I’m writing to share a feedback technique Carole Sand and I tried recently in a writing class. It used a technique from the art world – a Gallery Walk – to improve feedback and mentoring for students’ work. The specific goal of this assignment was to provide feedback on student writing in real-time and offer supportive and critical feedback on early paragraph writing that used a claim - evidence - reasoning (CER) format. This is more formal writing than fifth-graders are used to doing, so it is a bit more challenging for them to do. Also, it is less creative and more analytical, which is another barrier. Frankly, it’s less exciting to write this way than to write creatively. BACKGROUND Students had already begun to draft a short analysis of a character in the story, Voices in the Park, as seen through author/illustrator craft choices. As they wrote, we could see uneven paragraph development using the CER format. Rather than give each student individual feedback (which would have taken too long and broken our rhythm) we decided to create a gallery walk; students copied a single paragraph and placed it on a slide in a Google Presentation. ASSIGNMENT SPECIFICS Here are the directions for this assignment: I pushed a blank presentation out to students as “Can Edit” collaborators. I called this a Gallery Walk, meaning it was a place to show our work for critique. After students posted their drafts, they were encouraged to analyze their own work using the highlighter tool and to read and notice and provide comments on what others were doing. Below are some of the slides after 30 minutes of work. STUDENT WORK AS MENTORS As students posted, they noticed things that others were doing. Sometimes they would pause to comment as in these examples below: REVISING USING STUDENT MENTORS Often students used what they noticed in other’s writing to improve their own work. Here is one example of a first draft and a draft after about 20 minutes after reading how others were crafting their work: First Draft About 20 minutes later. I see much more attention to incorporating simple in-text citations of evidence and to providing reasoning that connects evidence back to the claim, a crucial and difficult step.
TEACHER ROLE Our role as teachers was to strategically “seed” comments to bring out some of the things that we noticed and to write things we noticed on the class (analog) whiteboard. Items that emerged were in-text citations, claims (what required evidence for support, what did not), and how to transition into reasoning from evidence. All of this feedback happened in class over the space of 30-35 minutes. Student interest in each other’s writing seemed to increase the amount of feedback per student. SUMMARY THOUGHTS We noticed several things over the course of the class period:
This process also gave students A LOT of comments and models to use on a single paragraph without requiring a lot of teacher-time (30-35 minutes of class time.) The work students did on the Presentation could be brought back and applied to the other paragraphs in their persuasive writing. I’m thinking of doing this kind of gallery walk with my science students as they craft explanations for phenomena or argue from evidence. I think it would work well whenever students are trying to hone already taught work (but not clearly understood), or as a way to critique and expand thinking.
5 Comments
Michael Himlie
4/4/2020 08:22:48 am
I loved reading this very peer-based editing method, for younger students. I as an adult learn so much from editing & being edited by peers, & to transfer that to a classroom is such a useful tool. Also the more natural way of improving writing by utilizing others, is a far more inclusive form of education than to dive in to a thesaurus. Thank you!
Reply
Steve Peterson
4/4/2020 11:05:58 am
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and comment.
Reply
Sarah Zbornik
4/6/2020 04:27:27 pm
What surprised me the most, from this birds-eye view, was the amount of specific feedback that was given within a short amount of time. Thanks for sharing!
Reply
Steve Peterson
4/6/2020 05:49:43 pm
Thanks for reading!
Reply
Stephanie Radloff
4/27/2020 09:05:39 am
I really like the peer editing because the students can and did learn so much from each other. I also liked this because the students that are weaker writers are able to strengthen their own writing by being able to read other's work and only sharing with the teachers instead of their peers if they are not confident in their work.
Reply
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorsDCSD Teachers, Instructional Coaches, Learner Advocate, and Collaborative Teachers Archives
April 2024
Categories |