Woods vs. Freeland

I feel like Kate Freeland lays out a lot of ideas and approaches that I'd kind of had floating around in my head but hadn't been able to solidify into words. The end goal, as Freeland notes, is getting students to be reflective writers. As Freeland describes it, "Reflective writing teaches student writers to evaluate their own work, which makes my job as a facilitator much less stressful. I agree with Elbow (1986) that we haven't taught the student how to do something unless she can determine on her own whether she has done it." (250). Similarly, my goal had always been to get students to think for themselves and learn how to improve their own writing without specific instructions on what to fix.

As I mentioned in class on Monday, I've always been a little wary about critiquing the work of my fellow writers. Much of this stems from a concern regarding one person's creative taste clashing with anothers. But there's still carryover when it comes to academic papers. Naturally I was curious about what types of things I'd be saying and doing to help my students improve their work. Frankly, I don't think I'd be particularly good at laying out a concrete series of steps or bullet points that would result in a quality paper. Fortunately, according to Freeland at least, I may not have to do this. It could be that being a good teacher doesn't necessarily mean I have to come up with brilliant pointers as to how students can improve their papers. It could be that all I need to do is work at being an effective mirror, a fellow writer who reflects my students' ideas and thoughts back upon themselves and really makes them think about why they are saying what they are saying and how they can improve their own words. This is an approach that I think I'd be much better suited for. It's also a notion I'll keep in mind when attending future creative writing workshops.

Interestingly, Freeland's philosophy seems to run counter to some of the other authors we've just read. When critiquing student papers, she puts great stock in asking open ended questions. In her words, "I ask questions such as, "Is this what you want to say?" or "How can you revise this sentence to make it easier to read?" or "As a writer, you have several choices—which do you think conveys your meaning to you reader?" When my students answer open-ended, nonevaluative questions, they hear in their own language, based on their experience as readers and listeners, what their reader needs or wants from the text." (247) It strikes me that this advice stands in contrast to the approach taken by teachers such as Peggy Woods, who wrote that "I want peer responses to be effective in terms of revision by providing comments that do not correct but rather offer descriptive reactions to the text, questions that enable the writer to think about the piece in a new way, and options for revision." (188) First of all, it seems to me that there is a pretty thin line between "correcting" and offering "options for revision." There may be a difference in tone, but the end result is the same. It seems that it would be hard to avoid one while striving to incorporate the other. Second, this is a highly different approach from Freeland's open ended questions. I recognize that the former was talking about teacher comments and the latter student comments. But if taken together that would make for an interesting classroom, one where students get most of their writing tips not from the teacher but from fellow students. It's a conundrum, because I can see the value of both approaches, I'm just not sure they would work well together.