ch 7 Best Practices in Teaching Evaluation and Revision
Conferencing and helping students revise their writing has always seemed difficult for me. Students do not like to rewrite after writing and meeting with each child takes a lot of time and effort. Keeping the other students on task during individual conferencing is a job in itself. This is certainly something I need help with and would like to improve.
Revision Points
-changes made at any point in the writing process
-detecting differences between intended and actual meaning
-parallels good reading comprehension skills
Teachers should model and teach students evaluation criteria for various types of writing to aid in self-evaluation and peer revising. Just as teachers should model writing, it is important and helpful to model revision. Word processing is suggested for aiding in revision and limiting rewriting, but is not feasible for younger students.
I liked the instructional strategies offered by Charles MacArthur. The five step directions for the editor and the specific evaluation questions presented about character development would be helpful in guiding revision. The idea is for peer editors, but could be used for student/teacher conferencing, especially for younger children. I would like to have examples of evaluation questions for each of the story elements.
