Educational Leadership - November 2009

intent and how their words could better express that intent, I had to imagine myself in the middle of their process. It’s not enough to tell students to make their writing more clear, focused, or engaging—students can’t often do that because they don’t know how, and they don’t really understand how they went astray.

I was sometimes wrong when I imagined what they were trying to do when they wrote, but my attempt focused students’ attention on their intent and process rather than on vague categories such as “organization.” I was looking, then, for an approach to assessment that

Trait rubric’s sentence fluency category:

Phrasing does not sound natural. The patterns may create a sing-song rhythm, or a chop-chop cadence that lulls the reader to sleep. This comment may sound like it has gotten inside the reader’s mind, but only in the same sense that a computerized phone menu can anticipate a caller’s problems or needs. The company using such a menu can add as many options as it wants, but no caller experiences this as a real interaction.

Because I considered response the most pedagogically significant form of assessment, I put aside rubrics and other predetermined categories

It’s not enough to tell students
to make their writing more clear,
focused, or engaging.

got inside both my mind as I read and my students’ minds as they wrote.

Whereas my exposure to assessment in college had been limited to test formats I never wanted to use in a writing class, my on-the-job assessment training had mostly involved rubrics: the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) four-point and six-point rubrics, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory’s 6+ 1 Trait rubric, and my own. I was frustrated with rubrics for many reasons. The most frustrating thing was that no matter how often I revised them or even invited my students to help create them, rubrics rarely reflected my response when I actually read individual papers. The problem was twofold: The rubric couldn’t get inside my mind when I read, and it couldn’t get inside my students’ minds as they wrote.

Interestingly, many rubrics now include “reader response” language. Consider this comment from the 6+ 1

designed to generate reader agreement and grades. Instead, I tried to do what I imagined my grandmother would have done: help students learn to use language to mediate the gulf between the writer’s and the reader’s mind.

Getting Inside Sarah’s Head Sarah was a 12th grader in my college-prep research writing class last year. The first assignment was for students to research any aspect of their futures. Some students researched their top three college choices to figure out which school would best suit their interests and personalities. One investigated what it would be like to be a female engineer in a career dominated by males. One tried to figure out why he was so indecisive and how he could learn to deal with the unavoidable and important decisions he would face. Sarah’s passion was music. She knew she didn’t want to perform or teach, so she researched the field of music therapy to see whether it

might be right for her.

One of my goals had been to teach students to find, synthesize, and skillfully use sources in their papers, and I’d asked students to use a combination of online and print sources in addition to at least one interview. When I read Sarah’s paper, it was immediately obvious that she had plagiarized at least one source—big chunks of her writing didn’t sound like her.

Dealing with students who plagiarize sources is an occupational hazard of writing teachers. Teachers often speak of “busting” students, threatening to run every paper through Turnitin.com and punish any instances of plagiarism with a zero. A common reaction to Sarah’s paper would have been to give it a failing grade or at least return it to her and tell her to fix the problem before I read further.

Instead, I decided to find out what would happen if I narrated my response to Sarah’s first draft and tried to get inside her mind. My response included this passage:

Sarah,

I like your perspective here; you’ve got to figure out a way to turn your passion into a job. It looks like you found some great sources, including information from schools offering degrees in this [music therapy], and the online interview, which seems more helpful to me than all the other jargony information about what the job entails.

Actually, the jargony nature of some of the information is a bit of a problem, because the jargon obscures the meaning. (What in the world does it mean to be “trained in the specific use of music therapy techniques as an adjunctive/ augmentative therapy”?) Since you’ve stuck too close to the wording of these sources in your paper, you not only have a problem with plagiarism here, but the information goes over my head because I can’t figure out what it means. In fact, I suspect that the information went over your head, which is why you didn’t put it into your own words.