Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

This week’s readings all have roots in conferencing with students to assist them to get the best possible work out of their writing. With many things in life, this can be rather ambiguous, and at a certain point a line will be crossed where one is no longer helping a student burgeon as a writer and instead tips towards essentially writing for the student. Such was the case with Tom Romano thusly, “The closer Dawn’s poem came to completion, the more directive I came in my comments and questions,” (p 99). Romano did well throughout most of the conferencing, but that moment he crossed the threshold into direction, he already did harm to Dawn’s paper. This concept is akin to a balancing wire walker; tip too much one way, and the whole thing plummets.

Another point Romano makes (to which, Fletcher and Portalupi concur) is that there needs to be open conferencing sans correction. Romano in fact explicitly stated, “Teachers should not take those drafts and mark errors, point out fallacies, critique severely, and then present students with the results. Such practice should be steadfastly avoided. It can only intimidate, disillusion, and overwhelm the writers,” (p 89). This goes hand in hand with Fletcher and Portalupi’s comment, “The best way to defuse them is by projecting an encouraging, appreciative attitude. Try to be there as a reader before you’re there as a corrector. You’ve got the entire year to help them polish their writing and refine their technique,” (p 39). With both of these points, I would tend to agree for the most part. However, especially in a high school setting, these corrections need to be made. Perhaps not right away, but one thing I’ve run into while I do my interning is that if you don’t correct a student on a mistake immediately, he/she will assume that it doesn’t need correction or that there is no mistake to begin with. Therefore I would argue that although strict correction is not necessary for these students, an indication for those students to make a correction to the mistake by simply pointing one out discretely at the end of comments made about the context of the writing will give that student the encouragement to continue unabatedly and correct when he/she chooses necessary. This an be achieved by an indicator such as a slight checkmark by a mistake, to which the teacher and student can go back to when regarding mechanics in the work.