Teaching composition in the traditional paradigm has focused educators and students on common errors such as spelling, grammar and punctuation. Richard M. Coe and Kris Gutierrez indicate that students educated through this paradigm have been so conditioned to focus on basic errors that it now interferes with their ability to construct ideas and compose them into a written product. Further, despite their intense focus on errors, they are not able to specifically identify what their major weaknesses are. Coe and Gutierrez set out to provide a series of assignments designed to help students identify and define their own writing problems, set goals to address those problems and evaluate their progress as they continue to develop their writing.
There are three main assignments that they set forth, but they are all based off of a prior composition- specifically a descriptive writing prompt. This prompt will provide the basis for the impending analyses of the following two assignments. The prompts require a piece of descriptive writing because, as Coe and Gutierrez point out, most students are good at writing descriptions. This will allow them to write more fluently, and, as a result, more easily and readily analyze their writing process. This assignment can be completed in class or as an at-home assignment.
Following the completion of the initial writing assignment, Coe and Gutierrez would have students analyze their recent work for the composition process they used, narrating everything they did from beginning to end. One obstacle educators need to be aware of in assigning the this prompt is the tendency for students to idealize their writing process. “Most people think that they way they write is much closer to the standard textbook procedure than it actually is, and many people will tend to describe the way they write best rather than they way they usually write” (263). The teacher’s time needs to be spent helping students see through their own writing process and not focusing on any lingering guilt or shame about deviations from the standardized composition process. A second obstacle lay in the complex nature of the writing process. It is not linear, so a series of steps cannot be used to describe it. However, the nature of the assignment actually provides for this obstacle as it forces the students to address the complexities of their own process.
This first assignment requires a three-part process analysis. First, the student analyzes their process independently through their written response to the prompt. Once it is written, the students must then share their findings. By setting the students into small groups and having them discuss their processes, students can connect with one another through similarities in their processes or problems. Further, at this level they can begin to share suggestions to strengthen one another's work, even before the deeper analysis of their own strengths and weaknesses begins.
Immediately following the primary analysis, students would then be assigned the second part of this unit: “Describe as specifically as possible the strong and weak points of the writings you produce” (265). This analysis should delve deeper than sentence-level errors, and it should include elements such as topic, organization and coherence. Further, this analysis should be based off of multiple written assignments; Coe and Gutierrez suggest ten to twelve. This requirement of multiple works, which they suggest come from the previous year’s courses, is a major stretch for high school students. One suggestion I would make is for this unit to come after a few weeks of regular journalling topics, as I find it highly unlikely that students (or my students at least) will hold on to their graded papers. I generally find them in the trash the same day they discover they no longer need them for a grade, much to my frustration.
The third and final assignment of this unit has the students write out their composition strengths and then the problems that they have faced. Then, they must rephrase the problems as goals, including in their rephrasing a means for achieving those goals, a time limit and evaluation criteria. Coe and Gutierrez suggest that students limit themselves to just a few problem-goals as too many goals will overwhelm them. Finally, they must revise their original descriptive response to take their new goals into consideration.
I see major benefits to this teaching strategy. In fact, I have already begun working out how to incorporate this three-lesson unit into my curriculum. There are some difficulties that I foresee, however. The prompts need rewording. These three assignments consist of vocabulary that will intimidate students, particularly the alternative students with whom I work. They also do not include the smaller lessons that must come before and between these prompts so students are properly prepared for the concepts and vocabulary they will be facing. Ultimately, this lesson plan offers a great deal of potential, but it needs some tweaking as I find Coe and Gutierrez to be out of touch and unfamiliar with the realities of teaching high school students.
Heather,
ReplyDeleteI found your analysis of Coe and Gutierrez’s very interesting. I appreciated how well they integrated the students into their discoveries of the writing process. However, there does seem to be a number of blind spots in their theory. First, it seems that this theory would need to be instituted into the system from a very young age. I can’t imagine introducing this assessment into middle or high school and having any success in getting the students to open up about their process or even understand their writing process enough to analyze it. If small steps were taken in the elementary grades to give students that chance to think about the process of their work, I think this could work. This, however, goes into the whole debate of weather the composition process needs a system overhaul or if it is just a matter of tweaking how it is taught.
The second blind spot that I found in their assessment is how easy they make it sound for students to recount the process that they used in writing. It seems incredibly difficult for even rhetoricians and composition analyzers to sketch out the exact process that the minds take when viewing an essay prompt and responding; it seems like a huge task to expect younger authors to be able to analyze their own process for writing.
This being said, I do think it is extremely important to help students think critically about their own work and find errors in the thought process themselves.
I agree with you and Noah that what Coe & Gutierrez are proposing needs to be instituted starting from an early age, as some of the students need to be conditioned in order to be successful. The way that public education in particular is now doesn't support recursive writing practices. I'm curious about your conclusion at the end, Heather, that the researchers don't understand high school student writers. You also commented that the prompts used language that was potentially intimidating to younger writers. I'm wondering if there's a middle ground that's worth considering here. When I briefly taught high school, I was surprised at how often the other teachers talked down to their students and assumed that, in particular, their students with disabilities couldn't handle "complex" or "sophisticated" writing tasks. I think students are more capable than some of our colleagues give them credit for. When we talk down to them or assume that they can't handle the tasks at hand, in a way, we're showing them that we don't think they're able, or we don't trust them to meet the challenge. Yes, in some cases, that may be true; it may be that some of Coe & Gutierrez's methods are too advanced, especially re: asking students to identify as writers and have them be able to think/reflect critically about their writing practices. But what if such a practice as self-reflection were normalized across the board? What if we trusted our students to handle it, no matter their particular skill level or grade level? I'm just thinking out loud here. What would such a discourse look like in the classroom?
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