Response to Write in the Middle, Workshop 6

Jessica Sumpter

English 484

February 22, 2008

Informal response

Write in the Middle

This video is focusing on how teachers respond to student writing. I’m hearing from the teachers that asking the right questions is really important. They use questions to draw out the students’ thoughts. I think it’s a really good technique. I think it works on a lot of levels. It gets the students to develop their thoughts more fully and articulate those thoughts to the teacher. Too, the teacher doesn’t take over the paper, the student retains full ownership.

Several of the teachers have talked about ways they work around their own biases. I think that’s great. Students react differently to teacher opinions, but rarely in a positive way. Some of them feel resentful, ignored, undervalued, but some of them latch on to what the teacher thinks, and that’s just as bad, just as limiting to student writing.

I really like the teacher in the first one-on-one conference. She does what the other teachers in the video do, but I feel like she’s more direct about it than they are. I appreciate directness. She asks a lot of questions, praises the student when she can, and, I don’t know, she’s firm about what the student decides. Also, I think students benefit from that type of directness. If a teacher is soft or vague about their questions, then students get confused about what the teacher is asking.

Several times after a teacher asks a question and a student hesitates, the teacher has been quick to tell the student what they’re not asking for. I think it’s a useful strategy because the student is probably thinking you’re asking for more than you really are.

The one teacher, I think his name is Jack, talks about how when he has students read their papers out loud one of the things he listens for are things that can be extrapolated to the whole class, he calls it teachable. I think that’s great. I love things that serve more than one purpose, that accomplish several things at once, especially if some of the learning is indirect.

There’s a lot of talk about having students read their papers out loud to one or more classmates, and I don’t know how much I like that. I’ve never come across a class that was comfortable reading their papers out loud, even in classes with lots of really good discussions.

It’s so hard to say ‘this is how you deal with students’ because there are so many different strategies, and each student is different and responds to different things in different ways.