (Kane, 2005, 194‐95 in Argys 2008).

So who's my new girlfriend, and how do I teach an essay now?  That is a post for next week.

1. Teaching in general, not teaching at a specific school.  Go back.
2. But yes, yes I did.  My first year.  And my second.  And my third.  Go back.
3. Assumption! Go back.
4. You should read the whole thing.  Really.  Go back.
5. And it shouldn't have been.  Go back.

Break-up

Hey baby!  Do you have a minute?  Let me buy you a coffee.  You want your usual carmel latte?  Alright, I'll be right back.

So.  Baby.  I've been wanting to talk to you about something.  I mean . . . you know I love you, right?  I love all your curves and indentations in exactly the right places.  I love how you listen and let me write the story I want to tell all over you, how you give my thoughts organization and my writing purpose.  You know I love that about you¹.

But sometimes I feel like I want something more, that I'm holding myself back.  I feel like there's more out there than formulaic, five paragraph essay structures.  More than the same transition at the end of every paragraph.  More than a simple restatement of the thesis.  It's not you baby; it's me.

Oh, come on baby, don't cry.  You're great, the way you gave students clear-cut organization.  We had some great times together.  Like when we made Josh realize he actually could write - remember?  He wasn't even going to write an essay.  It's those memories I'll hold onto, baby.

But seriously, any teacher would be lucky to have you when they're up against five paragraph essays.  Just because it didn't work out between us doesn't mean you won't find another teacher out there.  There are plenty of fish in the sea, right?  You could even say there are schools of them!  Get it?  Schools?

What's that?  Oh, you're going to go?  Oh, okay.  Well, good luck.  Maybe I'll see you sometime.  No?  Oh.  Okay.  Bye.



1. This makes no sense unless you look at this. Go back.

Giving Essay Feedback

Six years ago, as a student teacher, I used Audacity to record feedback for students on their portfolios by reading their essays aloud and giving them feedback as I went.  Students each received an audio CD with their feedback.

This was great.  Students were way more engaged in the feedback I gave them, because it was clearer, or it involved technology, or for some other reason I haven't thought of.  Students could also hear someone reading their paper aloud and pick up on my enjoyment of beautifully crafted sentences or my confusion when they forgot to proof read.  No more did students turn to the last page of their essay and look for the grade - they went through their feedback first.

But the method had it's downsides.  It was time consuming, even more so when burning the audio to discs.  Also, once I'd burned one piece of feedback, that CD was toast - I couldn't go back and add more tracks unless it was a CD-RW.  And for the student, they really had to follow along in their paper word for word; as the reader, I had to be very specific in describing what I was talking about in the paper - they only had my voice to guide them.

This year, however, I started using VoiceThread to give feedback on major papers, and as you can see below, it has some specific advantages that neutralize these issues.

VoiceThreads can be private, shared so that only those with a link can view it (for my students), or made public (like this one).

Welcome edcampPDX Participants

Here are links to the different tools I'll reference today:

THIEVES Previewing
Article of the Week Example

Good News Sites

Scholastic News
Headlines Spot for Kids
Science News for Kids
CNN (video)

Lexile Analyzer 

If you have further questions or ideas about prior knowledge, content area literacy, or anything education, continue the discussion in the comments or on Twitter @bleckley.

The Best of Pedagogy in Practice

If you've come here because you're looking at my application to work in your school, I've put together this post with links to a few of my posts that I consider to contain my best thoughts on education.  Being push-button publishing, blogging doesn't always produce fully developed thoughts; however, I strive to publish my best reflections using this medium.  I hope you enjoy them, and thank you for your interest.

I hope my regular readers will enjoy this updated trip into the archives as well.  And now that summer vacation has started, look out, because I've got at least five drafts just screaming to see the light of day.

Why I Blog
It's About the Teaching

Reflections
Enthusiasm
A Conversation With My Wife
One Trick Pony

Reading
Explicit Reading Instruction
Teaching Reading: A Reflection and a Way Forward
Book Clubs
Multiple Intelligences of Teaching Poetry

Vocabulary
Rethinking Vocabulary Instruction
Semantic Mapping Website
Human Brain Cloud

Writing and Grammar
Giving Feedback
Correcting Writing Errors
Teaching Grammar

Classroom Management
Learning Students' Names
Disciplinary Interventions
Conversation Calendars

Assessment
Individual Formative Assessment with Graphs

Professional Development
Summer Reading 2011
Welcome OCTE Conference Colleagues
Readicide Book Review

General Pedagogy
Third Times a Charm: IEP Assignment
WebQuests Are So Cool!
IEPs for Every Student
Classroom Community Building

First Draft Excerpt

Thought I'd share this student's rough draft of his introductory paragraph.  He takes the whole idea of topic choices to task:

Did Romeo and Juliet really kill themselves?  I think three different groups may have killed them.  In this school forced essay I will explain my reasoning.  I first think the parents of them forced them to make the bad decision, the Friar Lawrence could have done it also, and the Apothecary.

