A Good Day Teaching in the Writing Classroom

Yesterday was one of those rare teaching days when things went well in all three of my onground classes.  Usually at least one class doesn't go as I planned, or we run through what I planned much too quickly, or we cover the material but the students seem tuned out in some way.

Yesterday we did a bit of peer editing, and I was pleased that most students arrived at class with a rough draft.  Since it was our first peer editing session, I had students write on the rough draft something that they particularly liked about the writing.

Even if it's not useful in terms of peer feedback that students get, I think it's useful for them to see each other's work.  But it's draining to try to do it for a whole class, so I decided to only spend part of class time doing it.  I like having a classroom where I can rearrange the furniture.  I had students bring their rough drafts and a writing utensil (and nothing else) to the peer editing area.  In a 75 minute class, we did about 20 minutes of peer editing.

We did some revising exercises together.  I had them read their work out loud, all at once.  I counted "Three, two, one, go"--at which point students were supposed to read out loud.  In the first class, they read softly.  In the second class, I had to count down twice, and the students read softly.  In the third class, which is in the bigger room, students read out loud in normal voices, and at least two of them read with a lot of expression.

I talked about the importance of reading your work out loud so that you have a better chance of seeing what's actually there.  If you read to yourself, your brain knows what you meant, and your brain will fill in the blanks.  I also had them read their work from the end, sentence by sentence, starting with the last sentence and then the second to the last sentence and so on.

I talked about the skills they'll learn in the writing class.  Some skills they may never use again, once they graduate from college, skills like writing a research paper.  But some skills they'll use throughout their lives, and the ability to find one's own mistakes in one's own writing before submitting it to more judgmental eyes (a boss, a hiring committee, colleagues), whether it be in an e-mail, a report, a cover letter in a job search.  Students seemed very attentive when I did this part of the class.

Then I had them read an essay while I wrote comments on rough drafts.  We talked about the essay which is the next type of writing we'll be doing.  All three classes had good participation in analyzing the essay.  

I handed back rough drafts and told them to hang out if they still had questions.  A few of them did, and the rest headed out into the rainy day.

I realize that I could run through the same activities on a different day and come up with different results, although I do think the strategy of several different types of activities in a 75 minute class works well.  I'm making a record of the day so that on days that don't go as well, I can remember that there are days like the teaching day that I had yesterday.