Totally 10 Revision Choice Assignment

Photo by Dan Counsell on Unsplash

No draft is ever perfect. It was Kelly Gallagher who said writing is never done, it is just due. Right before midwinter recess my students turned in an essay based on their reading of a dystopian novel and I read through all the essay over the break (yes, I know teachers shouldn’t be working over break). Reading through the essays I was able to give quality feedback in the form of “I like, I think, and I wonder.” Additionally, I used feedback as data to develop mini lessons and scaffolds for the places where students could use more support and direction.

Revision is an opportunity to revisit our writing and make it stronger, clearer, more concise. The writer Ernest Hemingway “rewrote the first part of his novel A Farewell to Arms at least 50 times and rewrote the ending of the novel 39 times;” “Hemingway revised so much not because he was a bad writer but because he was a good writer.” I want my students to understand that writing is an on going process and revision is a tool that can help us to to re-vision—or re-see—our work from a new perspective and revise so it can work more effectively. Revision goes beyond just editing for spelling and grammatical errors, it zooms in on the organization of your ideas, your argument and supporting evidence, and the clarity of your ideas and analysis.

I have created this Totally 10 Revision activity to help students try out two or more revision strategies to make their writing stronger. In conjunction with the revision choice board, creating How-To sheets, flipped videos, and graphic organizers helps provide instructional scaffolds that help to break down the essay assignment in smaller bites and helps aid in the mastery of the task.

You can get a copy of this revision choice board here: Essay Revision Totally Ten

Reflections of Project Based Learning

This past fall I embarked on a project based learning opportunity with my media literacy elective class for 7th and 8th graders. It has always been a project based course, but this semester I gave my students an authentic challenge and ten weeks to fulfill the requirements.

Authentic Challenge – How can we develop an award winning movie short to highlight a problem in our world and create a film festival to showcase these movie shorts?

As my students were working on their own videos, I created a video to document the process using Adobe Spark.

Whereas, I wanted my students to make a movie that was 5 minutes in length, that was very difficult for many of the students. Most of the movies were around 3 minutes in length and all follow a documentary style format. Despite examining PSAs and short feature films, all felt the documentary format was the best to communicate their message and meet the objectives of the project.

Last week, my students presented their films to the entire 8th grade during a film festival  assembly.  This was the scariest and most stressful part of the process – most students confided – but it allowed for an authentic audience.

I compiled all the students’ films on YouTube and created a playlist with all their films.

At the end of the process, I asked students to complete a reflection that asked questions about the process and their final product. Students were honestly candid on the reflections. Many told me that it was too much work for an elective class and they learned how challenging it is to produce and edit a short film.

Among my own reflections, I observed many students losing steam producing a video over ten weeks of creation and editing. As many times as we viewed the films and offered suggestions for edits, students did not always following through with the edits. The students stamina for the project wavered depending on the day. Next semester I am thinking of breaking up the semester into two projects, one non-fiction and one, a fictional film.

I shared the student videos with Rushton Hurley, author and founder of Next Vista for Learning, an educational nonprofit dedicated to saving the world from ignorance, one creative video at a time. I met Ruston at an Google Summit in Connecticut back in October of 2019 and then we ran into each other again at this past month at FETC. I spoke with him about how to  get students to see revision as an opportunity rather than a tedious task. How do we move students from one and done to seeing revision as an on-going process to better work.

Rushton shared this video with me along with a blog post he wrote regarding the same dilemma. The video portrays “the lesson that we get better as we get and effectively act on constructive critique.”

The great thing about teaching a semester long class is that I have the opportunity to reflect, revise, and re-do. Next week I get to launch the project with a new group of students and this time I will approach revision and editing in a new way to support my student’s stamina and attention to detail.

Silly Rabbit, Dice are for Kids (To Promote Learning & Understanding)

Last week during the #games4ed Twitter chat participants were discussing the use of dice in the classroom for learning activities. The creative ideas were flowing throughout the chat. When the dry erase dice were brought up during the chat, I thought of turning them into hieroglyphic dice for a history class to create stories of ancient Egypt and other ancient civilizations. But, there are so many more ways to utilize dice in the classroom as shared throughout the conversation.

In the ELA classroom I use dice in many different ways from Roll the Dice or Think Dot activities to having students roll dice and complete a writing prompt based on the number rolled. One might have students roll dice to determine the number of words to be written in a summary. Dice are also effective for Cubing, an instructional strategy that asks students to consider a concept from a variety of different perspectives. On the cube or dice are different activities on each side. A student rolls the cube and does the activity that comes up.  You can differentiate dice/cubes according to readiness, learning profile, or interest.

