Content Area Writing: Chapter 10

(Page 253) “Some tests encourage teachers to race through content never slowing down to help students think deeply about the material, thus encouraging endless data bytes promptly forgotten once the test is over.”

Was anyone else given 20 vocabulary words every week in high school with the multiple choice test on Fridays to make sure you “learned” them? In the hundreds of words I was supposed to learn, I remember one: deluge. Or how many of us loved having the multiple choice and/or matching tests in classes so we could have a shot at getting the right answer so the teacher would at least think we knew something? The fact of the matter is we didn’t get to show any of our learning with those tests. (Hence the problem with Accelerated Reader tests…I would probably fail the tests on some of my favorite books, though I could write intelligently about them if given the opportunity.) Of course, having students write more on tests means they take longer to grade. And we have to grade them ourselves—there isn’t one right answer to where we could get an aide to grade them for us. But if they trade off is that we discover that student actually know something (or don’t know!), don’t you think it’s worth it? Of course, there is the whole issue that students have to take standardized multiple choice tests—EOC, HSAP, SAT, etc.—so they need have some practice with those as well. Maybe a combination approach is best? But if we think about it, in the “real world,” when do we ever take a multiple choice test? The only one I can think we ever take is for a driver’s permit. In the long run, is it better for student to bubble a correct answer or write intelligently on a particular topic?

Content Area Writing: Chapters 7 and 9

So many projects, so little time. Seriously, it’s obviously not a good idea for a teacher to attempt every one of these projects in a single course. Can you imagine the backlash from students if someone tried that??? I did think there were several great ideas for culmination assignments in these two chapters—ones that do a great job of getting students to write and show their knowledge in the process. Some are more time consuming and difficult (hence they came under the chapter entitled “More Ambitious Public Writing Projects”) but I think those could possibly be modified to a smaller scale.

I asked y’all to read over the different projects and either actually try out one with your students or choose one you think could work well with a class if you’re not a point to where such an assignment would work well right now. Last year in class we talked about the multi-genre paper. I know Christy has used that one with her students. Has anyone else tried it? How did it go? The problem I had when I did it with my students was that I was out on maternity leave, so they didn’t have a ton of guidance on exactly how to do it. They seemed to enjoy the project, but several of them put it all in a Power Point, which wasn’t exactly what needed to be done. It would have been helped to have some examples for the students to see. I’m thinking about getting that Melinda Putz book mentioned since it comes with a DVD showing examples, and maybe I could get some more ideas for the project as well. So…which of these projects do you think would lend itself well to instruction in your class? If you’ve tried using it, how did it go? If it’s something you’re planning on using, what’s your plan for that?