UNCONVENTIONAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS AND GRADING PROCESS:

           Often, students are only assessed by conventional “products.” By this, I mean cumulative tests and formal academic papers. This is the case in the seventh grade classroom I’m currently student teaching in—the only grades entered in to the grade book are final written assignments and unit tests. All other work—homework, quizzes, participation, daily journals, worksheets—are not even taken in to consideration when assessing a student. This has always baffled me. Why don’t they receive credit for all of the work they do along the way? Every bit of their learning process is ignored, and the product becomes the only thing that matters. Furthermore, these products don’t allow students to be creative, experiment, or take risks. I believe students should get credit for being creative, experimenting, and taking risks.       

In his book Teaching English by Design, Peter Smagorinsky writes, “Our problem with schooling in general is that it focuses on the final products without providing opportunities for students to engage in—and be rewarded for—the informal, tentative, experimental processes that lead to them” (Smagorinsky 83). The classroom I’m in is an example of this; students are not rewarded for their learning process at all, nor are they given many opportunities to partake in any sort of “experimental” activity. Assignments and grading are as structured as they can possibly be. As a result, students are rarely given the opportunity to exercise their creativity and take the risks that foster authentic learning.

Donald Murray advocates that in an ideal classroom, “the student is encouraged to attempt any form of writing which may help him discover and communicate what he has to say. The process which produces ‘creative’ and ‘functional’ writing is the same” (Murray 6). Here, Murray points out that form can be very limiting for students. If a blog or a video is more conducive to the student’s message, why should we limit them to writing a formal analytic essay? This idea goes back to my central question of balancing freedom and structure. Allowing students to convey their ideas in any form seems a bit chaotic. My first thoughts jump to, “What if they’re not doing the same amount of work?” and “How am I going to grade them all fairly?” These are the questions that providing structured form answer—when we remove this structure to foster creativity, we need to find an alternate way to answer those questions.

Although I don’t have a concrete example from my seventh grade classroom to illuminate this issue, I can use my experiences in a college classroom to shed some light. In my current English class, I was asked to write a “paper” that describes my writing process. This “paper” could be in any feasible form—I chose to convey my writing process with a creative video edited in iMovie. Other students chose many other forms, such as board games, picture slide shows, and play scripts. While we all chose drastically different forms to answer a common question, our professor graded our projects with ease. We all submitted a self-reflection that explained how much effort we put into our project and how effectively we answered the prompt. This provided us with a bit of structure to all of the creative freedom we were allowed.

            This example shows that is it possible to bring Murray’s ideal into the classroom. Providing students with a (relatively) common prompt and asking them to reflect critically on final project gives the assignment its structural build. This satisfies both the teacher’s need to grade fairly and the student’s need for structure and expectations, while allowing the student to take an enormous amount of creative liberty.