Surviving 2020
2020 has been the year of survival for teachers. Get through this day. Get through this week. Finish this quarter. Will we stay in person? Who is quarantined today? Do I have a fever? Is this cough…”the one”? I fully expected this year to be much harder than it has been. Teaching in a mask, keeping a paperless classroom, worrying about the revolving door of humanity that may be there one day and disappear for a week should have all broken me. But really, I have found ways to keep my sanity and continue to teach my writers.
Typically, one of the first units I do with my freshmen centers around narrative reading and writing. Using a model I adapted from Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher’s 180 Days, I take my students on multiple “laps” around the track of narrative, teaching them about descriptive writing, signposts for reading, action writing, theme, and annotation. I have fallen into a pattern of reading-focused and writing-focused weeks this year, so when the final assessment rolled around, the thought of both a reading and writing assessment made that little voice in my head spin in terror. “What if?” she said, “What if students chose their strength as a learner in this unit? What if they took *either* a reading path or a writing path to demonstrate what they had learned over the past quarter?” Ultimately, the focus of narrative reading and narrative writing in our standards is to teach students how a theme is developed in a story. Students can analyze a theme as readers and develop a theme as writers. Thus, my narrative project was born.
What does this have to do with Ahead of The Code, though? My central goal of this project has been to teach my students how to use the computer feedback to get them to apply the writing lessons we learn. My students were fresh off using EssayScorer in their querencia description pieces; therefore, they saw how it worked and had a basic understanding of the score feedback. Knowing that, I designed a six-day assessment where students would choose one of three narrative prompts from EssayScorer, brainstorm, draft, revise, and submit their work.
I was fascinated by the ways students worked in those six days. Since the class was essentially split in half (not by my own manipulation, either — half of them chose a writing assessment and half of them chose a reading assessment), I would record a lesson for one group and teach a live lesson to the other, alternating the lesson delivery each day between the two groups. I taught the following mini-lessons to my writing-path students:
- Brainstorming an idea (video)
- Narrative Leads (live)
- Review of Narrative “Shots” — description, action, dialogue, and thoughts (video)
- Narrative conclusions (live)
Because I couldn’t hover as much with my writers, I watched them use their digital tools like the Grammarly extension in Google Docs and even some sneaks into EssayScorer to see where their score stood. I didn’t actually have them copy-paste their first drafts to EssayScorer to compare to their final this time, but I did ask in a final reflection, “How did your draft change over the course of the last week?” and one student noted, “My draft changed by adding more descriptions and improving my score by having better word choices.”
Did I teach a lesson on word choice? Nope. But this student knew that “Word Choice” feedback existed in EssayScorer and intentionally worked on it in their piece. Another student said, “I fixed my grammar and I added 3 more paragraphs and changed my whole topic because I needed more words in my story.” Did I ever say it needed a certain length? Nope. But they knew from the models and their scoring feedback that they didn’t have quite enough yet. I was surprised to see students make comments like, “My draft changed because it went from more of a boring story that had run-ons, to a story that had eye catching events and was more proper.” Proper? It wasn’t my focus, but they knew it mattered to have to have a story that made sense and that it often happens in the conventions.
Granted, some fall under the tyranny of numbers. “I have a 6 overall. I’m done, right?” So I kept them focused on the revision tasks. “Did you make your beginning more interesting? What about all the shots? Did you use them? How’s your conclusion? Can we see the message or theme of your story clearly based on how the conflict resolves?” Each of those nudges made a difference. Students told me, “My draft changed a lot. It started as a few paragraphs of barely dissectable dialogue but it evolved into a readable story that I like,” and, “My draft changed a lot. It started very basic and I added more action to make it become alive so the reader could see what I was doing and what caused me to love it so much.” And there we go. It’s all worth it when a student likes and maybe even loves their work.
As we move into 2021 and find the light at the end of this pandemic, I am resolved to keep feedback at the center, either from me or from an AI. Learn something. Try something. Receive feedback. Get better.
Here’s to surviving…and maybe even thriving.
