Shifting the Struggle by Writing More and Grading Less
At the Teaching Partner meetings I'm attending regularly now, we talk often about "shifting the academic struggle" to students. These conversations are vitally important because they encourage our group to think with others about how to engage students in heavy thinking work. As teachers are up to their elbows in new curriculum tools and challenged to think about standards prioritization as they use those tools to plan, it is essential that as we move from planning to teaching, we remember that all the intellectual work we did in planning should help us "do less" of the thinking work in the classroom.
When I'm invited into classrooms for the purposes of observing, coaching and giving feedback, teachers usually appreciate if I watch with a critical question in mind: "Who is doing the work and who is doing the thinking?" It is such a valuable consideration because we know that if students don't have to engage in meaningful thinking work in class we probably shouldn't expect powerful learning. Another reason it is such a valuable consideration is because, for teachers, setting the conditions for students to do deep thinking independent of the teacher is much easier said than done. It is equal parts art and science.
Conveniently, I've been out of the classroom for a few months now and in that time I've mostly forgotten how challenging day-to-day teaching can be. Without an actual group of students humble me, I get to reminisce fondly about successful teaching approaches and all of the highlights of working with young readers and writers. As I daydream about teaching instead of actually teaching, shifting the struggle is much simpler in my fond recollections than it surely feels in practice.
Still, while I've got the confidence only a few months outside of a real school can give a teacher, I'd like to share a quick trick to shifting the academic struggle: writing more and grading less.
"Write more, grade less," is an adage I first encountered in the book, Results Now, by Mike Schmoker but the notion that students should be writing in lots of ways throughout the school day isn't new, nor is it Schmoker's. If you Google the phrase, you'll see Edutopia articles, curricular tools, and really smart blog posts, like this from The Cult of Pedagogy. All of them encourage teachers to challenge students to write often, and to give students as much thinking work as possible when it comes time to assess the writing.
Close Study Supports Close Comparison
Studying mentor texts is a highly demanding task. W use an exemplary piece of writing that "mentors" student writers by helping them envision what a finished product could look like, When I ask students to read something closely with me because it is an example of the kind of writing we'll do, I make them tell me all about it. "What do you notice?" I ask.
When students are invited to mentally deconstruct a piece of writing by naming all the things they can about how it is written, they start putting their fingers on engaging introductions, powerful vocabulary, and the organizational parts of a written work. There are almost no wrong answers when students start to notice all they can about strong, exemplary writing. The big list of things we notice about a mentor text shows how smart we all are about writing. When I narrow that big list into a shorter, focused list of things students are going to try, or things their work must have before it is finished, students have a key tool to take a share of the assessment load.
In the classrooms I've idealized in my now distant memories of teaching, I liked to highlight and annotate a copy of the mentor text on a chart paper with the things we'd identified. Usually, I'd blown the mentor text up so students could read it from a little bit of a distance. We'd also have annotated copies of the text laying around. Instead of grading students' work, I'd glance at it before tasking them with the thinking work of comparing their work to the mentor.
How does your introduction compare to the one in the mentor text?Can you try to revise your weakest body paragraph using some of the sentence frames we made when we studied the mentor text?Can you add a paragraph that shares an anecdote, like the fourth paragraph of our mentor text?
All these tasks ask students to put their writing alongside model writing. The most sophisticated assessment of their writing is done through rigorous comparison.
This approach is surely easier to write about than it is to execute in the classroom, and I look forward to having some classrooms next year where teachers are interested testing out what so many have theorized as good practice, and what I'm boasting about in this blog.
As much as I might remember my classroom teaching a little too fondly at this point, I remember very well what it felt like to grade all night only for students to pay fleeting attention to my well crafted feedback, then deposit their writing in the trash on their way out.
When it comes to assessing writing, it is so much better, I think, to have a student thinking about a mentor text and reworking their writing, than it is for them to put writing in a wire basket and wait nervously for me to affix a grade.
Let them struggle!
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