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.
This is so cool to read through and imagine. While I've leaned into peer writing workshops more and more (especially with larger class sizes), trying to figure out how to make regular conferencing work—amidst all the other things we do in terms of critical reading, etc.—is always a struggle.
But reading ideas and experiences like this one? It keeps me imagining—as this sounds absolutely transformative as a writing culture. (Never more important than this moment, too, for that.) Thank you for sharing your own experience and context!
Thanks! It does help that I don't have to spin as many plates as you do in more of a do-everything English class. (And I also don't have to navigate testing, etc.) The main constraint for me is simply contact time, which works out to maybe ~30 hours over the course of a semester, which is not a ton of time. And if I have about 20 students in a section and about 60 minutes for a class, that works out to only three minutes per conference even if we're going wire to wire. This doesn't really seem like it would work, but my experience has been that even very short check-ins can make a big difference. While it would definitely be nice to have more time, the key factor seems to be doing it relatively frequently on an ongoing basis.
Peer workshopping is something I feel like I need to work on.
Thank you so much for this. I use Carley Moore’s “Radical Revision” prompts with my grad students, which is a way in to targeted revision, but I generally let them choose a prompt from the list and have couched it as an “exercise” as part of the writing process (this is in a Research/Bib/Writing course for Master’s students). They tend to enjoy discovering that “writing a paper” doesn’t always mean starting from the beginning ;-). I think I can move to using the prompts specifically for revision tied to reassessment, even with my undergrads. I used a specs grading model for the first time last semester in an undergraduate course and while I am VERY pleased with the outcome of all the extra feedback and revision, I do need to rethink it a bit in terms of my time. This helps a lot!
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.
This is so cool to read through and imagine. While I've leaned into peer writing workshops more and more (especially with larger class sizes), trying to figure out how to make regular conferencing work—amidst all the other things we do in terms of critical reading, etc.—is always a struggle.
But reading ideas and experiences like this one? It keeps me imagining—as this sounds absolutely transformative as a writing culture. (Never more important than this moment, too, for that.) Thank you for sharing your own experience and context!
Thanks! It does help that I don't have to spin as many plates as you do in more of a do-everything English class. (And I also don't have to navigate testing, etc.) The main constraint for me is simply contact time, which works out to maybe ~30 hours over the course of a semester, which is not a ton of time. And if I have about 20 students in a section and about 60 minutes for a class, that works out to only three minutes per conference even if we're going wire to wire. This doesn't really seem like it would work, but my experience has been that even very short check-ins can make a big difference. While it would definitely be nice to have more time, the key factor seems to be doing it relatively frequently on an ongoing basis.
Peer workshopping is something I feel like I need to work on.
Thank you so much for this. I use Carley Moore’s “Radical Revision” prompts with my grad students, which is a way in to targeted revision, but I generally let them choose a prompt from the list and have couched it as an “exercise” as part of the writing process (this is in a Research/Bib/Writing course for Master’s students). They tend to enjoy discovering that “writing a paper” doesn’t always mean starting from the beginning ;-). I think I can move to using the prompts specifically for revision tied to reassessment, even with my undergrads. I used a specs grading model for the first time last semester in an undergraduate course and while I am VERY pleased with the outcome of all the extra feedback and revision, I do need to rethink it a bit in terms of my time. This helps a lot!
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.
Me: Googling Loom immediately!