Chapter 4 - Raise Your Expectations

This chapter could be a "study" itself. Wow! It was packed with great ideas . . . It's a chapter I'll review over and over.

I loved Routman's idea that we should expect good, legible handwriting and refuse to accept poor, sloppy handwriting. (And yet that seems so archaic when we're looking at the content of writing. But, if I can't read the handwriting, I can't evaluate the content.)

I also loved her suggestion to raise our expectations for editing. I've noticed that students in my room expect me to edit for them. Of course I should edit for them. I'm the teacher. Wrong! But changing students' ideas that editing is the teacher's role is difficult. Plus, when students do spend time editing their papers, they don't do as thorough a job as I expect. It seemed like I spend more time asking students to "look carefully at the paper and re-edit" than I do evaluating the content of the paper. Routman states that students should "understand that readers expect text to be error-free." (pp.69) I need to develop a stronger understanding of error-free text in my classroom. We might declare our classroom an "E.F.T. Zone" (error-free text zone).

I also agree with Routman's suggestion to rely on scaffolded conversations (pp. 77). I tried this in our classroom and was pleased with the results. First, I held the conversation with one student and recorded ideas on chart paper. I asked questions that I hoped would lead to more detailed descriptions and I saw the student make a better attempt at fully describing the event than in previous pieces. Then, I had students talk with one another before they started writing. I didn't ask students to do a formal "pre-write", relying only on the conversations before writing. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the content. It seemed as if students "wrote what they said", rather than trying to write sentences and paragraphs from a story web. The pre-write definitely captured voice more than traditional story webs, and the stories seemed to have a more natural flow.