Writing a draft

Many students request the use of laptops even when that has not been part of the teaching and learning plan. I don't blame them. For their generation the speed and fluency in one mode of print text - typing - often exceeds their speed and fluency in the other mode - handwriting.

            When I wrote essays by hand (in school and as an undergraduate), I wrote notes, then a draft, and after that I used colours and numbers to help me label which material from the draft would end up in the final version. This was the drafting and editing process I found useful when my technology was paper and pen. As a post-grad student, with laptop in hand, I tended to follow a similar method, with a combination of typed and written notes before I started the draft. In almost all of my post-grad essays, I found myself handwriting an introduction before I started typing. And still today, when I read academic articles, I take notes by hand. The neurons I use for handwriting must stimulate my learning in some way. For many people my age, this may be true also.

          When I choose not to handwrite, as I am doing now with this blog post, I use word processing similarly to the way I approached my essays. I love the fact that whilst I am word processing I can constantly review my writing; I use all the tools the word processor has to change and rearrange as I compose. This is the joy of drafting and editing with electronic text.

           However, as I observed in a previous post, students do not use the many features of technology available to them. One of the consequences of students' constant typing is the way it has affected their understanding of the concept of drafting. Some younger students seem to think that drafting is just about fixing spelling and punctuation.  As word processing helps students achieve this, they feel that if they are typing then those issues are covered. Consequently the first draft, because it is typed, is frequently the only draft. Certainly some errors are corrected such as changes to verb tense and paragraphing, but on the whole, students submit their first thoughts because it looks 'finished'. It would seem some teachers are so grateful to receive legible text that they also accept the typed version without demurring. 

          It is my job to help students learn to draft and edit, and use word processing more effectively. This means actively teaching students the tools for drafting and editing and possibly to balance that with the technology of paper and pen.

          This was made apparent to me recently when students were asked to compose a short story as part of their study of narrative. Despite their incredible typing speeds and having used Word since they could read, not one of the students knew about the Review function, where they, or others, could add in comments on the text. After some planning of character, setting and plot by hand in their books, students began to type a narrative on the laptops. After the first lesson of typing, I showed students how to use the Review function. Following this, students physically gave their laptop to their partner whose job was to offer comments or pose questions about the story as it currently stood. (We had been working all year on peer editing so I knew they would be able to offer appropriate comments.) When their story was returned to them, the students had to save the version with comments and consider how they would take on board the feedback. Each lesson we worked on the story (12.5% time) the same process would take place. Thus students were learning how to use the technology to accomplish editing and rewriting.

 Their stories were better for it. 

New Kinds of Smart: Part 1

I am currently reading New Kinds of Smart by Bill Lucas and Guy Claxton, the next text for our Professional Reading Group. Although only a quarter of the way into this, I am already excited by the both the ideas themselves and the way Lucas and Claxton have organised their material, including offering practical examples for teachers. I can see a few posts dedicated to this book.

The first chapter asserts that Intelligence is Composite and reviews theory I am familiar with such as Art Costa’s Habits of Mind. This and other relevant theories have had an impact, not only on my teaching, but on my own skills, knowledge and values. Earlier this year, I decided that I could use some development in two specific Habits of Mind: ‘Gathering Data through all the senses’ (10) and ‘Creating, Imagining, Innovating’ (11).

Essentially, the first of these, ‘Gathering Data through all the senses’, is about being open to the information from a wide variety of sources, and in a wide variety of forms. As I read over a number of my blog posts this last week I realised that blogging has encouraged me to examine information in a variety of forms. I have made links to scholarly books and articles, news articles, video interviews, websites and more. This development needs to be ongoing as I - like many English teachers I’m sure - tend to rely on reading as my way of gleaning information. I would also like to incorporate more visual texts where possible as a way of encapsulating ideas. Perhaps even video!

The second Habit of Mind I’ve chosen to review, ‘Creating, Imagining, Innovating’, is one I am already a practitioner of: using imagination to generate novel ideas and possibilities. In order to focus on these two Habits of Mind I would dearly love to attend one of the Creativity Workshops next year held in New York or Barcelona. The presenters of the Creativity Workshop have developed a unique series of exercises dedicated to inspiring and keeping alive the life of the imagination. They concentrate on creative process rather than product and on the idea of creativity as a way of viewing and appreciating life. I visualize returning with new thinking to help Staff and Students not just access their creativity, but to see how creativity is part of the fabric of learning.

The second chapter of New Kinds of Smart states that Intelligence is Expandable. As a supporter of Carol Dweck’s theory (see earlier post on Mindset) this accords well with my views over the last few years. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of New Kinds of Smart and giving Lucas and Claxton’s work its due consideration. 

Critical Literacy

I am currently reading Robert Manne’s essay for the Quarterly Magazine, ‘Bad News’, which is about The Australian.  It is a clear criticism of the political agenda of this newspaper under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch and the editorship of Chris Mitchell. Whether or not I agree with Robert Manne’s arguments, I cannot help but be inspired by the quality of his scholarship. It is critical literacy at its best.

In 2003 I attended the International Federation for the Teaching of English (IFTE) Conference in Melbourne and listened to one of the more powerful keynote speakers, Allan Luke. He argued, as many others have, that it is not just essential that students can read, but that they can read for bias, rhetoric, or any other tools which composers use to control the frame. “Critical literacy is the use of texts to analyse and transform relations of cultural, social and political power.” (Luke and Dooley 2009) The purpose of critical literacy is to give students high order analytical skills so that they are aware when texts (in any medium) are positioning them in a particular way.

In terms of critical literacy, Manne is able use the essay form to evaluate the influence of The Australian newspaper on our country’s political sphere, thus on us, the voters and readers. But this essay does more; it shows us how to look for bias in texts and when it is discovered, how to tell the story of the represented perspective.  Manne’s language is both precise and concise, and never does he use twenty words when five will do. It is the kind of text I would recommend to an Extension 2 student who is considering the Critical Response form for her/his Major Work for its clarity of language and argument. Ultimately, this essay is making me think about what role the media play or should play in shaping the agenda of Australian politics.

And that’s the point. Texts which are well-written and evaluative should make us think. If we can teach students both the critical literacy needed to analyse texts, and the writing skills to represent what they have discovered, then we are doing our job.