I am struggling with the term "quality work" for my students. I am faced with a few problems in my definition of quality and my acceptance of student work that has mistakes or is not perfect. This question has come to me most recently when working with my students on blogging. As a blogger myself, I know that my post are not all perfect, although I try to put my best writing and work out, I know that it is not perfect and may at times have mistakes. That being said, I also write, edit, revise, reread all at once, while I teach students the stages of the writing process as a paper and pencil process in separate steps: brainstorm, draft, revise, edit and finally digitally publish. Which then leads me to this question: do I need to improve my process, or do I need to allow them a bit more freedom in their own? I had a student say to me last week that he did not need to brainstorm, draft, revise or edit because he has his post "memorized" to which I said he needed to follow the writing process as that was the expectation. Another problem I face is when I ask my students to do this process, they are still making errors with clarity of message, fully developing ideas, and then some mechanics of spelling, capitalization, punctuation. So here I am with students using the writing process and still hitting publish on the blog post with errors or writing in need of more work. I continue to teach the parts of the writing process, model, give samples to do the work of revising and editing, share exemplars, and on and on. But what about the writing they complete now? Do I publish with mistakes and approach it as writing is a process and this is all a part of this student's journey and as they write more this will improve? Do I go over each child's blog and help them make every correction and pick the work apart and with it the joy of blogging? I want to have an end goal in mind, I want to have a definition of quality blogging, but I don't want to create a culture where quality means perfect. I also do not want to make it acceptable to post work that is not quality due to rushing through, not making corrections, not putting effort into revising, etc. These students are "young" writers and many are entering a stage in their education until recently have not done a lot of writing, but they also know the steps to revise and edit and often are completing them with high quality.
How do I find this balance? Having students produce quality writing, but allowing students to have some breathing room and not expecting error-free perfection?
If you would like to see more of their writing or leave them a comment please read the
class blog.
