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February 1, 2016
Vol. 58
No. 2

Writing with Autonomy

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When an English teacher informed his 7th graders that they would each be creating a book of poetry, one student, an avid skateboarder, voiced a notable gasp.
"Is everything OK, Travis?" the teacher asked.
Apathetically, Travis explained that he had never written a poem in his life, and the class buzzed with laughter. When the teacher asked Travis what he was interested in, Travis responded, "I like to ollie the Taco Time gap."
The puzzled look on the teacher's face brought further giggles, and Travis had to explain that an ollie is a skateboarding trick where the rider jumps the board into the air without using his hands. Evidently, the local Taco Time drive-through had a break in the concrete curb, forming a two-foot gap. Most days after school, he and some friends would practice "ollieing the gap."
Satisfied with that explanation, the teacher introduced the class to haiku poetry, showing examples and explaining the structure: 3 lines totaling 17 syllables.
Drawing from his arsenal of democratic writing practices, the teacher said to Travis, "I'll bet you can write 17 syllables about skateboarding."

Ollie the Gap

Looking up toward the ceiling, Travis said, "I ollied the gap," and counted five syllables with his fingers.
"There's your first line," the teacher affirmed.
Enjoying the attention, Travis continued: "After … school … I will … ollie. That's seven, right?" The teacher nodded. Smiling broadly, he finished with, "I love to ollie."
"There it is!" said the teacher, celebrating. The class applauded, and Travis stood and took a bow.
When the poetry books were due a few weeks later, Travis handed in a notebook jacketed with a collage of skateboarding images and mantras. The title of the project, displayed prominently in the middle of the cover, read "Poems from the Gap." Inside were 100 typed poems, every single one of which made mention of the Taco Time gap. "It was a thing of beauty," said the teacher. "Travis was really proud of his book."

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Going Democratic

A democratic approach to writing instruction values freedom and writer reflection over assigned prompts and teacher-generated feedback. Rather than using writing prompts embedded in adopted curricula or standardized test-prep materials, teachers offer options within a set of guidelines that define a unit.
For example, a unit on the essential elements of a story might include seven writing prompts, each one tied to a required reading from the text. However, unit goals, such as "write an argument," could be met in more creative ways that emphasize student voice. A democratic approach would keep the short stories for analysis purposes, allow students to bring in additional published stories they find interesting, and replace the assigned writing prompts with an ongoing project in which students compose a story of their choosing.
In the essay "Best Practices in Teaching Writing," Charles Whitaker, professor emeritus at Eastern Kentucky University and advisor for the Write in the Middle workshop, validates the use of student choice as a pathway to success.
"For at least some (and maybe all) assignments, providing students with choice; promoting ownership; and helping students draw on their own experience, interests, [and] inquiry can engage students as writers," Whitaker wrote. "Not all students have to write with exactly the same purpose or for the same audience."
When students find relevance in their writing, "we improve the odds for their engagement, as well as the likelihood that they will strive to write well," he explained.

Sharing the Feedback Load

Democratic writing assessments require teachers to abdicate the role of sole reader and critic, moving instead to a model that puts students in charge of a wide range of factors, including what to write and what feedback to take to heart or, conversely, disregard.
Students are given the flexibility to ignore some feedback to focus on aspects of writing they find more interesting, such as character development or suspense. Rather than take off points for not fixing marked errors, the teacher simply asks the student to defend her editing and revision choices. Credit depends on the strength of the defense.
This approach means that students spend more time talking with one another and less time responding to teacher input. However, it does not nullify or eliminate the role of teacher feedback; rather, it makes the teacher one voice among many.
Steve Graham, Warner Professor in the Division of Leadership and Innovation at Arizona State University's Teachers College, recommends that students receive feedback from a variety of sources, making the back end of writing instruction more democratic.
Digital tools like texting, blogging, e-mailing, and social media can enable students to share their writing and receive comments from a handpicked audience, Graham notes. As moderators of a Facebook page, for example, students can decide who has access to their writing.
"When I was a kid," Graham says, "if you wrote something, you had one reader: the teacher. Now you have the chance to share your writing with a much broader audience."
Limiting feedback to a single teacher can, as Graham's own experience proves, have detrimental results. He recalls a time when he submitted a paper in a college French class and felt the devastating impact of a hostile reader.
"The paper looked like it had been stabbed 600 times with a knife," he says. "I burned it in the backyard along with my French textbook. I didn't even read the comments."