I hope that third sentence makes it into the final draft.

Research Paper Assignment

This is what I'm introducing to my 8th grade reading workshop tomorrow.  How you like them high-expectation-apples, foo?

Research Paper

Assignment: You will write a 3-5 page paper on a topic of your choice. Choose something you've always been interested in or have questions about. You need to have a total of 10 sources that you look at for the paper. Three need to be books, three need to be journal articles, and the remaining four can be from any source (books, journals, websites, newspapers, etc.)

You will practice previewing each of the 10 sources you choose. You must use all of THIEVES with two. You may choose parts of THIEVES with four others and use KWL with the remaining four. THIEVES works best with journal articles and websites – not so well with books – you wouldn't want to read every first sentence of every paragraph in a book, right?

Rationale: Completing this assignment will put you ahead of the game for high school, where you'll have to cite sources starting freshman year and write a research paper sophomore year. It will also give you an opportunity to try out different strategies for previewing and reading informational text and decide which ones work best for you.

Format: Your paper must be typed in Times New Roman font, 12 point, double spaced, with one inch margins. Your paper must have a title. It must also have an annotated works cited and works referenced page. This means with each source you use, you will need to write a brief summary (using the Keep/Delete/Substitute strategy we learned in class). The paper must also include at least five in-text citations from different sources. You must also create three text features (diagrams, pictures, graphs, etc.).

Grading: This paper will be read and graded using the same five point system we've used all year. However, it will receive numerous grades, one on each of the following skills:

• Summarizing
• Previewing text
• Citing sources in text
• Creating a works cited page
• Using and creating text features

These skills will make up most if not all of your grade for third quarter.

Tentative Schedule:

• January 26 – Topic Proposal Due
• January 27, 31, & February 1 – Research in the library
• February 3, 21, 24, & 28 – Drafting in the computer lab, additional research as necessary
• February 28 – First Draft Due
• March 3 & 7 – Self revision in the computer lab using STAR, conferences with Mr. B
• March 7 – Second Draft Due
• March 8 & 9 – Peer Revisions
• March 10, 14 & 17– Revising in the computer lab
• March 17 – Final Draft Due
• March 19 – Spring Break!

A Conversation With My Wife

Yesterday my partner Jennie and I were walking home from the thrift store.  We'd been looking for a pizza slicer.  We've been cutting pizza with a knife for almost two years now.  They didn't have one.  Or a cutting board or a rolling pin - we've been using old wine bottles.  But that's not the point of the story.

"So what do you still have to work on?" Jennie asked me.  We were trying to figure out when to go to Target to liberate (as in buy) our pizza slicer.

"Well, I need to decide if I'm going to record my students' writing this weekend or not," I said.  This solicited a slight internal groan from my partner.  We live in a 436 sq ft apartment, and I can either record a reading in the living room or the bedroom.  Both locations are audible at different levels throughout the apartment.  While my students are producing some great stuff this semester, there's only so many persuasive essays a spouse is willing to listen to in a weekend when she has her own work to complete for grad school.  Jennie is always completely supportive and totally tolerate of this process - she gave me the idea of responding to students writing this way after all - but I can imagine it would get old.  Still, I persisted.

"I can't decide if I should do it for their rough drafts or later on.  I want them to complete some meaningful revision, and I want them to do a peer revision, but they just tell each other that everything in their writing is great."

Jennie nodded sympathetically.  I continued.

"It's like I need to teach them to peer revise . . . oh."

Needless to say, I didn't record their writing this weekend.

Pass / Fail Assignments

My wife recently started her masters of social work at Portland State University.  Her first major assignment was a paper connecting her bachelor's level experience and learning with what she has now begun at her master's level internship.  The paper is a pass / fail assignment (as is the class).

The result I see is that she is less stressed during the writing of this paper than she has been with her entrance essay, scholarship essays or any of the other countless pieces of writing she needed to complete to get accepted to the university.  The stakes were so much higher.

