I've adopted a growth mindset on a couple of different occasions, I suppose, but the most significant one I've engaged in recently is the shift to a different style of grading essays. I am going to try and only focus on the assigned grammatical terms that the class has worked on for a certain essay (that build over time according to what they've learned thus far), and focus the rest of my essay-grading energy on the "big topics" such as thesis statements, tone, flow, coherence of arguments, etc. I'd say that the biggest struggle with that is that the students' mistakes are standing out like giant glowing beacons / distress signals, and like the crew of the Starship Enterprise, I feel the need to rescue them from whatever mess they've walked into at the time! It's really, really hard to resist marking every possible thing I know, as if the sharing of my grammatical knowledge is required for them to be complete people, which I'm pretty sure (but not guaranteeing) isn't the case. This, in theory, once I get the technique down, will lead to less time grading essays and more time rockin' out with my wife Kate and daughter Elise. It's a struggle, though. Given the fact that I've just started to do it this way, as well as mark their rough drafts and force revision (not marking their final products unless requested), I'm encouraged that I will in fact get the times per paper down on average - any English teacher knows that grading essays can be the most time-consuming and unfulfilling parts of their job, especially when one sees a student chuck their freshly-graded papers in the bin. It causes Hulk-like rage-outs. The thing I'd change about this ongoing experience is that I'd try and invent a time machine, or something that'd allow me to alter and abuse the space-time continuum, and then employ it so that I appear to have graded all of my papers, but have actually let only a fraction of time pass in the real world- then, grading essays wouldn't feel like such an up-and-down crapshoot of usefulness vs. uselessness. I haven't done that...YET!!!!!!!!!
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ReplyDeleteDusty,
ReplyDeleteI am encouraged by your new growth mindset. I too would like to invent a time machine or get a TA to correct my writing papers. I'm dreading correcting all of my writing papers, which is too bad because I should be looking forward to seeing what the kids are capapble of. I like your idea of editing their rough drafts and not their final. Very interesting, I wish I would have talked to you early.
Sounds like this new strategy is not only putting you into a growth mindset but your students as well. As a student who is still working to improve my writing skills. I would have pushed myself to improve more if I had teachers give me suggestions for structure changes in my writing rather than grammatical errors. If you don't grade their final, do they? Have you thought about creating a rubric explaining all the "big topics" your looking for and what they should look like? Maybe it could save you some time when correcting their first draft.
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