Do You Feel a Draft?
An interactive and metacognitive routine for revising a draft
April 20, 2016
Anna Wolff [email protected]
Leo Hopcroft [email protected]
Goals for participants
● To experience how a novice writer might try to see their own
draft in a new way.
● To approach a draft with an attitude of re-vision rather than
“fixing” problems
● To reflect on teaching revision in their own courses
Discussion Questions
What are your experiences with student revision?
What revision strategies do you use with your students?
On a scale of 1-10, to what extent do your students actually
engage in revision?
In this exercise, you are a student!
You will work in groups, but think of your group working on an essay together
as one student.
The prompt will be provided only so that you can see what the student was
responding to. The prompt is not the routine. The re-visioning routine can
work with any prompt.
Most importantly, you are not a teacher grading the student’s paper! For this
exercise, you are the student looking at the first draft of her own paper and
trying to see it in a new way. We want our students to examine their own
work closely. Let the student do the learning!
Our students in action
Re-seeing Routine
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
You have a set of post-its. Go through your student paper, and write the main idea (NOT JUST THE TOPIC) of each
paragraph on a post-it. One paragraph main idea per post-it. DO NOT number the post-its.
a. If you can’t figure out the main idea of your paragraph, can you figure out what the student was trying for?
b. If you find yourself wanting to write multiple ideas for a paragraph, give each idea its own post-it. This
indicates a need to break up that paragraph in revision.
Once you have all of your post-its, write one more with the thesis on it. If you can’t find a thesis sentence in the
draft, create a central claim. If you find a central claim but you feel that you could make it stronger, go ahead. Put
the thesis or central claim at the top of your flip chart sheet.
Mix up your other post-its. Now, look at each one and sort them into two piles: relevant and irrelevant to the
thesis.
Set the irrelevant ones aside and focus on the relevant ones.
With an open and experimental mind, put your post-its in a reader-centered order. Play around! Try a few
different ways!
Look for gaps. What other ideas/things do you need to address for your reader to find your thesis reasonable?
Write new post-its for these ideas and add them to your sheet. (optional: After students find an order they can
move to peer review.)
Can each member of your group explain why you made the choices you did?
Reporting out
Groups take 5 minutes to discuss the advantages and
disadvantages of this activity and how you might use or
change this activity for your own class
Take 5 minutes to report out to the whole group
Thank you!
Anna Wolff
[email protected]
Leo Hopcroft
[email protected]