Teaching Adolescent Writers: Chapter Seven

(Page 148) “…if you want to see a student’s writing improve, you have to provide the student with meaningful feedback before the paper is finished.”

Once again, Gallagher uses a great sports analogy. I like how he compares writing to boxing, where the competitor continually goes to the corner for coaching between rounds. Reading and coaching students before their final drafts just makes so much more sense. What good does it do for the student to get tons of comments (in addition to low or failing grade) at the end? Do we think the student is actually going to go back and make any corrections and learn something more? If we have any suggestions to further the student’s thinking, is he going to do anything with those comments? Have you ever had a student get a low grade and rewrite his paper without the opportunity to earn a higher grade? If you’ve ever had that one happen, I’ve got to meet that kid!

The thing is reading a student’s writing prior to the final draft just makes sense. If our goal is for students to learn and improve, I don’t see any way around it. I suspect the argument against this is that it would take too much time to read papers multiple times. Yes, it is going to take some time, but I don’t think it is as bad as it appears. Unless a student completely scratches the original work and rewrites everything, then the second read won’t take as long. Plus, you won’t have to be spending as much time writing comments all over the place because you will have conferenced with the student in advance.

I think about all of those HSAP practice tests I score. If I just gave students their scores, it would take me no time to get them done. What takes forever is writing comments on them so they can see what they can do to score better on the actual HSAP. I often find myself writing the same thing over and over. I always wonder how much better the papers could be if I had the kids as my actual students and could conference with them about what they wrote and see the changes in another draft. Of course, the idea with HSAP is that there is no conferencing, but if we coach kids throughout the year, then they should do just fine.

Teaching Adolescent Writers: Chapter Six

(Page 130) “…even when students understand the purpose behind their writing, they often give little thought to who their audience might be.”

I think many students figure that the teacher is the one who is going to be reading and grading the assignment, so she/he is the only audience to whom the work should be written. If we only give the “fake” assignments that Gallagher writes about (i.e. the kinds of writing that is never seen in the real world), then why would students ever write to an audience other than the teacher? By exposing students to those real-world writings and examining why they were written, they can see the possibility of writing to someone else.

Gallagher gives many strategies to use to get students to write better so that they are writing for someone other than the head of the class. I think several of them can easily transfer to disciplines other than English. What if students bought in their lab reports for others to analyze (RAG Competitions, p. 133) or the teacher highlights the best parts of the lab reports to share with the class (Golden Lines, p. 131)? I know lab reports are lengthy—I don’t think the golden line thing has to be done in five minutes as Gallagher describes. It could be done as the teacher grades the reports; she could then use the lines as examples when students write the next report.

I also thought that “Another Set of Eyes” (p. 137) strategy would work well for those of you who work closely in subject areas, such as US History or Physical Science. When I used to score the practice HSAP tests while I was still in the classroom, I never scored my own students. I wanted someone else to score their writing for a couple of reasons. One, I felt like they needed feedback from someone other than me, so they could see what someone else thought of their writing. Two, it allowed me to look at how others viewed their writing—I could see if I was overlooking something and could look for commonalities (good or bad) in their work.

On a side note, is it a sign that I have overused my copy of this book when I have a chunk of pages fall out?!? Pages 83-88 sure did fall out when I opened my book tonight. I thinking that’s a good thing!