What's Working - Tamar's update

I don't know about other people, but I felt really good about the "critical friends" group that took place on Friday. For those of you who weren't there, it was my turn to share student work, and I brought in an email from one of my students to her "book buddy" in Kenya. The letter was two paragraphs long, and the first paragraph (social) included text messaging language, while the second (academic -- about the books she is reading) was written in standard written English. We used a protocol that I adapted from the National Writing Project's protocol for looking at digital composition, a protocol that I will be using in a presentation on this digital writing exchange at the MacArthur Foundation's "Digital Is..." conference in Philadelphia next month. The protocol asks participants to focus on what they notice, what they wonder, what questions the piece raises for them, and what's working. They are asked to withhold all judgment. This is an approach that was central to a graduate class I took at Bread Loaf a few years ago with an incredible professor named Michael Armstrong. His work is all about looking at what's working in student writing.

I left the "critical friends" group on Friday feeling energized and excited about the work our students are doing. So often I can get bogged down in what they're doing wrong in their writing, and I forget to look at what they're doing that's working. So often I can get judgmental -- not just of them, but of myself as a teacher, since I feel responsible for every mistake they make -- and I forget to appreciate and learn from what they write. The NWP/Michael Armstrong approach has been invaluable to me as a writing teacher, and I was very happy to share it with my colleagues.

This weekend I am reading and responding to my students' epic stories (based on structural elements we found while reading Beowulf). They are long. I have been dreading this weekend of grading... But as I read through them, I am reminding myself to notice, to wonder, to question, and to appreciate what is working.

As part of the writing process for this piece, students all commented digitally on their peer's epics, and they used these comments (theoretically!) to revise. I'm pleasantly surprised as I look at the comments they left for each other and the revisions they did to see that they really took their roles as commenter and reviser seriously. As I read, I am responding to their comments (things like, "I agree with what Jafah noticed here... I see how you changed this paragraph in response to his comment"). I am also writing a two-part comment at the end of each piece: What I noticed/what's working (this part is a narrative... 4-6 sentences), and a bullet-point list of "suggestions for next time," which tends to focus more on mechanical elements.

Then I'm slapping a grade at the end, which still feels a bit problematic... This process just isn't easily quantifiable!