How do you judge what feedback you can and cannot use in the service of your writing? Harder still, how do you help students develop the agency to do that?
In my writing classes, all students give written and spoken feedback to each other in a process called “inquiry.” Every student gives a copy of whatever they are working on to every other student in the room. We dedicate a week to this process. Meredith sums it up:
When this happens, everyone gives me new ideas and says what is and isn’t working. This is by far the most helpful thing for my writing that we do in this class.
However, just because students get feedback doesn’t necessarily mean they know what to do with it. I remind students no person in our class has all the answers, especially about their own writing. The capacity to weigh criticism is a critical growth point for an evolving writer and thinker.
To help them weigh and measure this good feedback, we use a simple three-column table in their writing notebook. As they sift through the annotations, they identify three things: 1) annotations I can’t use or don’t need 2) annotations I need and know how to use, and 3) annotations I need but don’t know how to use.
Students have about 20 annotated copies of a single piece of their own writing to trek through at the end of Inquiry Week, and it can be overwhelming without an instrument like this table to process what can be used and what can be registered, but dismissed.
The third column is the one I like to scan for mini-lessons possibilities. I can often look for patterns to create a small group that needs the same mini-lesson, about how to develop a character or how to write a solid conclusion or how to avoid tonal whiplash.
Do you use a process like Inquiry Week in your classroom? How do you help students process all the good information they get from it? Let me know in the comments below!