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Jed Hopkins, an English consultant with the Minneapolis public schools,
shared these thoughts about writing and standards in a recent e-mail that
made its way around the middle school reform networks.
Managing Writing in a Standards Based Classroom
When it's a Friday afternoon and the last bus has departed from the school
there's always that feeling of quiet relief. A time to sit back at the teacher's
desk, hardly used during the week, and reflect on the week gone by.
It had been a good week for this middle grades English teacher, frenetic
at times, but on the whole productive. All but one of the students in her
class had completed the assignment and she was enjoying this accomplishment.
The papers sit on the corner of her desk and she begins thoughtfully to
collect them up and put them in her canvas bag.
She knows that she ought to grade them soon and, once again, promises herself
that she will not allow the task to take over her whole weekend. This had
happened too many times before: reading and rereading the scripts, pointing
out the errors, and often straining to say something encouraging, had taken
her into the depths of the night. Would this time be any different and the
nagging doubt came into her mind - would the students benefit proportionally
to her effort?
A standards based classroom should provide plenty of opportunity for students
to articulate and attend to characteristics of their work in a positive
and productive manner. Hence, students need to know how to describe qualities
of their work, have in front of them a clear view of what to aim for, and
be provided with useful feedback that will enable them to be more productive
next time. The formula seems simple enough, yet this emphasis on perspicuity
presents teachers with some thorny problems. As one teacher put it, "I
really want to help students know how to do a better job but if you tell
them too much it won't sink in". This teacher had realized that too
much feedback can be as damaging as too little.
For another teacher, it wasn't the "sinking in" of concepts that
was the problem so much as how feedback can influence what students believe
about themselves as performers of writing. This teacher seemed committed
to the idea that teacher responses should focus exclusively on content:
"I try to downplay the language errors when I grade work. It's the
content that matters most. That's why we write -- to communicate something.
Fill students' work with red ink and you'll turn them off writing forever.
I like my feedback to be a dialogue with what the student is saying in the
writing".
Of course, this teacher believed that students needed to know how to spell
and write grammatically correct sentences and when I asked how she helped
students with the more mechanical aspects she showed me the rubrics and
checklists that she has the students use: "I'm trying to get them to
be responsible for the mechanical stuff by applying the rubrics to their
work. But I want them to take care of that themselves. The trouble is, the
kids who like writing do it quite well, but those who are struggling hate
it. It just seems like another hoop they have to jump through in this writing
thing. They just want to write it and hand it in."
Yet another teacher recognized that her underachievers seemed little impacted
by many of the things she was teaching the others: "I could spend hours
helping a few of my weakest kids with the concept of a conclusion in their
essays, but they still wouldn't get it while it wouldn't be a problem for
others. I want everyone to learn it all but I know that's not realistic
-- so what do you go for?"
For all of these teachers, it seemed that promoting talk of the writing
process and applying standards to student work, while it promises to reduce
uncertainty for some, was often at the expense of increasing anxiety or
apathy in others. These teachers were skeptical of and sometimes frustrated
with what they saw as the overloading of students with standards criteria.
For them, making much of what students need to learn runs the danger of
making some students feel impossibly far from achieving it.
Yet, at the same time these teachers believe in standards education. They
believe that if you want students to take responsibility for their own learning
then it is the responsibility of the teacher to provide students with a
meta-language to describe that learning along with expectations that are
clear, meaningful and realistic for each individual. But, to achieve this
requires expert management of writing tasks. Teachers need to know what
aspects of writing are worth directly teaching and to whom and when and
how to provide feedback. In addition, students need to know how to capitalize
on the value of feedback and trust that it will benefit them.
Concerns such as this prompted the district to begin promoting a writing
management system that would:
1. Get teachers away from diffuse comments about students' writing.
2. Encourage teachers to think about the relative status of errors. In particular,
errors that may be the result of (a) proofreading; (b) developmental level;
or (c) a missing concept that the student will learn.
3. Reduce student anxiety about how their work will be received.
4. Increase the possibility that students will learn from the correction
process.
5. Make the teacher's job manageable.
6. Promote the importance of genre, purpose, audience, and writer's role
in the construction and execution of writing assignments.
7. Promote such insights across subject areas.
For more information about this management system, contact Jed
Hopkins (English Consultant)
Minneapolis Public Schools