What’s New? This is the point in the semester where I start to reap the rewards of our cycle of reflection. Our community of writers reflects every week, every unit, and then wraps up with reflection. I want my students to grow as writers and reflection is an essential part of that process. Reflection is a foundational principal of my pedagogy. Something new I’ve done this semester has been to carefully select poetic writing invitations that will both inspire my students’ writing but also their reflection and this has really helped my student reflections level up. Highly recommend!
Original: Reflection has always played a key role in my writing classrooms from the beginning when I used portfolios to teach first year writing to today’s #ungrading classroom. While those early reflections were summative I have gradually shifted to formative reflections (including weekly reflections see Direct Line). My current iteration of reflection includes weekly reflections that also serve as check-ins, unit reflections that look back at the work of the unit but also set goals for the next unit, and a final unit that serves the dual purposes of a practical demonstration of what the student has learned that semester combined with a reflection analyzing their journey as a writer.
First Year Writing Reflection
My first year writers have been involved in an American Creed Writing Marathon all semester and their final project will be a multi-genre showcase of what they have learned that can incorporate a curated collection of their work and writing from final deliverables to projects and writing that may exist in their notebooks but never saw the light until now. This work will be fun and creative and full of student choice, but will also require a great deal of high level rhetorical work to create a cohesive whole from the disparate parts which makes it an ideal practical demonstration of what the student has learned. The experience of creating their multi-genre projects offers a range of learning opportunities and supporting their classmates engaged in the same process adds still more depth. Plus, I am strongly encouraging students to publish their work to the National Writing Project’s Our Democracy platform. I am making this optional though as many of my first year writers are under a lot of stress.
While watching those projects come into being has been fun, the part of the experience that holds me rapt is the analytical reflection. Again, because I believe in authentic writing and I believe I always have something to learn from my students about writing and teaching, there is a great deal of choice for my students. They can treat this reflection as a literacy narrative, rhetorical analysis, or comparison contrast essay. I also shared some of the tools I use to reflect on my practice. I am really curious to see the rhetorical choices they make as well as the reflection itself because I have never given so much choice for this activity.
Professional Writing Reflection
In the past, I have asked my professional writing students to reflect on what they learned over the semester and how those lessons will impact their future as professional writers, but this semester, strongly influenced by the desire to make this reflection an authentic writing experience, students will create project closure reports instead. Throughout the semester my students have proposed, developed, and conducted usability studies on a passion project. The final unit includes a polished project deliverable (a web site, social media campaign, formal report, white paper, or the like, created to support the passion project) and a project closure report or post-mortem to examine, honestly and thoroughly, the successes, failures, and challenges of the project and identify opportunities for improvement going forward feels both pedagogically and professionally appropriate.
I have not yet read any project closure reports from my professional writing students, but the final reflections of my first year writers have begun to trickle in and I am so excited by those reflections. So many students have embraced the reflection process and learned from it. Some used comparison contrast methods to examine my course in the context of their years of literacy instruction while others used a literacy narrative approach to explore the shift in the way they think about and engage with the consumption and creation of text. Some students have zoomed in to write very personally about their confidence and engagement as writers and consumers of text while others have pulled back their lens to examine their growth as students and humans as well as writers. I am so pleased with the rhetorical skills my students have developed and honed over the course of one pandemic semester and believe these tools and the confidence to wield them have made our journey one worth taking. I am further pleased that my focus on low-stakes #authenticwriting, reflection, and #ungrading has allowed students and instructor to enjoy the journey of growing as writers. Over and over students noted how the pacing and structure of the class combined with the ungrading approach helped them focus on their development as a writer and reader. Over and over students emphasized how the writing marathon approach helped them discover or recover a love of writing and appreciation for text. A good reminder that we can often do so much more with less.
Update: I was so pleased with the reflection process last year that I am continuing the practice in both first year writing classes and professional writing this academic year. Already this semester I can see my students growing into more thoughtful writers. That transformation from writing student to thoughtful writer is my goal. I want my students to understand that writing is so much more than a disposable transaction and reflection is an essential part of that development. At the conclusion of our first unit creating This I Believe American Creeds, my students wrote reflections honoring the journey we took. The invitations I shared for those reflections were:
- Describe your journey as a writer from first writing “I am a writer” to the inquiry process to exploring your rhetorical situation. How have you changed as a writer? How has your writing process changed? In what ways has your thinking about writing and the writing process changed? In what ways have your goals for yourself as a writer evolved over the course of this unit? Have you grown as a writer?
- Discuss your satisfaction with the final draft of your slant essay. If you had more time/energy/patience would you make different choices? How did your vision for your This I Believe American Creed evolve over the course of this unit? How did this evolution impact your satisfaction with the final draft? Consider your own responses to the questions you asked about your TIB during the inquiry process.
Reading these reflections brings so much joy to my writing teacher heart. Does your assessment do that?
Yesterday’s writing invitation centered on the final reflection my first year writers will use to explore and assess their writing journeys and I’m not going to lie. I cried. In both classes. Even though I will see many of these writers again in the fall this was the last time I will write with these communities so I carried the weight of that farewell in with me and then so many of their reflections just undid. me. We began with some poetry to unlock some of the key ideas I hope students will explore in their more polished reflections that will be completed later. I was blown away with the imagery students shared. That is the power of teaching writing through poetry. The final prompt that I gave students was a teacher’s agenda inspired by the process some of my colleagues employed for our peer observation process and the peer review process I use with my students. Whatever my failings as a teacher, I know that this semester I helped many of my students believe they are writers and that was definitely a journey worth taking.
Note: Some of the high points my students identified in their in-class reflections include the community we built and especially the way we check in with each other, our practice of writing and sharing, feeling free to take risks and step outside their comfort zone (because ungrading), writing about topics deeply important to them individually, exploring their personal values, and sharing their life stories. We did some serious rhetorical work along the way, but these are the joys that carried us through that work. Our broken education system continues to wear us all down, students, families, and teachers, which makes is so much more necessary to center joy and community in our work.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
