In last
week’s post, I addressed the need for teacher self-care and how coaches can
support it while improving instruction.
I suggested that you encourage teachers to lighten their load by letting
go of the hours they spend grading worksheets and I suggested some alternative
to that practice. Part of that advice was to have students do more
writing. Writing is an effective way for
learners to show what they know. An open-ended response allows students with
differing knowledge and ability to tackle the task and demonstrate what they
are learning. Through writing, they can show their understanding of concepts
and their increasing skills.
Suggesting more writing may seem
antithetical to the idea of lightening a teacher’s load. What could be more
time-consuming that grading students’ written work? While it’s true that providing extensive
feedback on written work can be time-consuming, let’s support teachers in
letting go of less-productive means of providing feedback and instead remind
them of ways that are both efficient and effective.
Fewer
Comments
To start with, let’s remind teachers
that extensive written comments on finished products are not productive. A final draft isn’t a prime teaching
opportunity. Students are done with
that piece and likely to learn little from exhaustive comments that may be written
there, especially when these comments point out something that should have been
done differently.
Instead, find
one or two things to celebrate. Look for
something that represents recent growth for the student. Do they show they are
just beginning to grasp a new concept? Celebrate it! Did they use a more advanced writing skill
once in the paper? Point it out and praise it!
When we draw attention to those burgeoning abilities, they are more
likely to be expanded and repeated.
We can also narrow the need for
comments on final drafts by responding earlier in the process. Encourage
teachers to collect a draft of the paper.
But instead of littering the draft with reactions, teachers can lighten
their load and make their feedback more meaningful by asking what the students
want support with. Before turning the paper in, students could highlight a
section they want the teacher’s help with. On a tiny strip of paper stapled to
the top, the student can write a question or express a concern or confusion.
After a quick look over the entire paper, the teacher focuses his attention on
what the student wants help with. One or two comments give the student
something to work with. More than that overwhelms.
Student
Self-Help
Some zealous teachers end up doing the
work for students when they give feedback on written work. One teacher I know
spends hours giving feedback on student papers.
She catches every punctuation error and carefully inserts the
correction. She rewords awkward sentences, writing her edited version between
the double-spaced lines. Her students have a love-hate relationship with this
response. They’re glad they can meet this teacher’s expectations by inserting
her recommendations, but they hate opening their papers and seeing all the red.
They also hate losing ownership for their work. It sucks the joy out.
Encourage teachers to resist the urge
to do the work for students. Instead, teachers can help students help
themselves through mini-lessons on points of confusion, rubrics that share
clear expectations, anchor charts that can be referenced during the work, and conferring
while students work. Also encourage peer
feedback and student self-assessment. Tools like rubrics and anchor charts make
this work more effective, too.
Don’t
Grade Everything
Teachers may feel obligated to review
everything their students write. I think
this comes from a mistaken view of the purpose of writing. When we view writing
as simply an opportunity for students to show the teacher what they know, then
it does seem obligatory for the teacher to respond. However, if writing is
viewed as an opportunity for the student to explore his own thinking, to learn
and to grow, then the process of writing itself has served the purpose. This
purpose should be explicitly shared with students.
Some pieces of writing should receive
teachers’ attention. Targeted feedback corrects misconceptions and supports
growth. Additionally, some writing deserves an audience. Teachers can lighten
their load and enrich the experience when an external, broader audience engages
with students’ work. This makes writing more purposeful, authentic, and
motivating. And when students know their
work is going public, they take more care.
Jeff Wilhelm said, “If you’re
reading all of your students’ writing, they’re not writing enough.” Giving students many opportunities to write
doesn’t mean teachers should be weighed down with volumes of papers to review. Less is more.
Giving fewer comments, letting some work go unreviewed, and giving
students tools for helping themselves can make teachers’ workload more
manageable and increases students’ learning.
This
week, you might want to take a look at:
Top
10 tips for conferring:
Why
every teacher deserves a coach:
Why
and how for shared reading:
Tools for changing the
grading conversation:
Lessons
from learning to read Hebrew about beginning reading instruction:
That’s
all for this week. Happy Coaching!
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