As I ponder these questions, I realize that they echo questions that students ask, as they pump me for feedback. What can they do to become better writers? What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong? How can I help steer them in a direction that makes it all right?
The questions plague me like the feeling of "Stage-Fright" that my first contribution to this blog spoke of. To be honest, they scare me because one of the simplest responses is, "How do I know? Who am I to know?" Those responses, I realize, probably don't do much to ease the anxiety of a student who has learned to trust teachers as sources of answers, as authorities, as coaches, as experts, as people who can provide the solutions to the problems that vex us most.
The confrontation of student expectation with instructor stage-fright came to a climax in my mind recently as I encouraged students in my digital-storytelling course to see storytelling as a creative process that relies upon community input. There is no one right way or wrong way to tell a story, I said. Only suggestions and ideas, based on one's own personal idiosyncrasies and insights. Furthermore, the way in which a story is going to be told will vary, depending on the community for whom the story is being put forth.
I had written those words in an online course bulletin board as a way of encouraging and empowering students to take seriously the peer advice they were receiving from one another, advice that, for the most part, was supportive and helpful. There was a layer of guilt added to the words, in that I was late in delivering my own feedback, probably in part due to Stage-Fright. But seriously as I thought of peer review, I really wanted the students to understand themselves to be a part of a community of learners in which authority was not hierarchical despite the indisputable fact that the course did have instructors (who would eventually become grade givers). Furthermore, I had seen the effects of too much instructor input: good ideas that didn't have a chance to develop were stifled; a style that was coming out in a cautious, playful, exploratory way would be prematurely critiqued. These experiences have been helping me understand that the best advice that students could receive would be to listen to themselves and to learners in similar positions as them.
But peer review doesn't create self-review in and of itself. It doesn't help any of us cut to the question of how to make our own writing better. It doesn't really help us understand what to do with those freshly-pressed, very raw and precocious first drafts.
So I have decided to embark on an experiment in teaching myself self-review. I will do my best to document this experiment through two tried and true tools: the practice of writing at 750words.com every day for a month (the month of May), and the practice of what I called self-assessment for students and Julia Cameron refers to in one of her best primers on writing, The Right to Write, as the evening check-in.
Here's how I hope the experiment will work: May is National Short Story Writing Month -- or so I've been told. It is much less structured than the well-known National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November and the National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) in April. Some searching for sources over the past couple of weeks have told me that some organizations consider March to be National Short Story Writing Month, and some mark the heralded month as April. Others consider May to be a worthy month for reading, rather than writing, short stories. And some just want you to write a story and post it somewhere to share.
While I have written short stories in fictional format, non-fiction remains my genre. So the fact that my quest to find a storytelling community to help me through National Short Story Writing Month turned fruitless provoked some anxiety.
What I decided is this: In May, I will read one short story a day. And I will assess it by answering the following four questions:
1. What was the story I read? Title, author, place where it was published, and a 1-2 sentence synopsis should be provided.
2. What were three strengths and/or insights that I gained about storytelling and writing from this particular story?
3. How do the strengths/insights I gained support my own efforts to improve my writing?
4. Have I read anything else by the story's author? How does this particular story fit or not fit with the author's general body of work, as I understand it?
I also will write one story a day. And I will assess that story, with these four questions:
1. What was the story I wrote today? Title, word count, and a 1-2 sentence synopsis will be provided.
2. Where did the idea for this story originate?
3. How did the story develop?
4. What might I do to this story later to strengthen it?
If you're an educator, you might recognize a few traces of Bloom's Taxonomy in these questions. I have been using the levels of learning established in that matrix -- memorizing, understanding, applying, assessing/analyzing, evaluating, and creating -- for the past several years to create learning activities for students, including questions of self-assessment. While I feel that the process is a bit mechanical, I feel that it works in the sense that it allows students and their instructors to create a dialogue on the student's learning that is less hierarchical and more collaborative. I continue to study and work with the method. My hope is that others might join me in this May experiment, and perhaps report to me on their learning.
(On the image: It comes from a blog on online college courses, and offers a more structured and deeper understanding of self-assessment and its value to students than I can offer here. Visit the blog at http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/2011/11/21/self-assessment-charting-your-own-progress/
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