Finding Places to Step Aside: Teach Smarter by Letting Students Lead
Reading time
Date posted
by Sarah M. Zerwin, author of Step Aside: Strategies for Student-Driven Learning with Secondary Readers and Writers
No matter how much I intend to stay out of my students’ way as readers and writers, I frequently discover places where I’m doing too much of the thinking for them. Usually it’s where I see them struggle and I want to make things more accessible. But in doing so, I may inadvertently impede my students’ agency to practice—for themselves—the thinking that will enable them to have agency in my classroom and (more importantly) in their lives.
For too many years, I have taken too much work home—especially hours of responding to student work. During the 20-21 school year, my district implemented a weekly schedule that included extra time to figure out the big pivot to online and hybrid instruction. For the first time in my teaching career, I didn’t do any school work on the weekends. But now we’re back to our pre-pandemic frenetic weekly teaching schedule. And I’m unwilling to keep giving up my weekends to school.
So I rethought almost everything about how I approached my job, hoping that if my students were driving more of their work in the classroom, I could probably do less. There are many big and small strategies I’ve been honing toward this, which is a focus of my new book, Step Aside. Here, I’ll explain my new strategies to put my students out front driving their revision work while making the feedback load more manageable for me.
What I Did Before
For many years, my students completed “thorough revisions.” They chose one of several different rough pieces of writing to revise. They worked in suggesting mode in Google Docs so I could immediately see the changes they made, and they would explain their changes in margin comments. I would ask each student to keep working (and resubmitting) until it seemed they had learned what they could from a particular piece of writing.
Even though it was pretty quick to evaluate a single student’s resubmitted revision, managing multiple resubmissions across the many students on my rosters took quite a bit of time. I was constantly reviewing revisions, work I had no chance of completing during my prep periods at school—work I had created for myself.
Another (and more critical) issue with the thorough revisions was that the task centered on me. Their revision started with the feedback I gave on their rough drafts, and I was the one who decided when their revision was good enough to be done. I kept them working until they responded to all of my margin comments and until they had fixed every error in mechanics that I marked for them.
In my efforts to ensure what felt to me like rigorous revision, I impeded my students’ agency as writers.
What I’m Doing Now Instead
Students answer a magic question.
If you were to keep working on this, what would you revise? This simple question gets my students thinking about revision with every piece of writing they turn in. A student might write, “If I keep working on this, I will add more details and description to my opening anecdote,” or “I will find more evidence from the text to support my ideas,” or “I will develop my conclusion more fully.” A rubric or checklist that defines the particular writing task offers students language to identify what they might keep working on, but the magic here is that students will have a place to start revising that they determined on their own.Students revise before I look at it.
Even though students revise on their own before they turn the writing into me to review, they’re not revising blind. First, they’ve got their answer to the magic question as a starting point. Whatever revision work they do from that starting point will truly be theirs. Second, I invite them to seek feedback from a reader and to consult a mentor text to get ideas for revision. With a lot of modeling, I teach them how to select a just-right reader, how to drive a reader feedback session, how to find a mentor text worthy of their study, and how to study a mentor text to identify craft moves they could try in their own writing.Students explain their revision work.
To get my students more focused on their own individual processes as writers, I ask students to write a new writer’s memo on their revised writing where they explain the work they did to revise and why they did it. Who was your reader? What of their feedback did you use? What was your mentor text? What craft moves did you steal? If you were to keep working on this, what would you focus on? (Yep, the magic question again.) And I ask students to provide a few margin comments to point out some specific revisions they did. They don’t have to point out every little thing they did, just the most important three or so. All of this makes their revision process visible—to me and to them.We use descriptive rubrics to determine if revision work is complete or not.
Descriptive (rather than evaluative) rubrics spell out clearly the work a task asks of students. “Complete” goes in the gradebook if I can check off all rubric items as done. Students can resubmit partially complete revision tasks, using the descriptive rubric to guide their continued work. These rubrics allow us to focus on how fully students engage in the process of revision rather than on evaluating the quality of their final drafts—an important shift to get students more focused on learning than on point collecting.
Benefits of this simpler approach to revision
Students have more agency in their revision work.
Revision will enable students to achieve their own goals for a particular piece of writing when their answers to the magic question guide reader feedback and mentor text study.
Also, a clear descriptive rubric leaves no mystery about when we’ll determine revision work is “complete” for the gradebook. Students are no longer subject to waiting for me to decide when the revision work is complete.The work is more manageable for me.
I don’t review students’ revision work until they have already done quite a bit of thinking via reader feedback and mentor text study, which is much later in the process than when I reviewed their work in my older thorough revision task. Much of what I would say for feedback is already there, articulated by each student in their own words. This saves me time!
I’m also no longer reviewing multiple revisions by every student. They are only resubmitting if they didn’t take care of all the work embedded in the task as spelled out by the descriptive rubric.
The writing chapter in Step Aside goes into more detail about these revision strategies, and the rest of the book offers similar simple classroom strategies to get students out front driving reading, classroom conversation, and assessment.
We can simplify our work in a way that also builds student agency. It’s better for students, and it’s more sustainable for us.
Step Aside: Strategies for Student-Driven Learning with Secondary Readers and Writers
Sarah has done the work to weave many resources into a Three Step Meaning Making Process that grows students’ thinking.
Especially when we notice our students are struggling, Step Aside reminds us we need to hold ourselves accountable for keeping out of the way of the most important work. Our students must read and write and think and discuss—on their own—to navigate the complexity of their lives.