It is obvious from this week's readings
that there are many ways to go about generating, giving, and
receiving feedback for developing writers in our class. It is also
clear that giving valuable feedback—both as teachers and
students—is something that takes intention and practice.
While there are many ways to teach
it—either as a class like Ackley, or as a set of mini-lessons—I
think it is important to model peer-reviewing. This was a cute and rather helpful video (see clip below) I found featuring students talking about some of the pitfalls of peer
reviewing.
Fulwiler (who totally looks like Hemingway)
attempts to show us the product of several different drafting stages,
although I felt that at times he could make parts of the process a
bit more explicit in order to be useful. While it is nice to see the
process in action, this doesn't really tell me much about how I would
implement revisions in my own classroom, especially when you consider
how different 8th graders' literacy practices are from those of
college students. I think his instruction for revision takes a lot
for granted - that students know what good writing looks and sounds
like. Some of his suggestions (I appreciate that they are not
commandments) help, but others (Let Form Follow Content) are way too
vague for students who have had limited exposure to different genres.
I found this site to be helpful because it includes different concrete strategies for teaching
peer review as part of writing across content, which is great for
Common Core!
I also like the idea of experimental
drafts and playing with genre and constraints. In some ways this
takes the pressure off the drafting process because nothing is really
a “final” product. Being afraid of writing most often stems from
thinking that the first draft has to be perfect. What do we do as
teachers to both challenge students to produce quality work and get
them over the first hurdle of writing?
The next hurdle seems to be giving and
receiving useful feedback from peers, which Winn and Johnson, as well
as VanDeWeghe, find to be one of the most culturally relevant
practices.
In particular, I appreciate
VanDeWeghe's use of the word disposition, namely,
finding ways to encourage young writers “to develop the
skills and dispositions to interact wisely with other writers” (p.
96). I think we often think of skills, even writing and critical
thinking skills, as things that can be acquired quickly, within a few
repetitions. Disposition seems to imply that this is something that
takes time and repeated effort to cultivate. It might take more than
one or two mini-lessons, in fact it might take an entire year or
years of school to get students to a place where they can provide
helpful feedback by habit. Dispositions take into account all of the
developmental aspects of our students:
Responding well calls for not only identifiable skills but also intra- and interpersonal skills, along with such crucial emotional and cognitive dispositions as empathy and reader-based anticipation. (VanDeWeghe, p. 96)
A final word on VanDeWeghe: he makes a
salient point that “many ingrained curricular values and mandates
work against higher-level response and the time it takes to teach
(and learn) it well” (p. 99). We will have to untrain our students
to give evaluative or affective responses just like we will have to
untrain them to seek “teacher answers.” Which may take a good
deal of time.
As far as Ackley's method of peer
tutoring, I am intrigued by the idea of making a high school or middle
school writing tutor center. I know that I learned the most about
literature when I was peer-facilitating study sessions. Having to
teach a concept to someone else often helps you understand it better
yourself, so I see Ackley's tutoring model working not just for
“advanced” writers, but writers at all levels, seeing themselves as
having something to offer their peers in terms of writing advice. It
is also a great way to leverage and create student leaders.
Given some of the pushback against
“writing as process” models (which give White kids the space to
use literacy skills they already know from home, while expecting
students of color to know it without having been taught, thus putting
one group ahead of another) it seems as though there isn't much
discussion in Ackley about the role of language and power in
peer-reviewing activities. I did find an interesting article on race, gender and status in peer reviewing interactions.
Since VanDeWeghe basically references
Simmons for the entire article, I was curious to read it for myself,
and I have linked it here if you are interested.
http://users.ipfw.edu/wellerw/Responders_training.pdf
http://users.ipfw.edu/wellerw/Responders_training.pdf
2 comments:
Amanda,
I enjoyed the VanDeWaghe article and like the point you make about students needing to acquire the proper dispositions in order to give valuable feedback to their peers. I agree with you that this is a process that will need to be taught and modeled to students and that we can't just expect that they'll know how to provide helpful feedback immediately. When I was a student and my teacher asked us to peer review I never knew just how much I should say about their paper; whether to give positive or negative feedback. I ended up usually complimenting only and ignoring any problems I saw because I was too nervous to suggest any larger changes that needed to be made. If I had been explicitly taught how important peer feedback was and how it was okay to suggest changes as well as accept suggestions, I think it would have been a more valuable experience. Thankfully, in college, I started to take peer reviews more seriously and lost my fear of upsetting the writer.
I'm really glad you discussed the pushback on writing workshop - I'll have to post the Ellsworth piece that made me cry like a baby. Also I firmly believe that the tutoring concept should be used not only with advanced students but with all students. Advanced students could definitely benefit from feedback from "less adept" writers and readers. Clarity of writing is especially important for these readers so their feedback would be good at getting beyond the 'good job' kind of feedback "advanced" writers often get.
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