Blog #7: Dominic Lopez

 

 

 

 

 

                                                These are my thoughts for this week’s readings: 

1.) The Tobin piece is thought-provoking to me because it points out how teachers play an important role in the composing process of a student’s writing. The way a teacher reads and interprets their writing will affect how they will provide feedback to a student’s writing, whether positive or negative. The student will usually take what the teacher says on how to improve their writing and apply it to their next draft. Thus, it is very important that we are aware of any biases or presuppositions we have towards a topic a student is writing about or about the student and their writing before we read and respond to their papers. We need to make sure that our advice for improving their writing will be useful for them to apply to their papers. To not discount the good aspects of their writing that are already present; teaching them to play to and improve their strengths as a writer while improving areas in their writing that are weaker. 

2.) In the Inoue piece, I liked that it is asserted that students need to be consistently and frequently assessing their own writing and their writing process. This can be done in a number of ways, such as discussing their writing with their peers or their teacher and writing papers that reflect on their writing. It’s interesting that this piece suggests that students being able to explore different writing techniques and styles as well as taking risks in their writing are a form of assessment of their writing. When students experiment with different writing styles and takes risks in their writing, they are able to see what can be improved in their writing and what doesn’t work in their writing. They can see what writing process techniques lead to better drafts and overall final papers, or what style of writing is more effective for conveying their ideas. Hence, it creates an assessment of their writing and the writing process because they will adapt their writing with new effective writing styles and writing processes and use them in their future writing.  

3.) For the Wittman piece, it made me change my perspective on how writing comments on a student’s paper isn’t just grading and correcting mistakes in a paper. It can be viewed as an ongoing literacy narrative for the teacher; they are constantly learning how to read student papers more usefully and effectively and to write comments that connect their own literacy or experiences with aspects of the student’s writing. By trying to use writing comments on student papers like this, it can help students not feel like they are getting attacked for not being good at writing or making writing mistakes. Instead, the teacher is both contributing to their writing growth and learning from their papers about different aspects of writing, which in turn will help them read and make more effective comments on student papers in the future.  

4.) Chapter 14 of the Lindemann reading had a few useful pieces of advice for responding to student papers and for assessing their growth as a writer. I thought it was useful for her to suggest that teachers should avoid labeling problems with the paper in their comments unless they give students suggestions for how they can fix them. If teachers focus on pointing out to the student where they did well in the paper, the teacher can think of ways that the student can use what is good about their writing to improve the areas of the paper that need to be strengthened. There should be a variety of writing assignments in different writing genres for students to complete frequently throughout the course and kept in a portfolio so that both the teacher and the student can properly assess how the student’s writing is improving and how it can continue to improve.