Debates Continue

The debates continue. In his book, Preparing to Teach Writing, Williams presents us with a lot of information about the strength and weakness of everything dealing with how to teach writing. He first informs us of the many controversies about which rhetorical theory is the most effective approach to teach writing. From there he discusses what the best practices are to use to foster better writing. Next, he deliberates the phonics-whole-language debate and how this is important with respect to writing. Then he stirs up controversy about why teaching grammar does not lead to improved writing. Finally he provides us with the debate over whether holistic scoring or portfolio grading is the most effective way to assess and evaluate writing. After analyzing all this, I appreciate that Williams has equipped future teachers with all the different methods for teaching, assessing and evaluating writing but hopefully it will be easier to incorporate some of this into practice than it is to read about it.

I have always thought that holistic approaches to most things work better than one approach. In the medical field for example, most doctors treat their patient’s illnesses with medicine or surgery. They often don’t see the patient as a whole person they just see illness and treat its symptoms. Holistic medicine emphasizes the need to look at the whole person including analysis of physical, nutritional, environmental, emotional, social, spiritual, and lifestyle values. In medicine by looking at all the parts that make up the whole person a more effective treatment can be implemented to enhance the patients recovery. This makes sense to me in assessing and evaluating writing. Writing should be examined as a whole and not broken into parts where it gets measured as a set of subskills rather than as “a unit of expression”(318).

The most important aspect of holistic medicine is that it focuses on education and responsibility for personal efforts to achieve balance and well - being. This statement sounded like what Williams was saying about using holistic scoring in the classroom. It provides a way for students to gain an increased sense of control over their own writing by taking part in assessing it (318). However, training students to evaluate each other’s writing is a bit risky for the various reasons mentioned i.e. that students aren’t as mature or experienced as teachers (329). Even in grad school I have had a hard time evaluating the writing of my peers due to my lack of knowledge and experience doing it.

I do like the idea of scoring with some kind of rubric because I think this allows the student to know how close they came to the goals of the writing assignment, and it provides those assessing and evaluating the work (students or teachers) to know what they should be looking for in the writing that they are evaluating. This helps both the writer and evaluator to be thinking along the same lines. Setting up the rubrics and teaching students what good writing is are the problems as well as the amount of time needed to do this properly.

The holistic approach is time consuming for the teacher at the beginning when all the ‘socialization’ is occurring but according to Williams, it is critical for the entire procedure to be successful (320). So while I do like this approach I think it has some critical flaws that would make it hard to use. It seems hard enough to be a teacher trying to figure out how to assess and evaluate writing, let alone be a teacher teaching students how to do it. Also the teacher must be able to evaluate how well her students are evaluating other student’s work. It seems like this type of approach might work better for upper grades and college.

Portfolio grading also allows students to be responsible for their personal efforts in writing by allowing them to choose their best work to be evaluated. In this approach other teachers evaluate the writing. The advantage this has is that it forces the student to focus on an audience outside of their own teacher and their own peers (330). I like that this approach also uses rubrics to assess writing. This approach seems like it would work well in most situations as long as the teachers are trained properly and follow protocol.

One thing about both of these approaches to assessing and evaluating writing is that they are not entirely objective. It would be great if all of this were as easy and objective as teaching, assessing and evaluating athletes in a running sport like track or cross-country. It is true there are many methods that coaches can use to train runners to become better, but the assessing and evaluation process is so much easier. Time over a certain distance is what is measured. A stop- watch is the tool used for assessment. The coach times the run from point a to point b and then collects that information for evaluation. The evaluation process usually is determined by the standards set to qualify for some race. There is very little about this process that is subjective.Unfortuanetly the same isn't true for assessing and evaluating writing.