Since my wife is a member of the "new" or "knowledge class" (a term from one of her social work readings), she didn't cut corners on her paper.  I'm wondering what balance I would have to strike to get my student's best work and also offer this nerve-liberating form of grading for papers or assignments.  I could always ask students to revise specific pieces of a paper to get it to a passing grade, but at what point do students say "why bother, I'm never going to get it good enough for him to be happy."  And I can think of a few students who would cut every corner they could - some of them did it last year.  But then again, maybe they shouldn't have passed because of it.

Publication and Authentic Writing Assessment

Why this is important:

One of my student's response to my end note question, "what part of this essay are you most happy with or most proud of?"

I'm not really proud of the paper.  It's just an essay.

Modeling the Writing Process

When I sit down saying, "I'm going to write," whatever ends up on paper, particularly fiction, is very rarely good. But sometimes if I have a concept that hits me in the middle of the day and I write it down, it may be half decent (at least, in my mind).

But we as teachers know that one won't become a good writer unless one practices and, I think, for myself at least, I need to force myself to sit down and write.

Which is why we have our students write in journals or writer's notebooks, maybe everyday or maybe just three times a week, either in class or for homework. Many of them (in my limited experience) look at it as a chore rather than an exercise that may help them improve.

I'm reflecting yet again on writing workshop and its implementation in my classroom when I was a student teacher. I don't think my half page handout gave my students an inkling of an idea what a writer's notebook is. It told them it wasn't a diary. It told them they might expand some of the pieces to be part of their portfolios at the end of the hexter. That was it. A professor I had the semester prior to student teaching gave me her five mini-lesson set on introducing students to writer's notebooks.

I made my own half page handout.

How quickly we can revert to our freshmen ideas of how a teacher is supposed to teach.

My own writer's notebook got off to a slow start in fall 2005 in my teaching writing class with Louann Reid, and I certainly didn't keep up with the three times a week I asked of my students in spring 2006.

But sometimes events in my life provide a catalyst giving me a need to write. That's what happened when I met my future wife in 2003 - I wrote 30 poems in three months. When I was finally able to get back in the classroom after my student teaching in 2007, there was a spike in the number of posts on this blog. Peace Corps has had a similar effect - nine entries in my writer's notebook for December thus far. Hopefully I can keep the streak going by sometimes forcing myself to write.

But students need to know that they won't always have great ideas. They need to be prepared for the very real possibility that not everything will be good.

Thinking back on my own schooling, I don't ever remember being presented a clear, complete, and realistic model of the writing process from drafting to publishing. We wrote stories, did peer reviews, revised, our teacher's edited, and we made our own books at the school printing press. But our stories were what our teachers told us to write - we didn't choose our medium and our topic required approval. There was only one draft - no turning back, no starting over. Having never seen a good peer review as a fly on the wall, we didn't really give completely honest or constructive feedback. We changed a word here or there and added the necessary commas. Our teacher's graded. We took the finished book home and showed our parents, who proudly distributed our publication to Refrigerator Front Bookstore before it was ultimately shelved as a childhood memory.

That's why I started this blog. It's my first step to show my future students more realistic models of the writing process and a more authentic audience. The two haikus posted now are finished pieces from my first two months of using a writer's notebook. I want the blog to model publication as closely as possible. I would appreciate your comments and spreading the work to friends who you think may be interested.

I'm thinking maybe I videotape myself doing a peer review with my wife, or if one can view history on Google Docs, I could peer-review, revise, & edit there. Any other ideas?

Blogging as Journaling

Recently I've been thinking more and more about how my own blogging will act as influence to me later on. I wish I had posted something about each of my lessons everyday, because the few notes I did make on my lesson plans at the end of the day are insufficient now as I look back. Plus, blogs are searchable and tagable. It just might not be as entertaining or useful to readers (not that it necessarily is now, what with me not currently teaching).

Here's one post I read today that I want to look back on when I try to do writing workshop again (not that you wouldn't enjoy reading it too).

What's the Motivation Behind Writing Workshop?

I sure hope this happens to other people besides me: when you think of something after a lesson that you should have thought of before - only in this paticular case, replace lesson with unit.

Maybe someone out in the blogosphere will have an answer to this question. I was pondering my student teaching this morning, as I do from time to time when my mind drifts, and about writing workshop. What is the motivation for a student to put together a portfolio in an average English class? Theoretically, if one comes up with some really good writing prompts, students will want to write. But what if you have a student or students who just really hate writing. It would seem they should have to learn to write at a functional level, but why should they be happy about writing poetry or short stories or anything other than the essay they might have to write in college, depending on their major, and the reports they might have to write depending on their job. Usually, we can convince students that writing has some factor of coolness associated with it, but what if we can't?

