Don't Just Hand That Paper In--Reflect on It!

An exercise in choosing powerful words: students categorizing verbs

This week, I resisted temptation. There’s so much learning that can happen between student completion of a paper and teacher assessment of it, if student writers are given an opportunity to reflect on the effort they’ve just made. But I’m always tempted to just collect a final draft and move on without giving writers that chance to reflect. I’m always glad when I resist that temptation, like I did yesterday when 6th and 7th graders handed in the final draft of the stories they’d been working on. I learned things, they learned things, and we are all poised to move to the next stage of growth with more awareness. 

In order to help writers reflect yesterday, I gave them the following sentence stems…

• The reason I wanted to tell this story is…
• Something I learned or observed about the writing process: planning, drafting, revising, or editing is…
• Something I worked hard on and improved is… 
• Something we did in class that helped me grow as a writer was…
• Something I want to improve on next time is…
• A specific question I have for Mrs. Essenburg about my story is…

Reading their responses this afternoon was a worthwhile experience. I was pleasantly surprised by the thoughtfulness and passion with which some expressed their reason for telling their story. I want students to be able to identify what they’ve worked hard on, to be proud of their work, and I want to be able to comment on what they see as their biggest focus of effort. I want to know how I’m helping them, and how I can help more. I want them to be able to set goals for themselves. And I love to be able to answer the questions writers actually want to know the answers to, rather than commenting ad nauseam on things they don’t care about! Here are some of their responses: 

The reason I wanted to tell this story is…

• Don’t think only about you. Think about the other person more than you.
• I think that friendship is important, and we have to respect the friendship because I think that my friends  help me to fix my problem and also challenge me, which leads me to more interesting things.
• I want people to imagine and expand their creativity so they can be good writers as well.
• I wanted the people that have a dream to know that if you work hard, someone will know that you are working hard. So never give up.
• To do stuff in peace or stay calm to solve a problem.

Something I learned or observed about the writing process: planning, drafting, revising, or editing is… 

• Planning the story before actually writing it helped me to take more time to think about my story and to come up with more specific details.
• I found some new errors that I couldn’t change. I need more time to edit!
• The more you plan the better because you can imagine more of what you are writing.
• Planning helps make my brain warm up, and helps me to think of how the story should go.

Something I worked hard on and improved is…

• How to start the story.
• How to make the reader more interested by ending the story mysteriously.
• My spelling because I think when my spelling is wrong the reader will have a hard time reading it.
• To try and give a good visualization.
• Adding details.
• Dialogues and dialogue tags.
• To give enough information to make the readers understand.
• Choosing strong verbs and adjectives.

Something we did in class that helped me grow as a writer was…

• Reading different kinds of stories.
• I learned how to choose the words.
• Planning the characters first helped me to fully think about how I could describe the characters in the story.
• The mini-workshops helped me a lot, but the best mini-workshop was the lead and paragraphs because I didn’t know about it before.
• Dialogue worksheet. This helped me a lot because you can put dialogue into your story which enhances the picture you’re looking at.
• Learning how to make leads.
• The whiteboard activity helped me learn where you put commas.

Something we did in class that didn’t really help me grow as a writer was…

• Planning quotes before actually writing the story was a bit difficult because deciding what the characters are going to say could possibly change later. (However, someone above said this was the thing that helped them the most. That’s how it goes.)
• I think the plans were difficult because I don’t think it was the perfect way for me to plan. (Planning was named by many writers as helpful. This writer seems to understand that planning is important—it’s just that this way didn’t work for this individual.)
• Correctly punctuate the dialogue from “Stray” didn’t help me a lot because of the labelling of the numbers. (Yes, I realize I made that exercise unnecessarily complicated, and I’m thankful this writer reminded me.)
• It all helped me, but I think the least helpful was the lack of practice writing paragraphs. (Yup. We started that exercise and ran out of time to complete it. However, when I edited their revised drafts, I realized it was more important to revisit dialogue punctuation than finish the paragraph exercise. See next comment.)
• About paragraphs because knew about it. 3% of chance to forget to use it.

Something I want to improve on next time is…

• Checking my work over and over. I just noticed a mistake (quite a big one) after  Mrs. Essenburg gave us back the print of the final draft.
• I want to use many kinds of words to describe things.
• To explain what’s happening/explain the setting by giving background information and not actually straight up say what’s happening.
• I want to improve on the plans.
• The action part because I think it’s lacking detail.
• I want to improve on the lead.

A specific question I have for Mrs. Essenburg about my story is…

• Did the first paragraph make you want to read the rest of the story?
• What should I do to learn more vocabulary?
• How can you exactly know where to start a new paragraph?
• Are there other ways that are easy to plan in the beginning?
• Was the story entertaining? Should I make it longer or shorter? Should I get rid of something? Was the setting clear? Is the lead good? (I get the feeling that this writer really wants to know!)

Overall observations: Student writers found planning really important. Most of what we did in class was helpful, and writers grew in a wide variety of ways. When they identified exercises that were less helpful, there were no surprises. I was pleased that a number of comments showed writers thinking about their readers. And I have a number of specific questions I can get back to writers about. Above all, I re-learned that post-writing reflection is a worthwhile exercise.

How do you help writers reflect on their learning?