This week we finished up our narrative writing project and took the second interim test. I'm so proud of so many of my student about their stories!! There is one girl in particular who usually does the bare minimum, and yet she ended up writing NINE pages of play script. The requirement was only two. I made sure to write her a big long note on her work when she turned it in in Google Classroom. I'm not sure what it was about this that got her motivated to work so hard, but I have a guess. On Monday, I pulled her draft (with permission) to use for modelling how I would peer review it for the class. She acted like she didn't care at all, even though her girlfriend was hyping her up about it. And then, when I was grading her final draft, I noticed that she had made edits to all the things that we had talked about in the mock peer review. So she must have actually been paying really close attention! That makes me want to use authentic examples like that even more than I already do. I generally try to pick "strong" work because I worried about embarassing students who still need more practice, but maybe it would actually be a great motivator if I can frame it the right way in class.
Clearly this type of writing worked for her, but now that we're done, I'm wondering if this would have been a good opportunity to let kids have more freedom to differentiate creatively. I initially thought writing a script would be great for everyone, because we could focus on dialogue and action without getting stuck on descriptive prose, which many of them seem to struggle with. I do know we have a lot of artistically inclined kids, though, so maybe giving them the choice between script, prose, comic, illustration, or even video would have went well.
My main concern with having a super wide open creative project is how to grade it fairly. There is definitely some security in grading by a rubric. If a kid is annoyed about their grade, I can point to the exact reason why they lost points. It also makes it easy to communicate what they need to do in the first place. But the quality of all these different kinds of art is really impossible to compare in a quantitative way. I would have to put a lot more thought and effort into writing a rationale for each grade depending on my subjective view of the student's effort and quality. That's intimidating to me, especially because I know how sensitive it feels to present art to someone else for judgement. But I'm starting to think that it's worth my effort. I already spent a lot of time going through and adding comments on all of their script-writing, so I can clearly make the time for something like that. Maybe having each student write a short artist's statement along with whatever they produce might be a good idea too, so that I can more clearly see what ideas related to our curriculum they are trying to accomplish, regardless of skill in a particular medium.
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