I agree with Amy. It reminds me of a great Cris Tovani quote: "School is not a place where young people go to watch old people work." If you are doing most of the work, no one is learning but you! Make the kids do the work! Kelly Gallagher, in Teaching Adolescent Writers is where I go often when I need some strategies that make the kids do the thinking.
>>> Amy Lesemann <[email protected]> 1/13/2009 1:27 PM >>> Hi - just teaching a writing class for 15 kids, and hand writing extensive comments for them continually about did in my hand! But I can hearken back to the days of 120 kids. But I don't think making them wait 3 wks for their comments is the answer - I don't mean to offend hard working people, either. I do understand how hard everyone is working. I think more peer commenting/editing is one answer. Another is to take an essay, and WITH THEIR PERMISSION, put it on an overhead, and model commenting on it. It has to be a fairly competent paper, and a fairly confident kid (sometimes I took one from a different class) and you have to model sandwiching comments. So, positive-negative - positive...boom, you're done. Then they made some positive comments as well - what they liked about the essay. Kids do love reading each other's work, and in my rough and tough class, you could hear a pin drop when I put an essay on the overhead - I had to establish rules - no dissing the work, no "I bet so and so wrote this", and of course they tried to break the rules! But it helped them understand how to critique the work, and what was a positive and useful comment, and what was a negative and useful comment. It got to be more fun...we also used post-it notes or scrap paper cut up for our comments - somehow, it was less painful to see the comments on other paper than when it was written directly on our work! Hope this helps...rubrics, too, are very useful as long as you give them out before the work is due and explain them, so they know how the work will be assessed - the language has to be user friendly or they're useless, and you'll still end up writing a ton of comments! There is a free online rubric maker if you need one, in which you can install your own standards. Very cool. Amy in Ann Arbor -- Amy Lesemann, Reading Specialist and Independent Learning Center Teacher, St. Thomas the Apostle School _______________________________________________ The Literacy Workshop ListServ http://www.literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/lit_literacyworkshop.org. Search the LIT archives at http://snipurl.com/LITArchive _______________________________________________ The Literacy Workshop ListServ http://www.literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/lit_literacyworkshop.org. Search the LIT archives at http://snipurl.com/LITArchive
