From what I've
seen in my observations, students don't like writing very much. They seem to
have been workbook-ed to death. I graded a few essays which the students wrote
for a practice PSSA test and was discouraged with what I saw – fake writing. I
had to give most of them 1’s (on a scale of 0-3) because their essays were
incomprehensible, didn’t answer the prompt completely or at all, or simply
showed little to no effort.
I can tell that
the students know that doing well on PSSA essays are high-stakes. It’s been
drilled into them over and over: they need to pass to graduate, the school
needs them to pass to get funding. I can see that they don’t write well because
they have no good models of what good writing looks like. They've gone over
"attacking" the prompt, highlighting useful information, and
rewording the question with more understandable words. All of these things are
great skills for writing a good essay under a time limit. However, I don't
think that these skills are effective without the students having an idea of
what they should be working towards. For example, I can tell the students
have had the essay form modeled to them. In fact, some essays even had cues
written before each sentence. Topic sentence. Example one. Example two.
Conclusion.
Even within the confines
of PSSA essays, I think that there are some writing tricks that Gallagher suggests
in this week's reading that might be helpful to my frustrated students.
The funneling technique
described by Gallagher would be helpful in teaching students to narrow their
essay focus. While grading, the most common error that I had to take points off
for was not answering the prompt. When most students failed to answer the
prompt, it was often because they had just restated it word for word and put
one or two examples (if any) without giving them any connection to the topic at
hand. Teaching students how to focus in on the topic and "write smaller"
would help with the process of thesis creation and picking relevant examples
from the essay prompt.
Another useful
technique that Gallagher suggests is the writing fountain. I think that
this technique might be useful for students who feel stuck with a particular
prompt. Having had this experience before on tests, I’ve found that writing
down all the associations that I had with the topic in the prompt helped me
find an idea that I liked. I think that having an idea that you like, or at
least relate to, make creating an essay easier. Writers write about what they
know, after all.
I think that these students would find writing more enjoyable
if they were able to practice for the PSSA test by writing about things that
they liked. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be likely for this class, as they are
restricted by the confines of the workbook. This makes showing the students
good examples difficult. And outside of the canned responses given in the PSSA
prep book, how can you give a good model of an essay response written in the
heat of the moment? I don’t think that there is an easy answer to this
question. I think that we as teachers work with what we get, and try our best
to help our students make sense of it all.
