The Student Experience in Writing: A Moral Imperative

Yep. Still reading Maja Wilson's Reimagining Writing Assessment: From Scales to Stories.

Dewey (1938) pointed out to us several things that must be considered when we teach writing:

1.  The student's experience will determine if the student is writing because the task is interesting and meaningful or if the writing is done to comply and perform. In other words, how we go about teaching writing, assigning writing, and giving feedback to writing will predict how the student responds to writing in the future. This is well documented in Reading. If we force reading on students because we think they should read a particular text or level of text, we can pretty much ensure that they won't choose to read later for themselves. Same for writing. How many people do you know in today's world that tell you they love to write and choose to do so for fun? Consider the finger pointed. We are creating experiences with writing that don't reach the goals we say we want to reach. And these experiences live on in future writing experiences in ways that none of us can bear to read.
2.  Dewey points out that people learn from everything. Sometimes, though, they go the wrong direction. We must make sure that the experiences with writing that we promote in classrooms are not miseducative. To do that, we must find ways of gathering feedback FROM students that help us assess if our work helps students grow in the right direction. Only then, can we name those writing moves for the students and teach them how to use their intentions, audience, and relationship with the medium throughout their writing process and growth.

Wilson provides a heuristic for teachers to begin thinking about student writing processes. Applying Hattie's (2012) levels of feedback, collectively, this set of questions serve to help the teacher gather feedback about how the writer's PROCESS impacted the TASK, or product. This triangulation of motivation, process, and product requires significant interpretation by the teacher.

How are the writer’s intentions engaged throughout the writing process?

• What motivated the act of writing?
• What was the interplay between internal and external (and intrinsic and extrinsic) motivations?
• What influenced the writer’s intentions as she wrote?
• How were big and small decisions influenced by the writer’s intentions?

How does the writer use her sense of audience (and self and others, real and imagined) to make decisions throughout the writing process?

• What is the author’s relationship with readers - and her understanding of them?
• How does the writer’s relationship with her audience (self and others, real and imagined) affect her writing process, in positive and negative ways?
• How does the writer negotiate her relationship with audience (self and others, real and imagined) to solve problems, push forward, or revise?

What’s the writer’s relationship with the medium - its nature, characteristics, limitations, and possibilities?

• In what ways does the writer notice and respond to the nature of the medium?
• How does the writer struggle with the limitation of the medium - and what results from that struggle?
• How does the writer let the medium’s limitations and possibilities shape her intentions and decisions as she writes? (Wilson, 2018, p. 60)

This level of feedback seems foreign to me. I'm pretty sure I have had limited to no interactions with student papers that gets this deep. But how powerful!

Don't we need to see how the writer's intentions are coherently expresses throughout the text and the process of completing the composition? After all, it will be a flawed process the writer uses that takes the writing into incoherence.

Don't we need to see how the writer was purposefully making decisions about the audience? After all, it will be through a flawed process that the writer forgets to whom he writes and what that reader will need?

Don't we need to see how the writer manipulates the medium to fit his intentions and audience? After all, won't it be a flawed process and task level understanding that indicates a the inability to compose within the boundaries of the medium?

A return to Dewey reminds us why this approach needs more attention: the moral imperative of inclusive democracy. The way we evaluate student writing must embody the values of growth as opposed to rank division of our society. Wilson reminds us that the core of writing well lives in our decision-making capacity. Our assessment and feedback must inspire, even require, writers who are "active and informed decision makers" (Wilson, 2018, p. 52).

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and Education. West Lafayette, IN: Kappa Delta Pi

Hattie, J. A. C. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning. New York, NY: Routledge.

Wilson, M. (2018). Reimagining writing assessment: From scales to stories. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.