Writing and Civic Engagement: How can feedback and revision strengthen their relationship? (Blog Post 5)

What do young writers need?

    Over the last couple years of teaching, I have reflected much on what young writers need to truly grow and develop. While my time as a preservice teacher in college was formative and fundamentally shaped much of my teaching philosophy, it was not until I was in a classroom regularly reading the writing of over one hundred students that I began to really question: how am I supposed to teach all of these students to become better writers? The beauty of teaching is that I will likely spend my entire career to exploring strategies for teaching writing, like this semester when I was fortunate to have my students partner with writing coaches who provided them with feedback and opportunities for revision on several writing tasks. In this section, I'll explore what I believe students need throughout their writing and revising processes and how the various roles intertwine. 

    From teachers, students need clear expectations for how a writing task fulfills their needs: both skills based and personal. As Dan Deweese summarizes from Nicole Mirra's Educating for Empathy, while ELA is a skills-intensive discipline, the vehicle by which skills are practiced is more open-ended than many other disciplines. Therefore, teachers must make sure that the assignments they are creating and the feedback they provide allows students opportunities to practice their ELA skills and introduces themes and content that are meaningful to the lives of students. This semester, I have found that incorporating new methods of assignments, such as emphasizing perspective taking in various modes of writing and giving students a tangible audience outside of the classroom in the form of their writing coach, has drastically increased the amount of writing that has been turned in compared to past school years and even past units with this same group of students.

    From writing coaches, young writers need supportive and specific feedback on their writing that focuses on encouragement and growth. My work with writing coaches this semester (and sometimes as an incognito stand-in coach for my own students) has helped me to reflect a lot on the type of feedback that most supports students. In reviewing examples of the graduate research project, I was reminded of a presentation given in my first time taking this course on the role of feedback in student revision. Nancy Sommers found that when teachers dissect student writing in feedback for changes, they encourage students to see their writing in parts rather than as a whole piece of discourse. I found that the comments students found most helpful in their writing often were connected to large scale meaning-making in the students' writing, and that students often struggled to make sense on their own of comments focused on small parts of writing.

    From peers, young writers need encouraging, writing-energized environments that are supportive of each other and the writing that they do. When students received comments from their writing coaches they didn't understand or disagreed with, their peers were the first ones they went to to read over their writing. Students offered each other the same type of peer feedback in some of my classes that finished writing their drafts sooner than others. Since students were more engaged in these ideas and the audience of their writing coach, the culture of writing and supporting each other as writers was strong.

Civic Engagement & Supporting Writers to Revise

     As students grow as writers, they build their writing identities that are shaped by their personal interests in civic engagement, their peers, teachers, and all who give feedback on their writing. Fostering youth engagement in activism is not just the role of parents and there should be opportunities for students to express and explore their personal interests in the works they produce and read in the ELA classroom. This is an important intersection between the role of teachers and peers in supporting writers because if teachers provide opportunities to engage student voices, as Our Children's Trust provided opportunities for young people to speak against climate injustice, there will be an enriched environment of writers supporting each other to improve their writing in expressing their ideas in the clearest way possible. While the role of how writing coaches, peers, and teachers support young writers may differ in the type of feedback and writing optimism provided, if the goal is encouraging a writer to produce the clearest output of their voice on an idea they are passionate about, they will all work together successfully to support the writer in making meaningful revisions to their work.