Writing starts a conversation

Trees in Muir Woods, stretching higher every year. (Image by chris18769 from Pixabay)

The assignment had been given: Write about a place you’ve been.

Barely five minutes later, Chris, a sixth grader, had already turned his in. I glanced up to see him already engrossed in something else. Warily, I plucked the sheet of paper out of my inbox and read.

“The place I’ve been is San Francisco. My dad took me with him on a business trip. We went to Chinatown and Ghirardelli Square. We also went to Muir Woods. It was awesome!!!”

That’s it? We’d played this little game a number of times, and it was getting old. He knew this wasn’t enough. Why was he testing me like this?

Looking back, I see things from a different perspective. And so does Chris. Now a rising high school senior, he returned for a visit recently and told me how easy high school writing was after all of the writing he did for me in middle school.

The thing that made Chris a better writer is the same thing that made me a less frustrated writing teacher, and that was to embrace the power of iterative feedback.

I didn’t have to fix this all at once — and neither did Chris. His writing could evolve. His ideas could be developed through a step-by-step process that he could learn to replicate on his own.

The first step was for me to accept that students tend to have “set points” for their performance on writing assignments. These range from “I don’t turn things in at all” to "I can go for pages and pages on this prompt.” Chris wasn’t testing me or being insulting. It’s just that four of five short sentences was his set point at the time. The work felt “done” to him. When it’s done, you turn it in (hopefully to never have to think about it again).

Ah, but that’s where the iterative feedback comes in. Because instead of simply giving him a bad grade, we were going to play with this. I could have handed it back and asked him to write a minimum of a page, but then I would have gotten a bunch of nonsense.

So I wrote a question at the bottom. “What did you see in Muir Woods?” Then I handed it back

Well, you know what he wrote back. “Trees.”

Grimly, I reminded him to use complete sentences, then asked what kind of trees and awaited his reply.

“We saw giant redwood trees.”

My turn: “Using complete sentences, tell me three things about your Chinatown experience.”

And so on. Eventually, Chris’ work had grown to include many more details, and he put it all together into a new draft. Having seen improvement, we moved on to a new prompt.

After going through this process with several pieces, Chris learned that if he wanted to simplify his life, he might as well include more details in the first place. At that point, my feedback questions could address higher-level concerns: “What is the topic sentence of this paragraph? Can you find the sentence that doesn’t fit the topic?” or “How might your reader disagree with this assertion? What would you say to them in reply?”

Once Chris’ set point grew to a couple of pages, it made sense to give him more structured assignments with more specific parameters. I knew he would pay attention to them and that he was capable of satisfying the requirements without being prodded (or writing a bunch of filler). I learned more about the way Chris sees the world and could engage with him about not just his writing, but the topic that he was writing about..

Chris’ strength was in his receptivity to feedback. Some students are shocked to have work returned to them and view feedback as a sign that they “did it wrong.” It takes a gentle touch and some time to help them understand that feedback is, fundamentally, a conversation about their ideas and not an indictment of their work.

As we develop as writers, we find that we can have more of this conversation in our heads prior to sharing our writing. However, that still doesn’t mean that the conversation is over. There will always be questions and comments about our ideas. The more we embrace this, the more we will grow.

So to continue the conversation: What are your thoughts about what I’ve written here?