Write Your Own Papers; Take Your Own Tests

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ceme online terbaikLast week Ed White came to campus and met with writing faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. Ed is semi-retired now but still works as a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona. His most well known and critically acclaimed work deals with writing assessment, including Teaching and Assessing Writing: Understanding, Evaluating and Improving Student Performance, Assigning, Responding, Evaluating: A Writing Teacher's Guide, and Writing Assessment: Politics, Policies, Practices. Teachers from the CWP-Storrs might be most familiar with him from work he has co-edited with Lynn Bloom, including Composition in the 21st Century. Over three days Ed gave a few workshops and was feted one evening at Lynn Bloom’s lovely home, where I had the privilege of talking with him at some length. The following day I was his cross-campus escort, making sure he got to the Center for Undergraduate Education on time. The lunch-time workshop at the CUE building that day was well attended and interesting. There were actually people sitting in the hallway where they could hardly see but could still hear what Ed had to say. The discussion took one of its most interesting turns when Ed told the roomful of Freshman English instructors, Writing Center tutors, and Education graduate students that the best way to assess the value of an assignment was to complete it themselves. “Have you ever tried that?” asked Ed somewhat rhetorically and with a knowing smirk. Everyone looked at one another a little oddly, as if to confirm that they weren’t the only ones in the room who had never done that.

I think many if not most of the writing project folks write with their students, though I still wonder how many of us complete the larger writing assignments we give, like portfolios or term papers. I know I didn’t when I was in the high school classroom. Coincidentally, a few days later (this past Tuesday, to be exact) I was running a professional development workshop at Lyman Memorial High School for its English Department members and a few Special Education teachers who co-teach English classes. Ostensibly we were working on CAPT and how to improve CAPT scores, but more broadly we were looking at the research that had informed the original design anjuran for what became the CAPT, and how to allow that research to inform our teaching practices. The original anjuran included the short responses to a story that are familiar to all of us, but extended well beyond those four (originally six) written responses to include response groups, revision, teacher conferences, more revision, and ultimately the completion of a portfolio to be assessed. So what I had the teachers do in the latter half of our workshop was complete a full CAPT-style lesson. They read Colette’s “The Other Wife” and responded in writing to the four CAPT questions, but then they met in response groups of four and used Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff’s Ways of Responding guidelines from A Community of Writers to give one another feedback on their responses. After this, each teacher went back to his or her desk and spent a half hour crafting the short responses and peer feedback into a single, coherent essay. At their October 21 department meeting, the teachers are going to look at these and continue the process.

A great deal was learned from treating the written responses as drafts to workshop into a longer essay, but I think just as much was learned from actually taking a CAPT test. I know there were young teachers in the room (including one who had been my student in high school!) who had taken the CAPT themselves as high school sophomores, but none of the veteran teachers had ever taken a CAPT test before, and doing so was enlightening—though not necessarily in the most positive ways.

Many of the teachers discovered that one or more of the questions were difficult to say anything insightful about. Just about everyone took too much time on the first question and left themselves little time to respond to the more sophisticated third and fourth questions. Some found that they just wanted to respond but weren’t sure which question their response conformed to, and so just randomly put it under one or another. Another teacher found he really wanted to jot down ideas and an outline but felt too pressed for time to do so to his satisfaction. Yet another teacher had an interesting experience for all of us to learn from because she based one response on a misreading of a line from the story (does everyone remember the now infamous story about the girl who was undergoing chemo treatments and the hundreds of students around the state who misunderstood what chemo was, thinking it was the dye she had used to turn her hair purple?) but then had a really profound insight into the story in her response to one of the other questions. How should that be scored? I don’t know if anyone walked out of the room that day with any certainty about how to better prepare students for the test, but at the very least everyone had greater empathy and insight to build upon when we meet again in January to continue planning.

On another note, I hope everyone saw the article on Ken Cormier in Tuesday’s Hartford Courant. Most recent CWP folks are certainly familiar with Ken. He’s a writer and a musician who is a PhD candidate in the English Department. He hosts a radio show on WHUS called The Lumberyard and in 2007 made audio recordings of the Summer Institute Fellows, some of which made it into an episode on his program. He’s run writing workshops for teachers at the 2008 Summer Institute, and was our keynote speaker at last year’s Student and Teacher Writing Conference. Anyway, Ken just released a new album, his third, called Nowhere Is Nowhere, and the Courant gave him a good review. Check it out.