Here are the class highlights from the 2/13 class. I am sorry that they are late.
The one day of our unit plans were turned in.
We then broke down into small groups to look critique each other's writing prompts. We were asked to identify any strengths and weaknesses in the prompts. We were also asked to discuss the usability of the grading criteria, and how will it inform teacher comments and the rubric.
After the small group discussion on the writing prompts, we were given a practice student essay for us to look over. A good question was brought up about how do we grade a horribly written essay on a very personal subject to the student. It was suggested that we refrain from focusing on the errors so much and take the time to counsel the student on how they can revise the paper.
Missy brought up the point that many us started making corrections and adding comments while we were reading through the essay. She recommended that we read through a student's essay first before we write any comments.
We were given the following definitions:
Formative Response: teacher comments made on the paper on how the students can revise their papers.
Summative Response: remarks by the teacher on why a certain grade was given.
Marginal Comments: remarks given within the text.
Terminal Comments: formative or summative responses given at the end of a paper.
A handout was given on higher order and lower order concerns.
We were given the assignment for 2/20. We are to go to LiveText and download some student essays and make comments on them. They are under "Student Essays." We are NOT to give them a grade. We will only give them formative and/or summative responses. The main purpose of the assignment is to give students feedback that we help them to revise their papers. (The original prompts are also available on LiveText.) We can make marginal and terminal comments on them. The essays were handwritten by students several years ago. This exercise is to give us practice on responding to student essays.
We discussed how we can respond to student responses. One option was to have a writing conference with the students. Some of the possible drawbacks to this are that writing conferences are very time-consuming, students who need to be there will not show up, and that students who are shy will forgot the comments that you make. One suggestion to help out the shy students would be to give the student a written list of the comments for future reference. The benefits of student conferences are that you can go more in depth about how the students can improve their writing, struggling students will have their confidence boosted by the comments, and you can get better connected with your students.
Another option is to have peer reviews. The drawbacks to this method are that some students may totally rely upon their peers to make all of the corrections for them and some students who write personal essays make take the comments too personally. Some methods that can be employed to counter these potential problems are to warn students who are intent on making cruel statements that there will be consequences for rude comments.
We need to make sure that students give us specific reasons why they do not like a particular essay.
Students need to be given a purpose, task, and credit for finishing their work during a peer review. We may have to form the groups ourselves and model how a peer review should operate for classes that have never done one before. We need to collect drafts with student comments to make sure that work was actually done. we also need to explain to students why peer reviews are done in the first place.
The readings were not discussed in class. Missy asked everyone to comment on them using the blog.
Future class cancellations will be posted on the blog.
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