Writing Reflections

This quarter I have been having students write more reflections. Last week I loved reading through their writing reflections in Spanish that they submitted with a working draft, answering two questions:

1. How does this piece of writing demonstrate your growth as a writer?
2. What would you still improve if you were going to revise this piece of writing?

Before writing their reflections, I reminded students of the level of depth I would like to see in their reflections. While reading through them, I realized that it was as enjoyable as reading book letters; I loved seeing their insights. While reading, I underlined certain words/phrases/sentences in order to remind myself of what I want to discuss while I confer with students about their growth as writers. I also noted trends in areas where students mentioned that they still want to improve as writers. For example, this year we had already focused on improving leads. Many students commented on their growth with leads but mentioned that they were not happy with their conclusions. For my cognition study that I recently mentioned, the teaching point will be conclusions. While this was already a natural focal concept that I had been planning on, my students' candid reflections reaffirmed that this will be relevant to their current goals as writers.

Pairing up their reflections with a working draft also helped to see how students' view of their progress matched up with the actual transfer into their writing. There was a range of levels to which extent the drafts actually matched up to reflected growth. While some students seemed to be using the teaching point language as buzz words that were not actually apparent in their writing, others actually demonstrated the growth. The important part to remember is that wherever the writers are, it is okay. Those who are talking about the teaching points but not yet showing it consistently in their writing are at least showing a heightened level of consciousness with the teaching points but just need more support and reminders, while other students are working at more independent levels.

It only took about ten minutes for the students to write their reflections, and it was time well-spent. It is always interesting to have a combination of written reflections and conferring - both providing a slightly different piece to the puzzle of who students are as readers and writers.