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"good"
"should be capitalized"
"This sentence could be revised to sound better."
Mr. Ryan (pseudonym) wanted students to spend time revising their writing and giving each other substantial feedback. However, as these examples show, the revision and feedback process in his classroom left a lot of room for growth.
The Classroom
Mr. Ryan, a first-year middle school American history teacher in a public charter school, emphasizes writing in his instruction and assessment. For both homework and tests, he asks his students to write short essays. He wants them to read texts critically and show by their writing that they understand, respond to, and construct arguments from and about historical texts.
However, Mr. Ryan found that many students did not spend the time that he had hoped developing their writing and that they lacked experience with disciplinary writing. He often found their writing did not make sense; he believed if they spent more time with their work, they would catch these mistakes. He also noticed that students did not revise as much as he believed they should. They rushed to turn in assessments, and when they discussed homework essays in class, students made few changes based on the class discussion.
In a survey of his students, Mr. Ryan learned that less than a third of his students reread their work multiple times prior to turning it in (30 percent). When he asked about the types of revision students did, he found that a small majority look for spelling and grammar mistakes (56 percent) or rephrase sentences (66 percent). However, just about a third said that they make major changes to their ideas (34 percent). Finally, a little less than half of the students believed comments from their peers were helpful for revision (44 percent).
As a former classroom teacher, I worked with Mr. Ryan to develop a series of instructional activities that would encourage his students to spend more time with their work and collaborate with each other in meaningful and useful ways. We hoped that designing a novel revision process would motivate students to engage in revision, increase their enjoyment of the writing process, and empower them to offer useful feedback to their peers.
Online Writing Groups
To accomplish his goals, Mr. Ryan turned to...