We had an interesting conversation yesterday morning. Our usual Monday morning arrival routine is to write and draw about our "important news." I give them a sheet that is about half blank space for drawing and half lines for writing. During the first weeks of school almost every student would start their news by drawing, which is absolutely typical. As I circulated yesterday I noticed that twenty three out of twenty five students in attendance started out their news by writing while two started out by drawing. Seventeen of the students did no drawing at all and twelve of them turned their paper over and continued writing on the back of the sheet. At the beginning of the year almost every student would do at least some drawing and there were only two who ever found reason to continue on the back.
Now usually, I'm paying as much attention to what students are writing about as I am to the mechanics of how they are writing or the ratio of drawing to writing. But this stuck out to me. When we met on the carpet I made a quick little data table on the white board and asked them what they made of the difference of how they were working in September compared to now. I should note that my take on the data was that it showed their increasing maturity. I thought it showed that they were progressing along a developmental spectrum where young writers (I would call them 'composers' or 'creators' but that feels unwieldy) move from drawing their messages, to drawing and labelling, to drawing and writing about the picture, to drawing about what they've written, to pretty much just writing. And from a teacher/adult perspective, that theory holds water. Setting aside my feeling that everyone should be drawing as well as writing, it is certainly heartening. Their take on what was going on was very different, though.
Lilly: I think that there was really just so much to share after all of the time away that we had to start writing. I couldn't have put all of that into a picture right now. There wasn't enough room on the paper to draw it all.
Stacey: I just felt like my ideas were more about writing than drawing. I had a lot of important things to say and I wasn't sure we had enough time.
Logan: I was one of the people who started drawing and I only drew. I just wanted to focus on the picture of the Christmas tree. I had that picture in my mind and I just couldn't put it into words, but I put a lot of details into the picture! [Laughs]Their ideas reminded me of something that I come back to time and time again as a teacher. Students always see these assignments (as open-ended as this news sharing is, it is still an assignment) as a way to share their lives, to express themselves, to sort through their ideas and make sense of the world around them. Their consideration is about what they want to say and how to communicate it most effectively. That is what they are doing when I am checking in on their growth.
And believe me, their academic growth is what I live for. But it is easy to lose the reverberating message in the newly sophisticated use of punctuation in a piece of writing, or the keen emotional insight in the adept demonstration of inference making as a reading comprehension strategy, or the newfound perspective on the vastness of the world in the deft control of place value in a math problem, when I'm tracking academic growth.
Obviously you can do both, right? I consider them becoming strategic and meta-cognitive as an essential part of their growth. Putting to them the question of why their writing had changed was a good way of sharing the learning and bringing their process to light. But it isn't as easy as it would seem or maybe not as easy as it should be to keep these kinds of conversations at the core of our work. There is a compression of lived experience and interpersonal meaning in data-driven culture. Striking a balance between the person who notes how much and how well students are writing and the person who takes in what they are writing about and creates a space for that to resonate is a trick in our high-stakes assessment reality. Making schoolwork authentic and relevant is fundamental to fostering the curious, loving, brave and capable people that we want our kids to be. But there is a cultural short circuit when the kids are asked to create personally meaningful works and adult lens on the work is about the academic data points. The little bits of a kid's heart and soul that get poured into the effort are too often left unremarked.
However, given the opportunity, the kids will keep you honest. Our conversation steered back to how they had made strategic decisions about how to compose their news. Some kids wanted to have different options for sharing their news, like poster paper and access to their laptops. Fair enough. Some kids were not so into the assignment and said that what they really wanted to do was just talk about their news! Fair enough. But I was reminded of how absolutely important it is to create time not only to share what is on our minds, but also to talk about how we are doing that.
Alright, a longer musing than usual and maybe a forced dichotomy, but these things weigh on me! At any rate I am proud of your students' work and I am honored to be their teacher. These students are definitely ready for more ownership of their learning. More on that in a later post. For now happy 2015, one and all!
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