Judith J. Katz
Teaching by Making Your Own Process Visible
How will students begin to distinguish the general from the specific? This question is deceptively simple to us (adults and teachers) because we can see the difference so clearly, quickly, and seemingly without much effort. That is because we have practiced the skill of noticing this difference for years. It is not that we skip any of the steps we want our students to master; it is that we have come to do so many of those early steps, let us call them processes, so quickly that we are unaware we are doing them.
I believe that the best teachers are the ones that strive to make their own thinking process visible to their students. I do not mean that these teachers require their students to think the same way as they do. Rather I mean that teachers share what they see, think, and do: they model thinking.
A Word About Reading Student Work and Coaching Student Thinking
At Co-op all teachers, across the curriculum, assess students progress using the following three questions. What do our students do well? What don't they do well? What can we do to move each of them to his/her next level of skill and knowledge? Looking at student work in this way illuminates individual and group patterns that can be used to positively influence classroom instruction.
Assessing student knowledge and coaching student thinking are by no means the same as grading student work. Grading student work is a necessary last step in the process of assessing and coaching student thinking. But if we begin by grading we will likely shut down thinking and the creative writing we want students to share. In order for us to get our students thinking and keep them thinking (reading, writing, and speaking), we have to become diagnostic readers and listeners. We have to become teacher-translators who can understand the language of students, teachers, experts, and great writers. We have to understand what each of our students is getting right even when they are (initially) saying it wrong. We have to learn how to listen to them.
All of this is just to say (with acknowledgement to William Carlos Williams) that engaging students in Creative Writing is a delicate piece of business. We cannot on the one hand encourage students to write, and on the other hand read their writing as "correctors." That is not the way to encourage a unique voice. The beauty of limiting ourselves (and our students) to the discussion of objective literary elements frees us as teachers to gently help our students compare and contrast their ability to use those elements well with masters who unquestionably do use them well. This unit discourages the use of the red pen. It encourages the idea that each student is an emerging writer with an emerging voice.
