Balance Happens

Last November I attended a clinic during the NCAA Division I Women’s Field Hockey Final Four. It was sponsored by US Field Hockey and taught by the men’s and women’s National Team coaches, Nick Conway and Lee Bodimeade. We talked strategy all weekend and one of the first things that Nick said was, “At the start of the game, look at the defense of the opponent and decide how you are going to attack.” Seems simple. To me, it was a complete shift in thinking; when I started games, the first thing I looked at was the opponent’s offense and decided how I was going to defend them. A simple shift from defending to attacking and you view the world in an entirely new way.

This past weekend the same happened for me in the way I see the teaching of writing. For the past few weeks I have been involved in the English Companion Ning’s discussion of Maja Wilson’s book Rethinking Rubrics. The exchanges have been akin to an invigorating graduate school debate without the extra homework and inconvenient class times. In Chapter Three, Wilson writes:

“When our purpose in reading student work is to defend a grade, we do not apply any of our natural responses to text. Encouraged by the performance levels on the rubric to rank students against an external standard, our readings of student work are based firmly in a deficit model. We look for mistakes, inconsistencies, and unclear thinking to justify which square in the matrix we will circle” (30).

While this seems obvious, it was as big of a shift of defending to attacking in how I coach. When I look at student essays, I am looking for mistakes to correct and not potential to develop. Instead of approaching their work as a reader, I approach it as a corrector.

She goes on to say:

“The consequences of this skepticism are great. In our search for mistakes, we often miss potential. We should never assume that student papers will be perfect; our job is to help students realize what they cannot yet do. This involves a subtle but important shift in our view of the texts they create. It means that we articulate for them what they have succeeded in doing, explore the meaning in what they have written, and help them connect what is not yet there to what could be there” (30).

I now need to think how I can best achieve this shift, how I can balance my need to produce effective writers who can create complex sentences with proper agreement and punctuation with this newly introduced understanding of how I can be developing these writers as well. This becomes even more vital and intricate as so many new types of writing come into play. As I have been reading this book, much attention seemed to be paid to personal essays, but we have students creating wikis, blogs and participating in nings. How do I help them see the potential of their writing in these contexts as well? Sometimes that seems easier with the increased ability to provide instant feedback, sometimes harder since I can’t get my pen on their screens to point out the errors, but maybe this is where the balance happens.