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28 TEAC H In G WI T H ST U D En T T ExT S group is not going to be critiquing anyone’s assignment design. To protect the student writer, I invite the teacher to create a pseudonym for him or her, and I remove all other information that might identify the student. Although the group comments on the student’s work, the aim is not to identify the particular student’s strengths and weaknesses, but rather to help participants to name, explain, and test their own expectations and values for student writing. Provide guidance tor reading the Text (individually and collaboratively) I give the group ten to fifteen minutes to read through the student text, marking its strengths and weaknesses. A “strength” is any textual feature that demonstrates what the student knows how to do, reflects some degree of purposefulness and control, or indicates that the writer is attempting something difficult (e.g., offering a counterargument, or defining a complex key term). A “weakness” may certainly be an error, but it also might be something that is missing from the text locally or as a whole. Usually, I ask participants to think of weaknesses as those aspects of student writing that give us clues about what the student writer probably needs to learn how to do next. I advise participants not to spend a great deal of energy trying to imagine what the teacher had in mind for this assignment or whether the student has fulfilled it. I offer this advice because students often misperceive their teachers’ expectations for writing assignments (see Anson, Davis, and Vilhotti in this volume for a strategy to help remedy those misperceptions). In the workshop I am describing here, it is more important for participants to focus not on what they guess about the teacher’s expectations but on what they can see in the student’s writing. After we read and mark the text, we gather some of the strengths and weaknesses on a board in two columns. I ask for strengths alone first, without caveats, and then invite participants to add weaknesses to the list after the strengths side of the board is quite full. Sometimes a strength is paired with a weakness, but just as often, once it is named as a strength, teachers can leave an issue without qualifying it later on. Figure 2.1 offers an example of the kind of chart we generate. After we have assembled these lists, I ask teachers to identify one or two strengths and weaknesses they would want to focus on that would not only help the student improve his or her performance on the partic ular paper we are reading, but would also make a qualitative difference Revealing Our Values 29 Strengths (what student can do) Weaknesses(what student needs to learn next) sense of voice good questions (genuine, not just rhetorical) chooses apt quotations provides context for quotations sentence-level correctness makes use of powerful concepts derived from readings thesis is more than a claim of fact gestures towards transitions between most paragraphs title reflects/includes key concepts from the paper MLA citation formatting consistent moves between registers and pronouns (third and first person) omits signal phrases for many quotations (dropped in) or uses generic verbs, such as “writes,” “says,” “talks about” tends not to analyze quotations quotes in places where paraphrase would be more appropriate thesis comes at the end of the paper too many questions (some could be claims) repetitiveness does not define key terms figure 2.1. Sample chart of strengths and weaknesses. to the student’s future writing. Teachers jot notes for a few moments to say what they have selected as the most important issues to work on and why. I also ask them to hypothesize about why the student may be strong in the area(s) they have chosen, and may need to learn in the others. Provide a framework for analyzing our discussion of the Text In terms of naming our values, the workshop comes to fruition at this moment and in the discussion that follows the individual writing, when the participants share their diagnoses and name their priorities about working with the student and the text. Impromptu assessment of student writing is a common feature of professional development workshops, so participants usually find it both easy and pleasurable to draw on their expertise. However, it is often much more difficult for teachers to offer their hypotheses about why the student may...

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