So then one thinks they're being a really cool teacher encouraging students to write poetry and stories and multigenre projects in addition to the essays required by standards. But then students end up disgruntled for making them write so much.

The limited stuff I've read on writing workshops comes from three books: In the Middle by Nancie Atwell, Room 109 by Richard Kent, and A Community of Writiers by Steven Zimmerman and Harvey Daniels. Atwell works at a private school for highly motivated, gifted students. Kent teaches an elective writing course. Zimmerman and Daniels encourage workshops as well, and for all I know are pretty well rounded teachers.

So maybe writing workshop shouldn't happen in required English courses. It seems like the students who would benefit from it would lose out, but what do you do with the students who hate to write if you can't get them to love or like or endure writing? Fail them?

In my naivity I think I'm missing something? Can someone help? Maybe this never happens, maybe all students find motivation to write if they're asked the right questions - I don't know.

Correcting Writing Errors

I read an interesting post today by Dana concerning marking errors in student papers:

Exactly which method of writing instruction works best?

• Explicitly marking each error in a student’s paper.
• Marking a line, indicating an error, but leaving it for the student to identify what the error is.

Which method do you use? Which method do you think would help students learn errors and how to correct them?

I've posted on this subject very briefly before, although in a different context. In a class I took a year ago (Teaching Reading was the title), we read Breaking the Rules by Edgar Schuster. One of the book's premises (if I remember right, I can't find it on the bookshelf) was that students don't need to know the rules of grammar before they write. They can learn them along the way with minilessions and by trial and error.

Nina's comment to Dana's post was pretty much along the same lines of Schuster's and my thinking:

I would generally put a check to the right of a line and write down the section of Hacker that addressed the error. They were required to look up the info for a homework grade and correct the errors. Usually I tried to focus primarily on those aspects we’d covered in class. If a particular type of error occurred more than once, I’d make a note of it in my comments at the end of the paper.

The only thing I would add (and this isn't really adding, but elaborating, I guess; I just like listening to myself talk) is that errors in grammar and capitalization or any other aspect of "Standardized American English" can be a progressive thing throughout the year. Start with minilessons at the beginning of the year and in the first paper, only mark those errors that were taught in class. Before the next paper, do another minilesson or two and then add those to the list one marks in papers.

And while I'm thinking about it, here's another interesting tidbit I learned from Marty Marsh at Lesher Junior High, though I don't know the original source. If you use a pen when you correct papers, a study found students feel worse when the marks are made in red than in another color. Woah, Twilight Zoney . . .

This I Believe

Anne, a teacher working with Karl Fisch, is having her students podcast "This I Believe" essays. What a cool idea.

I wonder how many of her students are familiar with the NPR series, and if there's something similar in the younger culture that one could also do this with. Doesn't MTV or VH1 have some sort of poetry jam thing?

Too Much Writing?

In my last podcast, I talked about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and my participation in it. The good news (actually, it's bad news, but my younger, more spite-filled self wouldn't think so) is that my brother won't be able to finish his book this year. The bad news is, I doubt I'll be able to either.

I am so tired of writing right now. But I'm glad I tried this out before doing it with my future students. That's a new rule for me, that should be common sense, but it wasn't when I was doing my student teaching: try something yourself before you ask your students to do it. That goes right in line with another rule: don't assign homework thinking you're the only teacher the students have.

What is really cool about NaNoWriMo, however, is that it is basically a really long free write. The novel I thought I would be writing has taken on a life of it's own and headed in a different direction. The message is the same, but the plot and cast of characters is very different from what I originally planned. And I feel good about how much I've written, the 12,000 plus words.

On the flip side, I'm not sure that writing should be so strongly associated with a number - the 50,000 words you have to reach to be a NaNoWriMo "Winner." I agree that finishing a draft is a good idea before revising and rewriting. But a length requirement, I don't think, is the best idea.

But any way, long post short, I am very tired of writing, and even though I know where to go next in the novel, I don't want to write any more.

NaNoWriMo

Last year, much to my jealousy and . . . other adverbs, my younger brother particiapated in National Novel Writing Month. He wrote an over 50,000 word novel.

As an English major, I was not very happy being shown up by some punk high school senior. But I was.

And many are. NaNoWriMo has a student novel writing program, if you're wondering what to do in class next month. I know I'd feel pretty cool writing a novel in middle or high school.