My students are currently writing investigative journalism feature articles and it dawned on me to create a Roll the Dice Revision Activity.  Working independently or in small groups, each student is given a revision activity sheet and a die. Each student rolls the die and completes the revision activity that corresponds to the dots thrown on the die (that is, if a student rolls a “three,” she then completes the revision activity with three dots on it.) 

In addition to building my own dice activities, there are story cubes and metaphor dice that one can purchase online. Rory’s Story Cubes is a pocket-sized creative story generator with pictures on the dice for users to create their own stories based on the images rolled. Metaphor Dice, conceived by award-winning poet and educator Taylor Mali, make the formation of metaphors as easy as rolling a handful of dice. These color coded dice require a user to combine one concept (RED), one object (BLUE), and adjective (WHITE), to build a metaphor.

The possibilities of using dice and building dice games across content area classrooms and grade levels in infinite. Share your ideas in the comments.

20 Revision Strategies: Make Writing Better

“For me, writing is never linear, though I do believe quite ardently in revision. I think of revision as a kind of archeology, a deep exploration of the text to discover what’s still hidden and bring it to the surface.”

~Kim Edwards

Revision is about going back to your writing to make it better. I was recently going through some old papers from my graduate school days and came across my notes from The Teachers College Reading and Writing Project specifically on revision. Below is a bulleted list of revision strategies compiled to help students dress up their writing to make it stronger and more clear.

• Add more – look at your writing piece and name two things you can do to make it better.
• Reread to see if it makes sense – is it clear? How can you make it sound better?
• What’s the most important thing you want to tell your read about your topic?
• Write the external and internal story (what you think, wonder, and feel).
• Observe and reflect.
• Use your senses.
• Talk to a friend or writing partner about your piece and then write. Think aloud.
• Storytell it and then write.
• Focus in on something small connected to your topic.
• Zoom in on a moment.
• Underline an important line and say more about it.
• Sketch then write.
• Try starting your piece by writing the lead differently.
• Play with the form or genre – turn into a letter, a poem, a song.
• Find a book you really like and see if you can write like that. Model an author you admire.
• Ask, “What have I left out?”
• Take a sentence and turn it into a page (lift a line or word).
• Try starting the piece in a different place, chronologically.
• Write endings several different ways. Ask, “What do I want my ending to do?”
• Reread asking, “Is this really what I have to say? What’s the most important thing I want my readers to know?”

 

Revision as a Scaffold Tool for Learning & Understanding

So, you taught a lesson, students completed many activities to apply this new knowledge – discussions, interactive notebooks, graphic organizers, collaborative assignments – and now they are ready for a quiz or assessment to show their level of understanding.

Then, more than a dozen fail the quiz.

What happened? Where was the disconnect? These students clearly need additional information, support, and possibly reteaching before moving on.

In education, scaffolding refers to a variety of instructional techniques used to move students progressively toward stronger understanding and, ultimately, greater independence in the learning process. (edglossary.org)

Scaffolding does just happen during a lesson. It also need to happen after an assessment, especially for those who have yet to grasp the concept or standard being assessed. It is important to NOT just move on to the next unit of study when it is clear that some students need more practice and attention.

Revision is key for my students who fail a quiz or short answer assessment. But I do not just allow students to go home, revise their work and then resubmit it for a better grade. Rather, I require these students stay after school with me working on the revision by completing a graphic organizer and questionnaire to help revise their work.

For example, students were asked the following two short answer questions in regards to our reading of Warriors Don’t Cry by Melba Patillo Beals and I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai:

I. How does Malala/Melba appeal to ethos and pathos in the text? Use two or more examples from the text to support your claim. CCLS RL.8.1

II. Where in the text do you see evidence that Melba/Malala is consciously crafting her memoir to present a particular point of view? Use two or more examples from the text to support your claim. CCLS RL.8.4

The revision documents were the following:

Allowing for this revision work along with conferences with the teacher helps students to gain a better understanding of the topic. With the graphic organizer I chunk the concepts of craft, ethos, and pathos. The graphic organizer includes definitions and examples so that students add text connections and details. Next, students show me their graphic organizers before moving to rewriting. This allows for  an opportunity for both the teacher and the student to ask/answer questions to check for understanding.

Scaffolding doesn’t just have to happen during a lesson. Our goal as teachers is to enhance learning and aid in the mastery of tasks.

Additional scaffolding techniques include:

Visuals like Anchor Charts, Interactive Foldables, and Graphic Organizers allow students to visualize and organize their thinking.

Models and Mentors can help students see what “Exceeds Standards” or “A” work looks like. I am always collecting student exemplars to read and discuss with my students what the writer did well and why it exceeds/meets the standards.

Words that Introduce Quotes Sentence Stems

Sentence Stems or Paragraph Frames can help students who need a task broken down into small parts. I always offer outlines for writing and graphic organizers to help my students break down the larger or longer projects and writing assignments.

