The Learning Nexus
By the time I publish this blog post, I will have been in school for ten weeks.
The first three of those weeks were spent in a hybrid 50% in-person, 50% remote asynchronous situation with an entire week lost to assessing students (thanks a lot, MAP). I have been introducing my freshmen to mentor texts and starting independent reading workshop and trying to find time to learn their names when I can’t see their faces. Now we are 100% in person, and while I don’t love my increased risk of exposure to Covid-19, I do love feeling some of the normal pace of a classroom again. The chatter. The trial and error. The goofiness that is 14–17 year-olds.
This year has me thinking a whole lot about grades.
What do they mean? Why do we give them? As teachers, especially English teachers, we can get caught in a toxic cycle of pushing out numbers to satisfy the demands of a system that wants to see “growth” and “data.” I keep wondering: how can we push the focus back to learning?
After more than 15 years of teaching freshmen, I am very familiar with their writing weaknesses. Lack of idea development. Simple sentence structures. Incomprehensible fragments and run-ons. Inexperience with substantive revision. I also know the best way to get better at writing…is to write. While we have the sophomore end-of-course state exam looming on the horizon in Ohio (Maybe? Maybe not?), I also have a responsibility to teach my students how to think and work like writers in any situation, not just a test.
I have already revealed my plan to spend more time with the EssayScorer program attached to our chosen textbook. The more I examine this plan, however, the more logical it becomes to my goals this year. Sarah Zerwin talks about how we need to hack our grade books and “tell the story” of our students’ learning using more than numbers and letters in her book Pointless.
Where does that all start? Feedback.
I need to be someone who can take my students’ hands and guide them to see where their writing can go. I need to teach them how to do that for one another. But I often don’t have the time both in class (our periods were shortened to a mere 43 minutes this year) or outside of school (because: tired) to feedback as fast as they need. Enter EssayScorer. And Grammarly. And all the tools built into Google Docs with its red or blue or gray lines that tell us, “Hey. Pay attention. You can make this better.”
Our first foray into using assistive tools found us in a nexus of so much learning. After 15–20 minutes of “vomit” writing, we entered our pieces into the EssayScorer and saw numbers on the first draft. Garth was irritated his were so low, “What?? How did this only get a 3/6 overall?” We looked a little more closely to figure out what the categories of Six Traits meant and then dove right back into our drafts to improve them.
Conventions, Sentence Fluency: We had already spent a couple weeks learning about complete sentences and combining them using conjunctions or semicolons. We looked at sample sentences in NoRedInk and scoured our reading and writing to find our own examples.
Organization: We learned how to use a mentor text to guide our writing, to mine it for ideas of how to write about a “querencia” — that person or place or activity that makes us feel at ease, strong, or most ourselves. We annotated, saw trends, made note of things to try.
Ideas, Word Choice: We learned about the writer’s technique of “snapshots,” where we can zoom in and out on details to create imagery for our readers. We practiced making comparisons, noting actions, or even focusing on pure description to paint pictures with words.
A week of mini-lessons, revisions, and conferences later, they put their pieces back into EssayScorer. And guess what? Everyone showed growth.
Working like writers?
On the one hand, I balk at the scores that EssayScorer provides for students. I cringe a little when I watch my students mindlessly accept any suggestion that Grammarly provides. On the other, I see how receiving those numbers and instant feedback inspired my students to work like writers. They didn’t accept their first draft as the final. David became obsessed with increasing his Conventions score. “Ms. Bills, I have put this through Grammarly and EssayScorer is still giving me a 2 in my conventions! What can I do?” I sat next to him and we read through a paragraph together, pointing out some improvements to be made in sentence structures. Then a light bulb appeared above David’s head, “I need to use control+F to find all the ‘ands’ in this piece. I have really long sentences. I bet I could fix them by putting in periods or maybe even a semicolon.” I nodded and smiled and walked away to let him get to work.
I’m realizing as we move on to our next writing experience, the direct teaching along the way matters as much as the feedback in the moment. The scores provided the concrete motivation some of my students needed to improve: it wasn’t coming from me two or three weeks after I had worked through the stack. But the lessons. The time spent thinking and planning. The little moments drafting in our heads gave my students the confidence to improve and the vision for success. As I move on, I plan to keep using that tool of fast feedback to slow my students down and get them to revise their work. We will keep learning about the Six Traits, keep examining writer’s craft, and keep finding opportunities to practice. Because after all: learning happens in the doing, not the score.
