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jwr's avatar

Thank you for sharing this - always appreciate your thoughtfulness and dedication to your craft.

Thinking about your questions at the end, I guess I think of revision as something that we do throughout the writing process. Pretty much whenever we're writing, we're going to be re-writing, too. In my teaching, I want that re-writing to be a process and experience of genuine intellectual development for my students. (For context, I teach community college writing courses.)

To that end, I try to build meaningful revision into the structure of my class. My strategy for doing this involves a series of exploratory mini-projects that students are encouraged to use as building blocks for the main project that they're working toward. These building blocks are explicitly understood to be work in progress, and students earn credit for their work as long as they're making useful progress (which can take a lot of different forms). Most of my feedback happens in the context of regular in-class conferences, and a lot of that feedback is about providing encouragement, supporting students' own metacognition, and framing their experience (including and especially the difficulties they encounter) in terms of intellectual growth. I do provide more detailed and at times more directive written comments on later-stage drafts for students who find that helpful, but I feel like the fundamental culture of revision in our class has already been built before we get to that point.

It's not a perfect system - nothing is - but it seems to work well for students and it's sustainable for me, and it's consistent with my desire to value and support the work that happens when we're in the messy middle of things.

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Jenna Vandenberg's avatar

I did 1:1 writing conference this year, and recorded them on Loom. I give students a link so they can rewatch the Loom when they are revising.

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