Reflection as a Fork in the Road
Student reflection during the writing process
“This feels too easy, I just sat down and wrote everything in two hours.”
This might seem an obnoxious statement from a high school junior, but it was recently said to me by an earnest student in a genuinely quizzical tone: why had the first half of her piece taken her over a month to write, while the second half took only a couple of hours?
Incentivizing Reflection
Before sharing the answer, I want to return to my previous post in which I asked “how my assessment shapes my students’ writing experiences throughout the process of composition, incentivizing my student writers towards effort and reflection”?
In response, one action I took was to give my students a “free-write” assignment, in which they were free to choose any type of writing but their grade would be contingent upon their regular planning and reflection during the six weeks they had to write their piece.
Here are the unedited reflections of the student quoted at the beginning of this post, along with a couple of explanatory notes:
Feb 1: I am having a hard time creating a valuable story. I know I want to make it about how women are treated but I don’t know how to tell it in a powerful way. I’m struggling to create a good character that is preservative [sic: not sure what autocorrect was thinking here] and tells the story in a powerful way.
Feb 14: I started typing individual stories. Different events that could happen to a woman and that do happen to a woman. I need to improve on the flow of the story and making it one item and not just a bunch of little short stories mixed together.
Following this reflection, the student and I discussed possible ways in which to organize her piece. Between us, we conceived a piece in which each short story would have the same structure and follow a woman through various stages of her life.
Mar 1: I created a flow by starting the paragraphs and ending them with the same ideas relating to age and how the men affected the story. This helped a lot with the structure and flow of my story. This gave my character more power in the story, giving her a real identity.
Following this reflection, the student and I discussed ways in which to differentiate the individual stories so as to show the differences in the character’s maturity.
Mar 20: I added more complex sentences as the female in my story ages. This will help the reader feel a sense of growth in the story. Doing this helped develop my character in a more intense way than just using the same writing style throughout the story.
Over six weeks, the student completed a very powerful piece that seemed personally meaningful. In fact, so meaningful that in a second “free-writing” assignment, she wrote the sequel, in which the original character tells the story of her daughter living a more empowered life. And because of the work she had done in February and March, this new piece was so much easier to do: as she put it in the quote at the start of this post, “it only took her a couple of hours.”
Lessons Learned
In thinking about this student’s experience, I have two thoughts on reflection.
First, per my earlier question, this experience showed me the value of encouraging student reflection. Because I incentivized this student to reflect at specific checkpoints along the way, she was able to acknowledge problems, ask questions, seek strategies, and celebrate successes. I was explicit with students that I would reward any type of reflection, even admissions of failure, as long as the student could articulate some sort of insight about this particular piece or their personal writing process.
Second, this experience refined my own sense of reflection, coming to see it a synonymous with John Dewey’s metaphorical description of thinking as “a forked-road situation, a situation which is ambiguous, which presents a dilemma, which proposes alternatives.” These regular moments of reflection forced the student to acknowledge she had problems to solve, gave us the opportunity to discuss possible solutions, and sent her down various experimental roads.
Pragmatically, this particular experience suggests that I structure future writing assignments in a similar manner: prompt student reflection so that they can identify various forks in the road of a writing process and make thoughtful decisions about the writing path they choose. Though they may not all enjoy this particular student’s success, I suspect that all students will learn through such a journey of writing and reflection.