Discovery Through Reflection

Handing students the autonomy to assess their own work can be daunting.
"When I taught high school, I felt like my teaching and assessment practices were not aligned," says Amber Warrington, doctoral candidate and editor for the Writers Who Care blog.
Early in her teaching career, Warrington felt compelled to use more democratic approaches in her classroom. She valued student choice and wanted kids to feel a sense of ownership of their writing. However, when it came time to give specific assignments and score them, Warrington felt pressure to adhere to the scripted prompts and predesigned rubrics used by her colleagues. Freedom to let students explore their writing their way wasn't an option.
Although Warrington's instruction was student-centered, her assessments weren't. This motivated Warrington, as part of her dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin, to ask three area teachers to join her in a yearlong inquiry group examining the effects of democratic writing assessments on student growth. The teachers used genre study to launch their more democratic strategies, with one focusing on short stories, another on poetry, and the third on essays. They met and shared data for a year.
"We wanted to counter the 'teacher as sole authority' approach and include students in every step of the process," she explains. Warrington and her team relied on journal entries to assess students' general knowledge of the genre in focus. By asking open-ended questions—such as, What do you know about short stories? and What makes a story worth reading?—the team was able to gauge students' familiarity with the genre.
In small groups, students frequently discussed their journal entries. This helped create an atmosphere of discovery in the classroom. Warrington says that students reflected—both in writing and peer discussions—on questions such as, What are my strengths? What are my habits—both good and bad? What can I do better? What should I do next? Who is my audience? What makes my writing interesting? What would make it more interesting? Are my characters interesting? Why or why not?

Process Over Product

One pressing question teachers have is how the work in this more flexible process is scored or graded. John Saxton, who teaches at Lamar Middle School, assigns grades in three areas:
  • Turning in the final copy on time.
  • The use of revision in the writing process (measured through frequent observational assessments on how students use their time).
  • The reflection throughout the process (as evidenced in journals and discussions).
"No teacher of writing would disagree that writing is a process, but often what kids get graded for is their product," Saxton says. "This is my attempt to grade the process instead."
Lauren Graeber, a 10th grade humanities teacher at Liberal Arts and Science Academy, let students know up front how they would be graded during the unit.
"I made it clear from the very beginning that the grade for the assignment was going to be a measure of their willingness to engage in the process and to try the strategies we discovered in class," Graeber says.
For the final product, which was an essay on a topic of their choosing, students invited guests to a publication gallery walk held in the classroom. Guests spent time reading final pieces and leaving positive comments on notecards provided by the writers.
Graeber then scheduled individual conferences with the students.
"During the unit on writing essays, we kept a running class list of all the pieces of the process they could potentially bring to the conference as evidence of their engagement," she explains. "For each conference, I asked them to show me how their understanding of writing, specifically essay writing, had grown and changed in three weeks."
Students had to back up claims with evidence and prove they used specific strategies discussed in class, such as choosing a topic, gathering ideas, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing.

An Effective Antidote

Each teacher in Warrington's inquiry group held capstone publication events to culminate the genre study. Holland White, a 10th grade English teacher at Del Valle High School, often hosts celebrations at the end of units. For instance, after a poetry unit last year, White says, "Students did a gallery walk where they read each other's writing and made constructive comments on Post-it notes, which they then stuck to the poems."
The ownership these students took boosted their confidence, Warrington says. Students were engaged and their final products looked less like school assignments and more like personal treasures, akin to Travis's book of poems.
In a unit on essay writing, Graeber gave her sophomores the freedom to make "writerly decisions" as often as possible. She mentored her students but respected the strategies they chose and the advice they heeded. She challenged students to consider why they were making certain decisions but did not discourage their choices.
"I think all my students walked away having been treated like writers for three weeks," Graeber says.
Allowing for more freedom in the writing process can be an antidote for students too often mired in test prep and high-stakes testing, White adds.

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Chad Donohue is a middle school English teacher, university adjunct professor, and freelance writer.



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