Daiker focuses on ensuring that you, as the teacher, try to
bring in positive feedback as you go through student papers to grade, either by
using a gimmick or making a conscious choice to do things in a certain order or
amount (i.e. for every 3 negative there’s a positive),but how might we bring
that into the classroom setting as well, specifically in terms of peer workshops
or collaborations between students?
Elbow brings in that “grades and holistic scores give too
much encouragement to those students who score high-making them too apt to
think they are already fine-and too little encouragement to those students who
do badly” (397). I think this is a vital idea, as we often focus on how
grades/negative feedback can make students apprehensive (to use Daiker’s term),
but this idea of the high achiever as fraud is crucial; we can’t ignore either
end of the spectrum. How might we use some of the methods Elbow brings forward
(i.e. freewriting, portfolios, evaluation-free zones, etc) to help high
acheivers remain focused and feel like writers and not frauds? How might we
grade them in relation to their own progress and not simply checking the boxes
and putting an A on the paper?
Hey Caitlin,
ReplyDeleteI think for peer workshops and collaborations, it'd be simple enough to press those gimmicks onto the students. Either by giving them some rule, such as you have to say something positive for every so many critiques, or even by having them write it down on a handout. This could be good to help students learn not just to criticize their peers, but to find the good in their writing, which is probably something few of them have experienced. Getting positive feedback from your peers I think will be more genuine than getting it from a teacher, so even if it is forced out of them through us mandating a gimmick, I still think it'd be a somewhat genuine experience.
I think for the second question, one way to make the high achievers feel like writers is to make sure that they keep track of their drafts and perhaps record or reflect on the changes that they made between each draft and the changes that they could still make to the piece even as they turn it in. This I think would teach them that writing is an ongoing process and that something can always be fixed, and that you as their teacher are focused more on their improvement as a writer than you are on the state of their writing.