By Collie Fulford
This reflection could be used during class, but I assign it for pre-conference homework during the Interacting with Texts unit. When I hold Unit II conferences, I don’t ask for a draft yet. Instead, students come in with all their generative material so that we can talk about writing decisions at this messiest of stages in the process. To help them notice their own strongest ideas about a direction for this project before I put my 2-cents in, I have students sort through their collected writings primarily with the intention of finding a focus for their draft. Part 3 gets them into gleaning for good material that corresponds to their focus, and Part 4 asks them to try to balance between their ideas and the author’s.
My conference actions then depend on how far they have taken these steps by themselves. If some students have had a lot of difficulty with sorting through on their own, we can talk through these first steps together. For those who come in well-focused, we can use the conference to discuss selecting relevant sections of their Writer’s Notebook to develop or to organize what they’ve chosen.
- WEIGHING YOUR INTEREST
- Gather all the interactions (i.e. summaries and responses) that you have done so far with the two central readings of Unit II. Which of the essays did you find yourself responding to most richly? This does not necessarily mean which essay did you like better or find yourself agreeing with more, but rather which one provoked the most involved responses from you? Is it clearly one more than the other? If no, then you might consider working with both texts by looking for threads of commonality in your responses to each essay.
- LOCATING A THESIS
- As you reread your Writer’s Notebook, notice where your writing seems most engaged and what you feel most strongly about. Is there a theme to your responses? What is one thing that you most want to say? Is there something that you think people who may not have read and experienced what you have ought to understand better (or questioning more deeply)?
- CONNECTING TO THE CENTER
- Place the thing that you most want to say, your thesis, right at the center of a page. Now, locate in your Writer’s Notebook any ideas that seem associated to that central claim – ideas that contradict or support it, details that explain it, and experiences that seem connected in some way to that center.
- BALANCING THE INTERACTION
- Notice if most of the connections to the center seem to be from summaries or quotes of the author or from your own associations and experiences. If you have only two references to the essay itself, for instance, go back to the reading and your Writer’s Notebook and see if you can locate other parts of the reading that relate to the center and to your commentary about it. If on the other hand, you’ve mainly chosen summaries of the author’s ideas, review the Writer’s Notebook and/or generate more responses from your own perspective in order to present some balance between your ideas and those of the author.
