Many people have expressed their gratitude for the Wednesday's workshop on responding to student writing. I know that it recharged my disposition and my essay marking right away, helping me simplify, step back, identify patterns of strength and need, and direct students toward future learning in upcoming online exercises, lab tutoring, and essay assignments.
Maybe there was just too much to cover since the issue of grading deserves its own week-long conference, but we really needed to spend more time discussing the student essay by Estelle Costanza (Frank's wife, George's mother) so kindly and bravely provided by Kristen Hren. (Who else would have volunteered to do this?) This essay was an incredible choice for our workshop, so perhaps we could continue the essay-response discussion in the comment section of this blog post.
I would also ask that those of you who marked the essay give your marked copies to Kristen so that she can compare the different strategies. I had hoped that during the workshop we would be able to go into small groups and compare our response strategies and the aesthetic of our marked papers, but there was not enough time.
One reason that there may not have been enough time was that we may have talked a bit too much about the assignment sheet. That was important, of course, since one of our goals was to analyze the relationship between assignment design and student/teacher response, but we needed to give more attention to what the student wrote and our responses to that writing. We can do that in the blog comment area and discuss ways to help Estelle Costanza reach even more of her potential.
I hope that our dialogue on this workshop material and our dialogue on responding to student writing will continue to unfold.
Again, thanks to those of you who prepped and participated, and a special thanks to Kristen for helping all of us, including Nancy Sommers, by sharing her work with us. We owe her! So give her your marked copies at the very least. Thanks.
To the comments!
1 comment:
I'll get things started. I'd like Estelle to look back at the pace of her intro's opening and conclusion and think about the shape of that writing in relation to her thesis. If that thesis responded a bit more clearly to the task and in less of a list-like manner, would there be more to say in the opening and closing of the essay? How might thesis revision and assertion impact paragraph shape, paragraph transitions, and signal phrases? Hopefully some awareness of those relationships would kick in and be applied to future essays.
I'd also want the student to work in the handbook or in the labs online or with tutors on improving control over apostrophes and the distinctions between commas and semicolons.
Because Estelle leaves out words and slips into some choppy sentence sequences, she might benefit from using the Write Outloud program.
For what it's worth, I gave the paper a C, and I think that the student, with more practice, is on the verge of producing strong work. Hopefully those sentiments will come through in my marks.
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