Tamar's Update: A Positive Approach

I had a really eye-opening goal conference with a student in August. He told me that he loved reading, but was a bad writer. He wanted to learn to make fewer mistakes in writing, but really didn't like writing... because he made so many mistakes! Makes sense, I thought. So what would happen if I focused on getting him to love writing, and addressed his "mistakes" some other way?

I decided to try a new approach with the first set of writing pieces this year. No corrections. None. Only positive feedback. OK, maybe a few tiny little suggestions. But NO circles, cross-outs, "frags" or "awks." This was not as easy as it sounds...

I have never been so aware of my inclination to mark up student work as I was when I read and responded to these papers. I had to keep reminding myself of this experiment, and its purpose. I want my students to become better writers. In order to become better writers, they need to enjoy writing. As my student reminded me in his goal conference in August, nobody likes doing things they are "bad" at. So my goal in responding to this first set of papers was to make everyone feel like they had done a good job. And they had... when I looked at the papers through a purely positive lens.

I underlined my favorite lines in their pieces, looking primarily for sensory detail, which was the focus of this narrative assignment. I then wrote a few sentences at the end telling them what I liked the most about their pieces. I did make the suggestion in several cases that they read their work aloud to make sure it said what they meant to say, but that was the closest I came to mentioning mistakes.

When I handed back the papers, I told them what I had done and why. I said that I didn't circle a single mistake, not because there weren't any ("everybody makes mistakes," I reminded them), but because I wanted to focus on what was best about their writing, and I wanted them to do the same. Then I did a lesson on some of the most common errors that I noticed in their writing (capitalization and homonyms. I mentioned that they would probably notice some of these things in their writing, and that next time they could catch the errors before handing in their work.

Today they completed their second big writing assignment, a creative ending to The Giver. They have spent the week writing, peer conferencing (with a set of questions, all of which focus on revision, not editing), revising (which I am still struggling to get them to see is different than editing), and editing (using a checklist of the skills I have taught them thus far). Now I'm torn about how to respond to these pieces. I really want to stick with the positive approach that I used on their last pieces. I still strongly believe that correcting their work won't teach them much of anything... Yet I'm concerned about my own accountability. I'm also torn about the role of their writing assignments in their final grades. I'm thinking about not assigning a grade to their writing pieces at all, but instead giving them narrative feedback that I think will actually make them enjoy writing more (which, I believe, will lead to them becoming better writers). I'm toying with giving more skills-based assessments that I can grade objectively, and really separating that part of grading from the much more subjective process of responding to their writing pieces. Any thoughts? Thanks!