Sunday, March 16, 2008

Chapter 7

After doing this reading I cannot help but relate all of my education classes, and even kind of get them confused with each other. The "traditional model" of writing sure does look a lot like the "official theory of learning" I just learned about in Dr. Jones EDC 350(?) class, and the use of collaboration in the "new model" really resembles the use of collaboration that Dr. Weaver has been talking about in ENG 520. I'm started to sense some sort of re-occuring theme going on here...or perhaps a conspiracy.

Personally I was raised in the "Executive Approach/traditional model/official theory of learning," in which we used 3 point 5 paragraph essays and papers written on one boring teacher chosen topic with almost no collaboration. I wonder if my writing would be less boring had I been taught the ways Christenbury discusses (214) in which students have say in their topics, prewrite, collaborate, and revise.

In "the numbers game" section Christenbury suggests that collaboration can help the teacher out by saving him/her time, and while I think that it's important to have multiple sets of eyes on a paper, and that this suggestion may be a helpful side-note in collaboration, I have to say that teachers need to be sure that they're not abusing this, or relying on it.

The section on "conferencing with students" also stuck out to me as an important one. In my practicum experiences I have observed and been a part of multiple short teacher-student writing conferences, and I think that they are not only possible, but vital. It is not cheating or giving answers out when a teacher asks a student writer questions, instead it is simply another form of collaboration. The goal of evaluating writing isn't to see how well students write and then grade them on it, the goal is to help the students become better writers.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Joseph it seems that you have written my blog for me. Thank you.

Joshua said...

I've seen the student/teacher conferences succeed as well. While the teacher is conferencing with a student, the other students work on something else that could anything from the paper they're writing to something as simple as independent reading.

I do agree that the group revision/writing could be easily abused. It shouldn't be a reason to not read students' papers on the teacher's part.