I am going to crackdown on plagiarism after yesterday's PD

Dear English Department,

I had a good talk with my group yesterday at the Write Boston PD. I presented the problem of plagiarism to my group; I wonder sometimes if my students even know they are doing it.  My group advised me to maintain zero tolerance for copying and to do some explicit instructions on what constitutes plagiarism.  Those people are rockstars.

Writing Revision Rubric

I mentioned in some of your groups last night a Writing Revision Rubric that I developed to try to give credit for the revision process. I'm not 100% sure it does what I want it to, but you are welcome to try it out/adapt it/use it as a starting point. You can find it here.

Write Boston dilemmas

Dilemma: students should be engaged with interesting work as many days as possible--not busy work to keep them occupied--but keeping up with timely feedback and grading is a challenge.

Some solutions:

• Allow students to select works for grading after revising.
• In order to hold students accountable for all assignments, directly state "Some writing will be selected at random"--so students do not 'check out' on assignments. 
• Make daily classwork effort a 0/1 assessment grade.
• To expedite the grading process, print a mini rubric in the footnotes of assessments; check off boxes that fulfill criteria or address common problems of practice. 

Other interesting ideas:

• Model what good peer feedback looks/sounds like, using direct instruction and think-alouds.
• Students should have a separate assessment grade for final products vs. rough drafts--so lack of significant revisions counts against them. (Process Grade vs. Product Grade)
• Have students share Google docs with peers for feedback.
• Have tiered prompts for students to prompt differentiation. (For example: Is Macbeth a tragic hero? vs. Is Macbeth a sympathetic character?)
• To prevent plagiarism, give direct instruction on embedding quotes and paraphrasing.

Ideas for Revision (from WriteBoston)

As a follow-up to tonight's WriteBoston PD (Nov. 16):

The dilemma I shared with my colleagues was with the writing process, and the constant desire to get more out of revisions. Like all of us, I struggle with how to receive a draft, offer advice, and then have students revise their papers in a timely manner (and without having to grade 600 drafts). Often I just grade and say, “Do THIS better next time.” Thankfully I got some great advice through our Consultancy Protocol activities tonight. 

I think I’d definitely like to start utilizing Google Docs more in the peer revision process. I use it quite extensively to grade papers myself, but the idea of having students offer feedback TO each other – which I can then view – sounded pretty appealing. In addition, I like the idea of modeling peer revising (I’d always passed out a sheet and told them to just go at it!), then explicitly teaching to patterns. If I’m noticing that most of my students are struggling with intros, then I’m going to model a sample intro (likely a student from another class) and have students work in class to create or revise their own. I get worried about keeping pace with the curriculum, but the feedback I received tonight made it more likely that I’ll take a week or two-week chunk of time to address writing mid-unit. Who says I can't stop in the middle of "Julius Caesar" to work on those papers analyzing Brutus' funeral monologue? 

Overall, tonight was very valuable to me, and I think I’ll employ a few different strategies to help my students improve throughout the process. Thanks everyone!

Help Students Toward Reading Complex Texts Independently: No More Training Wheels!

Lately there is a ton of buzz around increasing students' capacities to read texts that are considered complex and challenging for their age groups. I'm observing this unfold in various spaces with a critical eye. How exactly do we help students be able to read more complex texts independently? Do we give them texts that are well above their reading levels and apply as much scaffolding as we need to get students through it? Or do we meet readers where they are with more accessible text selections first and build their independent reading skills?

Click here to read the rest of this great little article!

Educator Goals

Educator Goals
Click on the link above to see your colleagues' goals for the year. If you see a goal that you think you can help a colleague reach through your support or materials or consultation, please let them know that you can help! This is called Professional Collaboration, which is under the Professional Culture standard on the Educator Rubric. And it's good practice!

Literacy Skill: Annotation

I noticed that some of the baseline assessments had instructions that asked students to annotate the text. And yet, we also told them not to write on the test! Well, this is a contradiction, isn’t it? As good readers ourselves, we know that annotating a text is an important way to be active readers.

But do we give our students opportunities to annotate texts? One way to make annotation possible when students don’t have their own books is to give students photocopies of articles or short stories or poems or sections of texts that we want them to read closely.

And do we teach our students how to annotate? Check out these links for some great resources on teaching annotation skills! And please feel free to post in a comment below some great resources YOU may have on annotation skills that you would like to share!

Thinking Notes (video)
Purposeful Annotation: A “Close Reading” Strategy that Makes Sense to My Students (blog post)
I'll Have Mine Annotated, Please (article)
Beyond the Yellow Highlighter (article)
Teaching Student Annotation (lesson plan)
Back to School with Annotation: 10 Ways to Annotate with Students (online article)
Annotation Rubric (borrowed from apsaunders.wikispaces.com)

Try this experiment in the next week: Give your students in one class a text of any kind and ask them to annotate it. See what they do. Give your students in another class the same text and teach them a strategy for annotating the text and see what they do. Let me know how it goes!