![]() Should be a fundamental notion, I know, but until kids think of themselves fully as Writers, they’ll need constant reminders. ![]() Quite often, students don’t realize that their inefficiency or lack of clarity as writers is actually preventing them from communicating the best version of their ideas. This assessment conference structure provides a great opportunity to have some frank conversations about clean, clear sentence writing. This creates more of a comfort level too–the kids are sitting with 3-4 other students who also struggled on an item and they can see that their errors aren’t some monumental personal failure. Often, I try to group students by which items they missed–especially when particular items were a strong measure of a more complex learning goal. I won’t pretend it’s always manageable, but most often, you can squeeze such conversations in more often than you’d think. Whenever I give back a reading or viewing comprehension assessment (ours, by design, are almost never larger than 5-10 questions, whether short answer or multiple choice or some combination), I try to have at least a brief conference with every student about items they struggled with. So this year, I’ve been trying to chip away at the idea of sharpening and refining in the space of a different sort of conference: Assessment reviews. It’s important, but it’s usually the first casualty of a time crunch. That being said, while the idea of your typing machine doing the decision making for your student writers is just the most epically grodiest thing ever, the concept underlying it isn’t wrong: All writing should involve some fine-tuning in the final stages.īut so much conferring time is spent with exploration of ideas and how to express them powerfully that I don’t often have meaningful conversations about the “spit and polish” phase of a piece. Sometimes I just like the way a sentence fragment sounds. So is bad grammar–I used some intentionally at the end of my last post in order to be playful. It’s a subjective concept that depends on context. You could have a measuring tape in there, but “too wordy” isn’t really a thing by itself, despite what Microsoft WriterBot 5000 (not its actual name, as far as I know) might beep or boop at you. Writing isn’t a set of rules or a standard of measures–we sort of maybe encourage this bad thinking with the ol’ “Writer’s Toolbox” metaphor. The problem here is more that it mistakes writing for something it isn’t. This isn’t new of course–various companies have also been trying to sell educators similar technology for “painless paper grading” for at least a decade. It suggested encouraging students to try out a new Microsoft Word feature that will basically auto-suggest (or replace, if I interpreted the gif correctly) segments of student writing that the algorithm decides aren’t “effective”. It offered advice for “ELA teachers” from someone who isn’t one. ![]() I came across one of those well-intended but ultimately wrong-minded tweets today while scrolling through Twitter.
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