Generally, I never regurgitate text. As many who have read my blog know, I tend to write in a stream-of-consciousness format that dances around within the required reading of the week. Sometimes this works, other times it feels messy. After last week’s discussion, I have selected one topic that REALLY stood out for me this week (as I have been contemplating this issue in my mind before stumbling on it). I’ll try to make this work ;)
A concern I have as an educator is how I can give enough focus to an individual student’s work among a towering load of papers. In my student observation, I have been given the task to work with one student to help them improve their performance. After doing this task for less than a week, I am concerned as to how I will be able to monitor the performance of 30-90 other students each week. Is it easier to communicate a student’s errors and mistakes on paper or in a one-on-one meeting? Williams notes, “Given the labor-intensive nature of writing comments, teachers have only two choices when deciding on a method. They can assign little writing but try to provide copious written comments, or they can assign much writing but make few, if any, written comments. Most teachers opt for the first choice” (314). I’m not certain that I agree with this.
I personally prefer greater workloads. Not necessarily more papers and greater length, but a strong emphasis on daily journals and a few larger papers as the semester rolls along. I believe that giving a daily prompt (with a small focus on time, maybe 5-7 minutes) will not only allow students the opportunity to get their creative juices flowing, but allow them to develop their craft. This also works to my advantage as well. If we collect the journals quarterly (or more), we will be able to notice patterns of error that a student may frequently make. If we can recognize these patterns early, we will be able to note their progress on a much more frequent basis. I believe this will also decrease the possibility that these mistakes will appear in much more significant writing pieces. I could be totally wrong with this assumption, but I think it is worth a go.
4 comments:
Collecting journals and noticing pattern of errors is great for the teacher, but how does it help the student?
The argument made assumes the reader can intuit the author's meaning. I would say that is a poor assumption and renders the argument vague and unclear.
Simple. If you communicate with the student through either written comments or conferences, the teacher can illustrate this to the student.
Dusty I would give your blog an A because unlike Jonathan here, I think the journal idea is a good one. As I keep mentioning in my own blogs, I am not in this class because I want to teach. I do NOT want to teach. So I always look at these readings from the view of the student, and as a student who has kept a journal for classes, I can tell you from experience that they are very affective.
The benefits of the journals are equal on both sides-- for both the teacher and the student. As a student, my journal entries improved, lengthened and painted better word-pictures as time progressed. I felt more comfortable writing for my professor.
As for your assessment, I give you an A because I enjoy how you picked one aspect of this chapter and figured out your own way to deal with it.
To Both Katie and Dusty:
The critique I left was aimed at Dusty's presentation of the idea, not of the idea (using journals in the classroom) itself. Since that was missed, it would appear that I need to improve on my clarity as well. So, here we go:
Saying that "If we collect the journals quarterly (or more), we will be able to notice patterns of error that a student may frequently make. If we can recognize these patterns early, we will be able to note their progress on a much more frequent basis. I believe this will also decrease the possibility that these mistakes will appear in much more significant writing pieces."
Is vague because it assumes that the reader of the blog will know the next logical step. My initial argument was to point out that that is not necessarily the case and needed to be spelled out. Which Dusty did in his response.
cheers,
Jonathan
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