I got this question today:
Ben,
Do you believe in 100-word free writes (or even ‘topic writes’, challenging them with a certain topic, perhaps what we PQA’d about) as a permanent, daily fixture in my 95 minute classes (which is all of them, all week)? Just picking your brain here…
And should they be timed? Is that necessary? Is the timed element key?
I say keep it simple. Ten strictly timed minutes. They write all they can.
I don’t like the idea of “topic writes”. I don’t want to challenge them. I want it to be easy for them. I will let their other teachers challenge my students. Why would I want to do that? Are their young lives not filled with enough challenges right now? I just want them to relax and have fun amidst a din of aural and reading input. And I myself just want to relax and have fun. I used to teach like teachers do. It made me really nervous. I really cared what people thought. I worked extra hard so that they would like me. It didn’t work too well for me. Those people whose approval I wanted so badly turned out to be mostly shits and a lot less aware of my work than I thought. One time in SC I built an entire fitness trail with a group of kids on a special program for a week. I raised the money and directed the labor and it was a great trail through the woods. I went back to SC to see it once. It’s still there but grown over. I found out that the principal of the school at the time I build it never even knew I built it. And then it got grown over. And yet I had to learn how to drive a back hoe for this project. I worked for 10 hours a day. I thought it would get me somewhere with the school. I did it for approval. It didn’t get me anything except a sore body. I also coached all kinds of teams. One time one of my cross country teams at Myrtle Beach High School ran roughshod over the state. I got sick with the intensity of the coaching. It meant so much to me then. I thought it would change my success in life. But nobody really cared, except the athletes and for us those are great memories, but at what expense? Just a little rant there. Sorry, I’ll return to the point….
Once the free write is over, the value is over, in my opinion. I don’t kick in and analyze anything. I am into comprehension based instruction and I don’t see what analysis of language has to do with that. The former is done at a magical unconscious level and the latter, so clutzy, is done at a very non-magical conscious level. I don’t even ask the kids to count words. Most teachers do both textual analysis and word counting. But my take on free writes is that, like reading, the learning is in the doing, not in the analyzing. As per Krashen, they get better at reading by reading more and the same most likely applies to writing. I should have asked him that the other day. You could process their work and highlight certain common errors and count words and make graphs and all of that, but, again in my opinion, the real learning is done in the ten minutes. The gains are the same at the end of the year, except you are more tired when you do all that other garbage. Now, you might do the graph counting if you sense that keeping track of their word counts might help their confidence. Should you do it every day in a 95 min. class? Why not? It’s Feb. and they have things to say. I wouldn’t do it in the fall and early winter. Or you could do five minutes. Total time for the entire process is 11 min. (30 sec. on each side to set up and take down the activity.) – no more than that. And, if it were me. I would take one of the free writes and read it to the class automatically changing the errors into correct L2. That’s when the praise should be there. Huge praise. Praise of fascination that your student actually wrote that in French. Circle a lot of stuff, spinning lots of PQA. Love how smart they are. That could go on for half an hour or longer. Watch the kid whose text you read leave the room about an inch off the ground. They need honest praise more than to be challenged. Just my opinion and others please weigh in on this. Great question.