How’s that for alliteration? Systematic, explicit instruction in students’ giving and receiving feedback keyed to a writer’s intentions for a piece or collection of pieces isn’t usually a high-level objective in the official writing curriculum. It’s production that garners good grades. Nowadays topics like making a claim, amassing textual evidence for the claim, addressing counterclaims, etc. get top billing—and form and structure, can’t forget form and structure—and conventions.
During the olden days of portfolio instruction, feedback was beginning to surface as a core concern, but the backlash that swept away portfolio pedagogy—it came on us like a flash flood somewhere around the turn of the century—took it mostly off the radar. During the portfolio era I found the opportunity to do some mixed methods research in naturalistic settings around teaching practices and feedback.
One study I published used student-written reflections collected at three different times across a school year from seventh and eighth grade students getting intense “doses” of portfolio pedagogy and assessment. When they submitted their portfolios each trimester to be assessed, they wrote formal, structured reflective analysis in response to direct questions. Class time was devoted to discussions of these direct questions and to peer-to-peer feedback on their feedback. Some of their best writing showed up in these reflective essays.
Each trimester students were assigned reflective analysis tasks to help them identify aspects of their reading and writing which were improving and to point to evidence in their portfolios. They had to select their most satisfying work and work that wasn’t satisfying; writings were a combination of assigned essays and self-selected writing projects.
They were also asked to identify problem areas along with evidence from their work to help nail down self-definitions so they understood what they needed to focus on. Essentially, they were learning to become hypothetical readers of their own writing. Their ability to discuss their improvements and spaces for growth improved across the three trimesters. I’ll dig up the article itself if anyone is interested.
Serious writing teachers have always recognized the function of feedback in the construction of volunteerism in reading and writing. If we can establish a community of literacy which fosters volunteerism, we can fire up self-regulatory engines that move students to say things like “You know what, I want to be a good writer when I grow up. It’s so important.” We saw this phenomenon in spades in these classrooms.
One particular aspect of the reflection repertoire asked them to write about and illustrate two things: 1) What problems did you face this trimester as a writer? and 2) What did you do to resolve them? I used every portfolio completed every semester in three different portfolio classrooms as data (roughly 200 portfolios over three grading periods for a total of 600) and open coded their reflections. During the first trimester, one big problem across the board was “length.” They had trouble writing what they considered lengthy pieces.
Of course, length in itself is not a virtue; lots of times it’s a vice. The interesting part is they knew, many were troubled by the finding. Intuitively, some explicitly, they complained not so much about needing to get more words on the page, but the problem of getting more good words, powerful words on the page. They were building an understanding of the Goldilocks principle: Too many empty words are worse than too few meaningful words.
Here was an opportunity to teach a collection of voluntary writers to “read from the point of view of a hypothetical writer” nowadays called “learning the writer’s craft.” Find a piece of writing you like that you consider “lengthy” and explore. What is the writer doing that seems satisfying? How can you do those things?
To be sure, since second trimester grades depended in part on documenting and showcasing what they did to solve this problem, they studied strategies for elaboration and its reverse gear, deletion. It’s tricky to want to elaborate, knowing you’ll have to cut it back. With good teaching they came to sharpen the root of the problem and understand what we mean by “elaboration,” which impinges on length but isn’t quite the same problem.
The second and third trimester reflections revealed a greater variety of problems they faced with more specificity. One big problem second trimester was writing leads that would grab a reader. Once again, that problem steered them toward hypothetical writing. Why did the writer do this instead of this? How did this lead work so well? Why did this one fail? Yes, publish writers fail, too.
There is far too much on this topic for me too discuss in this brief essay, but I would be happy to devote some time to it in future posts. Please give me some feedback. For now I’ll end with evidence of directly teaching and assessing feedback I held onto from my precious three years of experience teaching fourth grade, in many ways the highlight of my teaching career.
I’ve already written a “lengthy” post here on Substack about a program I developed and implemented at my school wherein I held after school workshops for parents interested in learning techniques for providing feedback to young writers at home. The third year of this program I had over 40 parents with K-6 grade writers attend all three 1.5 hour sessions after the supper hour.
One technique I taught them was “point and say why.” It wasn't enough to say “I really liked this!” What does a writer do with empty praise? Feel good for a second. But what if the feedback is “I really liked it when you described the old car. I could almost feel the rust.” Parents took to this idea, and early on I saw lots of sensory description spreading like wildfire.
This was a full ten years before my seventh/eighth grade experience. Here is a fourth grade sample, a rough draft Brad wrote. I can visualize him working on his writings in his working drafts folder. Note the date: October. Sensory details became old hat by January. The question became “How do I figure out what detail works and what doesn't without having to be told?”
I also tested the students on taking up feedback, how they made decisions about what to revise and what to change. My bottom line was this: Never allow anyone to usurp your writing. But that’s another post. Here are a couple of pieces of writing from my fourth graders the same year Matt wrote his fishing piece. I love rereading them!
Leanne’s letter to me. I always misspelled her name, and she cheerfully always corrected me:
The next piece is among my favorite poems from this lifetime. Danielle was a quiet person, an old soul who began fourth grade as a struggling reader and reluctant writer. I worried about her at the beginning of the year. When she submitted this poem to me near the end of the year, I felt perhaps the most satisfaction I’ve ever felt from working with children. I could care less about her score on the California Test of Basic Skills.
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Wonderful to read, Terry, and so much to learn from your methods. Thank you!