As part of their work on Lord of the Flies, I had my students pick quotes that contained an important image from a climactic scene late in the text and then go back to look for an appearance of that same image earlier in the text. The idea is to get them to see that images in a good book are interconnected throughout the story, and that as the image evolves, so to do the ideas that it represents. Whether that image is a full on symbol (the conch, the glasses, etc.) or more of an emblematic detail (creepers), they should be learning that a critical reader needs to develop the intuition necessary to recognize these details early and the note-taking skills to keep track of these details as a story evolves.
In the absence of having kids read a book twice (and what a world we would live in if there were time and curricular space for that!), it's an effective way to teach the skill and underline its importance.
I had the students post a 300 word prewrite on their insights, and today in class they read each other's posts and responded. I asked them to respond by either agreeing with and extending an idea they saw or by disagreeing and providing evidence (or a little of both). What struck me was the difficulty students had in moving past safe criticism of a concrete problem (incorrectly formatted citations, incorrect grammar) and into an actual intellectual dialogue.
Generally, the posts and responses were fantastic, but I was struck by the particular difficulty some kids had in making an intellectual contribution instead of a concrete criticism. It makes me think that we really have taught them that improving writing is more about error elimination than about depth of statement.
It concerns me, then, that as part of this collaborative, process-focused work that I'm going to do a highly traditional product-focused grading of these papers at the end. Does it send the message that I'm simply talking a touchy-feely game, but my real message (as evinced by what's getting the actual grade and contributing the most to the quarter average) is business as usual?
Well, when I grade a paper, I feel a lot of pressure to mark all spelling and grammatical errors. How are they going to learn not to confuse "it's" and "its" if I don't point it out when it happens?
ReplyDeleteHowever, what that means is that the paper is covered in green ink that says "these things are important" to a kid, and the weight of that ink sometimes leans towards those mechanical errors rather than towards a recognition of real thought.
Even beyond that, the paper grades focus on the execution of the product. A kid who engaged in the writing process really honestly will still sometimes deliver a big mess of a paper. In our "standards based" grading, that paper would get a low grade. And since that grade is a much larger influence on the quarter grade, I feel the message it sends is that what we really care about is execution of the product, which sends kids back towards that priority I find problematic: the execution of the error free product as the be all and end all of English learning.