Checklists and simplify task directions help students self-monitor their progress

Getting Students to Revise & Reflect on their Writing

What are we asking students to do when we ask them to revise and reflect on their writing?

I am of the philosophy that in order to become a better writer, one needs to write daily and look to examples of great writers as models and mentors. When it comes to writing essays in my English class, I have my students writing one essay each quarter. It is not enough if you ask me, but in this current climate of high stakes tests I continue to find a balance between teaching reading and writing.

I have my students write their essays in class and after I read through them, I allow students to revise and improve their essay for a better grade. After reading through the recent compare and contrast essays students wrote in response to  Melba Patillo Beal’s memoir, Warriors Don’t Cry, and Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” I planned a revision workshop to help students reflect on their writing and pinpoint areas where I found many students needed additional support. Reading through ninety five essays I found three places to “teach back” and help improve student writing: Writing a solid thesis or claim; Choosing the strongest evidence to support one’s claim; and Using better transition words.

I created a Revision Passport to guide students throughout the revision workshop and allow students to move around the classroom visiting different stations to help revise and reflect on their writing with the objective to nudge students to revise their writing and produce a stronger essay. After completing the work at a station I checked their work and gave them a stamp on the passport. Students had to complete four different stations.

Station 1 – The Exemplars

I pulled out two student essays that I felt were exemplars for the entire grade. I retyped the essays and removed the student’s names from the essay for the rest of the class to read through. Students had to write down two things the writer did well in the essay and then record a “writing move” they wanted to steal or borrow from the exemplar.

Station 2 – The Thesis/Claim

Although I have created interactive foldables and taught lessons on writing a clear and solid thesis, this is still a struggle for many writers. The thesis or claim is the heart of the essay. English teacher Ray Salazar has a great blog post on writing a thesis in three steps which  showed my students. I made a graphic organizer for students plug their thesis into the 3 steps Ray describes and then figure out what is missing or what needs to be added to help write a revised thesis that is specific, debatable, and significant to the essay prompt.

Station 3 – Textual Evidence

Not all evidence weighs the same. Students need help finding the strongest evidence to support their claim. At this station I had students look at the evidence they provided in their essay and rank the evidence from strongest to weakest on a graphic organizer. In addition, students had to explain why the evidence is weak or strong. What makes the strongest evidence and why?

Station 4 – Writing Reflection

Looking back at their essay and the work they did during the revision workshop students completed two reflection tasks. Students had to rewrite, in their own words, the comments I made throughout their essays and what I wanted them to improve on. Then, students were to give an example how they were going to make their writing better based on teacher’s comments and the work they did in the revision workshop.

Below is a copy of the revision passport I created and used with my students.

Revision Passport WDC

Revision Olympics for the [Dreaded] Essay

Maybe you’ve assigned an in-class essay assessment where students are required to write a four or five paragraph essay exhibiting their understanding and analysis of a text.  Writing under pressure and within a short time span (two 40 minute class periods), the results are mediocre.

I feel that I do not have enough time in the class period or in the school year to do everything that I want to and have to cover in my classroom.

Right now, I am doing all that I can to support my students as writers and give them the tools necessary to succeed in school on written assessments. In order to help my students understand the elements of an effective essay and to boost their writing for future writing assessment, I created a Revision Olympics Activity for students to reflect on their writing, look at models of proficient essays, and improve their writing for clarity, focus, and evidence effectively supporting the claim.

Below, I will walk through the different challenges of the olympic activity and at the bottom of this post I included a link to all of the challenges and handouts created for my students.

Challenge #1 – Student Exemplars & Self Reflection

Students read through two student exemplar essays and addressed the following:

What did the student writer do well in the essay?

What would you want to model/borrow/steal from his or her essay?

What is one thing you are going to do differently as a result of reading this student’s essay?

Challenge #2 – Building Better Intro Paragraphs

Students reread their own introductory paragraphs and addressed whether it included an engaging broad statement to capture the audience’s attention, linking information with text titles and authors, and a clear thesis statement that states the claim (and so what) in one clear cut sentence.

Challenge #3 Finding & Supporting Your Claims: Textual Evidence

Working in small groups, students worked as an investigative team to determine whether the evidence provided in their own essays supported their claim.  First, students were to find all the evidence provided in the essay and compile it into a graphic organizer. Second, students had to explain how each piece of evidence supported the claim. If other members of the team disagree with the explanations, the student was to find evidence that would convince them. Lastly, students were to record what the author was trying to prove with the example or evidence and why it mattered.

Once students completed the three challenges they were to revise their original essay.  The revised writing that I got in return was detailed, clear, concise, and effectively met the requirements of the writing prompt.

Here is a link to the handouts and challenge directions to use with your students.