The first part in our activity for this section was to practice brainstorming. I asked a college educated friend of mine to help me with this. She and I wrote out post it notes to represent the writing process. This led also into a conversation tangent on grading, and we labeled those so to separate them somewhat. See our thoughts below:
Earlier I had a chance to "incubate" and work through some of my problem in a different format. My thought process looked something like this:
Overall I think these main idea points summarized my ideate session and I would like to explore them further in my next steps with this problem:
- There is a problem in the fact that teachers and students do not have matching worth/ideal when it comes to writing, therefore, students aren't connecting with the feedback they are given. They only value the grade because they truly understand it and it has very real implications for them.
- Once feedback is given, there is no follow up or discussion afterwards. Revisions are rare after mistakes are noted (mostly due to time constraints). Most teachers end the process with the feedback/grade and they move on in class before feedback is even given.
-Many kids pigeonhole their writing to what they believe a teacher wants (writing to get the "A"), This is limiting creativity and thoughtfulness, and feedback given is not valued because the writing was tailored to just to appease the teacher in the first place.
-Free-style writing that is more inherent and less grade centric is not encouraged and not used on mainstream assessments.
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In this ideate session I re-learned the value of brainstorming and bouncing ideas off one-another. I often forgot the value of this as I feel teaching can be so isolated. I got a "refilled idea-bucket" when I brainstormed with my friend and it reminded me of the RSA Animate piece from noted author Steven Johnson, “Where Good Ideas Come From” that mentioned how ideas often needed to marry other people's ideas to become great. I had not seriously thought about this human nature to connect things (although I do it all the time) and I don't think I formerly allowed my students this time enough either by design.
The value of time also was reenforced during this module for me. I think that all of us can relate to time constraints and I really like building a designed "time off" into the process. I really felt like it was productive for me and I also hope to use this as a building block for future class units for my students as well.
To complete my problem solving, I need to figure a way to build and prototype a system that uses these values and is able to engage students with writing in a creative useful way. I'm not sure if this is as simple as a different type of grading/rubric, or perhaps a different technology to use, or maybe even a new idea of what to write all together (no more essays!).
- There is a problem in the fact that teachers and students do not have matching worth/ideal when it comes to writing, therefore, students aren't connecting with the feedback they are given. They only value the grade because they truly understand it and it has very real implications for them.
- Once feedback is given, there is no follow up or discussion afterwards. Revisions are rare after mistakes are noted (mostly due to time constraints). Most teachers end the process with the feedback/grade and they move on in class before feedback is even given.
-Many kids pigeonhole their writing to what they believe a teacher wants (writing to get the "A"), This is limiting creativity and thoughtfulness, and feedback given is not valued because the writing was tailored to just to appease the teacher in the first place.
-Free-style writing that is more inherent and less grade centric is not encouraged and not used on mainstream assessments.
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In this ideate session I re-learned the value of brainstorming and bouncing ideas off one-another. I often forgot the value of this as I feel teaching can be so isolated. I got a "refilled idea-bucket" when I brainstormed with my friend and it reminded me of the RSA Animate piece from noted author Steven Johnson, “Where Good Ideas Come From” that mentioned how ideas often needed to marry other people's ideas to become great. I had not seriously thought about this human nature to connect things (although I do it all the time) and I don't think I formerly allowed my students this time enough either by design.
The value of time also was reenforced during this module for me. I think that all of us can relate to time constraints and I really like building a designed "time off" into the process. I really felt like it was productive for me and I also hope to use this as a building block for future class units for my students as well.
To complete my problem solving, I need to figure a way to build and prototype a system that uses these values and is able to engage students with writing in a creative useful way. I'm not sure if this is as simple as a different type of grading/rubric, or perhaps a different technology to use, or maybe even a new idea of what to write all together (no more essays!).