Freeland Article

Conferences are a new frontier for me. All through my undergrad in my teaching classes i was encourage to use conferences, and yet no one ever really said how to do them. I know the techniques and what i am supposed to do, but i can totally see myself freezing up and going into "teacher mode." Freeland discusses how this is how she first conducted conferences (teacher mode) and explained that way did not work. A third of the class was failing, and students got to sit next to their teacher while she tore their papers apart (in a nice way). I definetly find this daunting...trying to use a conference that would best help the student and allowing them to find their voice. Freeland explains that having the students write a response before they come to the conference helps give the conference an "agenda" and i think that is a great idea. I can see me becoming lost in what the heck we are supposed to be discussing and the student getting frustrated,soooo a pre-written response sounds like a great idea to me. Freeland suggests throughout the article that a teacher has to "stop teaching" and this sounds like it should be easy (what is better then giving up your duties??), but i know that it is not that simple. letting the students go and trusting them is not easy for us teachers to do. There is always the need to want to take control and fill their little minds with all of our knowledge (yes, i am being sarcastic, dont worry), but letting them do things themselves usually falls outside of what we think we should do. But, i think it is necessary. In writing conferences and in the classroom...we need to let the students talk more about their own writing, because they are the ones who wrote it and that makes them the experts. Yikes, i am not positive that all of this made sense, so i apologize now :)

Anonymous Critique

I liked Johnson's essay about anonymous critique. It seemed to make a lot of sense that students would be more honest and critical of a work if they didn't have to worry about hurting the author's feelings in a face-to-face conversation. Even at the graduate level, I sometimes have a hard time commenting on another's student's work in a peer review session. I don't want the student to "dislike" me, so I try very hard to couch all my comments. (I beat around the bush, so to speak... haha). Plus, anonymous response forces the critic to focus only on the piece of writing. All of their opinions must be based on what they read, not on what they think of the author. (That is key to good response, I think.) On the other hand though, I think that face-to-face spontaneous response is good too. I think students may be more likely to take things said in face-to-face conversations more seriously. Plus, they can ask the person to clarify what the mean, right away. Also, as was said in a previous article, face-to-face peer review can help people understand the dynamics of audience better. I'm not sure the same thing is accomplished in anonymous review.

That being said, I really like the idea of a "practice" session on peer review. I think it is something I might incorporate into my own class. Teachers simply assume that students know the correct and incorrect way to comment on another person's writing. But, I don't think we really do. It isn't easy to understand the explicit reasons for why a piece of writing works, or doesn't work. Figuring that out, however, helps you to become a better writer, I think. We need to give students the proper tools to peer review. We need to go over with them what works and doesn't work. Otherwise, we are going to keep getting the results we do not want. We are going to keep reading comments like, "It's good. It sucks." We need to show students that they must take peer review sessions seriously, and that they are not just days for the teacher to sit back and do nothing. (I sometimes thought of peer review sessions as "wasted" or "easy" days.) Students just don't see much value in the practice, and why should they? They rarely get good comments.