Teachers as Conversation fire starters
What good is a grade anyway? Does it really mean anything to the student? It means something to report cards, or rather on them. It means something to HR folk who make decisions based on them. But when you get right down to it, do they really mean something to students?
Sure it feels great to get a good mark. Everyone loves getting good marks. But does a an 80 over a say…50, really tell you anything of value? Has it helped to shape a person?
Brilliant post over at the blog of proximal development »Readerly Comments
I too have started to discover the power of comments. I do leave grades on my students’ work, mainly because I have to, but now I’m also starting to leave conversations behind.
When I can, I’ve started to stop stressing the mechanics and have instead begun to get involved with my student’s story.
The results have been quite interesting. For one, enjoyment is up. The students that I’ve started using this with have started to really enjoy writing more.
What is even more intersting is that they read my comments and sometimes write back.
As they write back, they begin developing their work, and what started as answering a question about something related to classwork, suddenly grows into genuine conversation on paper. It flows.
As I read through the Proximal Development blog post, I just had this…."Of course!" thing going on in my head. A "WOW!" moment.
Wouldn’t we become more valuable to our students if we leave our grading hat in our desk drawers, you know what one I’m talking about, the one that makes you respond in red ink and numbers.
Instead we should think more about the conversation. How can I draw this person in more? Will a mere number do this? Yes, I likely need to put one, but what can I share? What questions can I ask, as if I were actually interested in what my student would say?
Are we interested?
"Why? Why were they reading my comments? Why were they so involved? Well, after years of teaching and, what’s even more important, after two years of teaching within a classroom blogging community, I have finally learned to write comments. I stopped writing as someone who dispenses knowledge. I stopped writing as someone who cares only about syntax and organization and who has forgotten what it means to get lost in a good piece of writing. I stopped writing as someone who is reading to assign a grade. Instead, I started reading as someone who wants to learn, as someone who cares about ideas, as someone who wants to join a conversation."
Yes you need to work on the mechanics. I’m not suggesting to throw that out, but value added here, in my humble opinion, is not so much that you leave your student with a number, but that you attempt to draw them into deeper involvement.
