A Student Who Puzzles Me (or Where Is This Writing Coming From?)

David (not his real name, of course) is a student in my 10th grade class. What puzzles me about him is his writing, which varies from fluent to very weak (grammar, spelling, organization, development of ideas etc.). Whenever we do in class writing (journal entries, peer editing, project reflections, essays etc.) he produces very little compared to his peers and what he writes is muddled. He often asks to finish assignments at home. (Since he has an IEP, he is allowed extra time to complete work.) When he turns in these assignments, they are not perfect, but they are very well-written.

Here's what troubles me... I would love to believe that the extra time David spends on his work at home is the reason for the remarkable improvement in his writing. However, there is a part of me that suspects that he is getting help at home (but from whom?) and that the "stronger" writing is not (entirely) is own. He seems to do less writing in his other classes (Spanish, Math, Chemistry) so his teachers, all of whom I have spoken to, have less evidence of the difference in the quality of his work. We have not received the CAHSEE scores yet (he took the test untimed), and I am very interested to see if he passed the writing sample portion. I've mentioned my concerns to the Special Ed. coordinator and she understands my dilemma. How do discuss my suspicions with his parents and with him without seeming as if I am accusing him unjustly?

More about Technology in the Classroom

As some of you know, I teach at a project-based charter school. Rather than final exams at the end of the year, all students have what we call TPOLs, or Transitional Presentations of Learning. These required, rubric-based presentations to faculty, parents and peers are intended to offer the students a chance to reflect on and demonstate how they have grown as individuals and learners over the course of the year. (Our students are used to reflecting on their work and the "process"; self-assessment and reflection are part of every major assignment or project they complete.) The TPOLs are based on digital portfolios, or DPs, that the students create and update by adding assignments and projects they have completed in their classes. Their DPs must include links to a personal statement, a resume and to each of their classes. For each of the projects they include on their "class pages," students need to include a description, an analysis and a reflection. These project become the "evidence" they present during their TPOLs.

I am really enthusiastic about my students creating a digital record of year-long learning and having the chance to reflect on how they have grown by sharing concrete examples of their work with members of their school. During the TPOLs, the students' goal is not to demonstrate how much content knowledge they have gained from a particular project; rather, it is to think seriously about the process of their learning. In this spirit, we encourage students to share both successful and challenging learning experiences (for example, working in groups, using new technology, prioritizing parts of a project and managing their time etc.) During their TPOLs, the students must reference specific grade-level and school-wide learning outcomes and explain to what extent they believe they have achieved them.

As a classroom teacher, my responsibilities include helping my students create and periodically update their DPs (although most of them know far more about DreamWeaver than I do) and to preparing them for their TPOLs (by thinking about questions such as: How does one reflect on growth and learning? What do the learning outcomes "mean" to them? What makes evidence relevant and persuasive? etc.) It is a lot of work and takes up a great deal of class time. In theory, I am all for what seems to be a comprehensive form of authentic assessment; I am anxious to see how it turns out in practice.

Using Technology to Motivate and Facilitate Writing

During our last literature unit, in addition to several forms of "individual" writing (reader response logs, reader sketchbooks, and dialectical journals), I asked my students to engage in a thoughtful bi-weekly email dialogue with a classmate in which they reflected on the reading, discussed ideas, questions, confusions and shared successful comprehension strategies. Over the course of 6 weeks, they were required to send each other 12 emails of about 150 words each. I checked the students' work the first week, and then every other week, for completion, genuine effort, depth of thought, analysis of their reading strategies etc. and gave them ongoing feedback to help them improve their writing and gain more from the experience.

The students seemed particularly engaged by the online nature of the assignment, by the chance to exchange ideas with a peer and by the relatively open-ended format of the writing they had to produce (although I gave the guidelines, they had a choice of what aspects of the reading to discuss). Most of the students took the assignment seriously, but some saw the email format as a way of using an overly informal style (abbreviations, slang and emoticons). The next time we do a similar assignment, I will need to rethink how formal or casual I expect the students' writing to be.

Before the end of the year, I'd like to set up an asynchronous chat in my class (similar to ours, with the students divided into groups of 4 or 5). I'll keep you posted. Nelson mentioned MOO's in class, so I intend to check those out, too. In the future, I would like to explore the idea of a class blog (but would it be academic? personal? both?).