15 Suggestions for Encouraging Scaffolding & Revision
Adapted from John C. Bean, Engaging Ideas, pgs. 35-37. To promote revision Bean recommends building interactive elements into an assignment or a course.
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1) Profess a problem-driven model of the writing process.
Instead of asking students to choose "topics" and narrow them, encourage students to pose questions or problems and explore them.
2) Give problem-focused writing assignments.
Students are most apt to revise when their essays must be responses to genuine problems.
3) Create active learning tasks that help students becomes posers and explorers of questions.
Students need to be seized by questions and to appreciate how the urge to write grows out of the writer's desire to say something new about a question or problem.
4) Incorporate low-stakes exploratory writing into your course.
Exploratory writing gives students the space, incentive, and tools for more elaborated and complex thinking.
5) Build talk time and writing center conferences into the writing process.
Writers need to bounce ideas off interesting listeners, to test arguments, to see how audiences react, and to get feedback on drafts.
6) Intervene in the writing process by having students submit something to you.
Take advantage of the nature of thesis-based writing by having students submit to you their problem proposals, thesis statements, nut shelling statements, or self-written abstracts.
7) Build process requirements into the assignment, including due dates of drafts.
If students are going to stay up all night before a paper is due, make that an all-night sessions for a mandatory rough draft rather than for a finished product.
8) Develop strategies for peer review of drafts, either in class or out of class.
After students have completed a rough draft, well in advance of the final due date, have students exchange drafts and serve as "readers" fir each other.
9) Hold writing conferences, especially for students who are having difficulty with the assignment.
Time spent "correcting" finished products is not as valuable as time spent in conference with students at the rough draft stages.
10) Require students to submit all drafts, notes, and doodles along with final copies.
Not only will you have evidence of your students' writing process, but you will also set up a powerful collection of work product to assess growth and revision efficacy.
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11) Allow rewrites, or make revision-oriented comments on typed next-to-final drafts.
Many students are motivated toward revision by the hope for an improved grade. If students have an opportunity to revise an essay after you have made your comments, you will strike a major blow for writing as a process.
12) Bring in examples of your own work in progress so that students can see how you go through the writing process yourself.
The more you can show students your own difficulties as a writer, the more you can improve your own self-images.
13) Give advice on the mechanics of revising.
If students compose entirely online, explain the advantages of revising on a double-spaced hard copy rather than on the screen.
14) Don't overemphasize essay exams.
Although essay exams obviously have an important place in liberal education, they should not substitute for writing that goes through multiple drafts.
15) Hold to high standards for finished products.
Students do not see much point in revision if they can earn A's or B's for their quickly edited first drafts.