A late-season win in the year 2020
“Amazing humans,” I told them. I always call my students ‘humans’ with some sort of affectionate adjective — it's a way to be respectful of the spectrum of binaries and gender identities and it's just odd enough that it catches their attention.
“You told me at the beginning of the year you want to learn what it's like to be a writer. Well, we are going to use Writable again, and use a part of its software that is going to help you feel like that. We are going to get feedback from an AI and we are going to do a self and a few peer reviews. Being a writer means getting and giving lots of feedback. This will give you new ways of looking at your own writing and though it feels overwhelming at first. However, by doing this, and then letting our work sit over Thanksgiving Break, we are going to make the process of final revisions and drafting clearer. This is one of the many tricks writers do. Are you ready to try?”
So that is how I sold them on using Writable again.
We had used it once before for a pre-assessment so I could get to know them as writers, readers, and humans. This process had been met with hick-ups, trepidation, and a series of students having meltdowns trying to navigate a new technology in a time of WAY too much new technology. In the small rural school I teach in, the kids are very uncomfortable with technology. They are good with their phones, but not with computers. They don’t trust them, and they just prefer good old fashioned pencil and paper. They also don’t like not knowing what they are doing and are fearful of new experiences making them feel like writing, which is already hard for them, impossible.
Backing up
I should back up again, get you the whole picture of the chaos that is my life as an English teacher, in the year 2020. I teach English 10 and 11. I’ve been blessed with some pretty amazing students this year. I’ve gushed about them several times in this blog. If I’m being honest, seeing them give their all, day in and day out either in person or on Zoom, is the reason I’ve survived to December this year.
My 11th graders have not had a research writing unit since Middle School. When they were freshmen, their English 9 teacher tried to do it in the Winter. But that was the Winter of 2019, which for those of you not from the Midwest, that was the POLAR VORTEX WINTER. This resulted in a collective loss of about a month’s worth of school for snow, cold, and just bad weather. The lack of continuity made her cut her losses of this unit (she started in January right after the return from the holidays) sometime towards the end of March and move on.
I had this group last year as 10th graders. I had big plans to do research in the Spring. And March 2020 changed everything about modern education. So these kids have missed out on continuing to developt a rather large and important set of writing skills for a while now. So, I decided to do a stunt journalism research writing unit that I borrowed and adjusted for their needs. I was introduced to stunt journalism research from a fellow teacher-consultant from the Chippewa River Writing Project, Sharon Murchie, that she did at our Online 2020 Summer Institute. Sharon, if you are reading this, thank you again!
Back to today
For all of this year’s challenges, changes, and chaos, my administration and I are okay if we only do half the curriculum this year as long as what we do is work of substance and puts the kids at least closer to the collective path. Making the kids feel loved and making progress, where we can, is what is most important. This writing project has taken two months to do from start to finish (see challenges, changes, and chaos) and my kids have LOVED this project because of its choice and freedom in topics. Additionally, in the two years, I’ve had them, this project has produced some of the best writing I’ve ever seen from them.
Taking the opportunity for a slower pace this year has given these students more time to be thoughtful writers and giving them more time to revise and think about their pieces. Because of the nature of everything, I was also forced to have the students write their papers in stages, something I don’t traditionally have them do. This may change. Having this kind of stretched out time has produced better writing. The combination of time and students getting to write about something they are passionate about are just two parts of this. The third is the feedback.
This year I have wanted to do more with peer feedback, but with the remote learning that seemed impossible without a bunch of extra work I already don’t have time for.
I wanted to use the peer editing feature Writable has. It's anonymous as long as students take their names of the document and the system randomizes the papers students. Students make comments and give peer reviews based on rubric criteria the system has (or you can make your own, like I did, basing the checkpoints on my single point rubric). They can rate it with stars and write comments to each other. The comments often have sentence starters, but students chance to choose to write their own as well.
It would be okay if this went bad I told myself, these kids wanted to know what it was like to be actual writers, right? Well, this is what writers do. They experiment. And they get lots of feedback. Both good and bad. I figured the kids were already super into their stunt journalism papers, I wouldn’t be asking that much more of them either. Even if Writable did scare them a bit the first time. And either way, we were remote, so if it was totally bad, I could easily just sweep up the mess and keep going.
So I challenged them the week of Thanksgiving break.
And they didn’t just rise to the challenge. They SOARED.
I made the activity asynchronous and they had a week to complete it. The engagement went through the roof. Many students reviewed MORE than their required three peer papers. Many of the comments were not only kind to the writers they reviewed but insightful. More often than not, their comments were spot on as to what each draft needed to fix. As I looked at their comments the Monday after Thanksgiving, I was stunned. I had never had a peer review go so well. In fact, I usually chucked peer reviews out the window when I was running short on time because they usually ended up with canned surface-level feedback. I had been rooting around for better ways to do it for a while now. Had I finally found a way that worked?
So when I got the kids in Zoom the next time, I asked them for their Writing Into the Day to talk about their experience with Writable. I have them do this in the chat to save time and the chat is only set to go to me. I get having them do a Doc or a notebook, and if it was face to face teaching, we would. But our community is has limited at best internet access. I have a good percentage of my kids who have to join from cars in the parking lots of various places on their phones. At that moment, I just want them to write, not worry about if they do or don’t have their notebooks or can access a Doc as well as be on Zoom at the same time.
Their experiences were all positive, even for the kids who had originally hated Writable. They loved that it was anonymous and that it gave them the chance to communicate with people who they might not otherwise. They also liked all the ideas it gave them for their paper. They had never done anything like this they told me, but they would do it again because it made their own papers better. They could in fact, finally see that they were doing a better job than they thought they were or had an idea of how to fix their own papers without having a conference with me. Even if it was somewhat hard to navigate, students said they knew this was important and other people were counting on them for feedback. That made them want to do this activity sooner.
They hated the AI feature. They didn’t like that it was very formulaic, and they said that a robot can’t be trusted. Many of them ignored the Revision Aide feature altogether.
But I was stunned speechless for a minute on Zoom (no my mic wasn’t muted). As I read their chats as they came in, I was entranced by the magic of this. And I had done nothing to do this. I had set up the system and the community and then gotten out of the way and let the kids trudge through the waters. The older I get and the more I teach, the more I know these are the best learning experiences for both students and teachers. This made me remember the power of peer feedback and why I need to give more opportunities in my classroom—especially in a year that had driven us to be socially distant. I like to think this late in the year 2020, these kids were so sick of the noise in their own heads and houses. They needed to read and hear others' voices to finally hear their own voices clearly for the first time again.
I haven’t asked them yet if they have felt like writers yet. We have far too much more writing to do this year to ask that question just yet. But it will be an interesting question to ask them in the spring. And even if their answers say no, I know that they are writers and they think more like writers than they give themselves credit for.
For now, I’m going to take my late-season win in 2020.
