Steve Elliott made a joke on Day 3 about modeling. Until I became a teacher five years ago, I too thought modeling was confined to the catwalk. The longer I've been in the classroom, the more I am convinced of the value this type of instruction holds.
The opening lesson, a debrief and critique of Day 2's reporting experience, was modeling personified.
Seeing our work projected on the big screen could have been like watching the Jumbotron of Shame. It wasn't.
Steve modeled what we as teachers must demonstrate for our students during the editing process. He read the first five or so paragraphs of a handful of spot news stories about Chris Callahan in their original form, telling what he liked about each one. He also told us, gently, how they might be improved, and then we got to see a revised version with his changes marked in red.
Ah, red. The color of love. Steve has been preparing us for that since we met him on Sunday. We don't even have the redlined hard copies back in hand, but when Steve does return our stories we know that anything marked on them is for our own good.
"The more red pen on your paper, the more I love you."
He's said it. We've tweeted it. We've blogged it. And we believe it.
After all, "Feedback is important," Steve said. "Constructive criticism delivered as a bludgeon can really crush people's spirits."
We as teachers don't want our prose, our spirits, to meet a publicly violent end. Why should our students?
Ginny Miller
Tupelo High School
Tupelo, Mississippi
Jumbotron of Shame! I think that students fear that's where they will find themselves at every time we critique their work. Of course, we must critique their work, and we must do so publicly, so that they can learn how to critique. But more importantly, we need to model for them how to conduct critiques with respect, kindness, and an eye towards learning because, after all, they will be editors one day.
ReplyDeleteKari Koshiol
Benilde-St. Margaret's
Minneapolis, Minnesota