Since it seems pretty subjective and arbitrary to assign grades to final papers, I definitely plan on putting more weight on how students progress through the process of writing. While the Dornan text can be a bit dry, it also has a lot of useful, practical activities and ideas concerning assessment. I liked the questions proposed on page 184 for a student to evaluate his or her own paper before conferencing with other students or the teacher. This puts the responsibility on the student to recognize where they need to focus. Helping students to understand what questions to ask of themselves and their writing is important to their taking ownership of their learning. After all, one thing I want my students to consider is the fact that they won't always have a teacher there to help guide them through their writing and its problems, so they need to learn how to evaluate it themselves.

I also liked the idea of dialogue journals...even though they seem unpractical in some ways (since the teacher probably won't have time to read them all, all the time). But I think having this dialogue is important. I remember doing dialogue journals in grade school, and I was always anxious to see what the teacher had to say. Even though she didn't respond to each day's entry, when she did respond, I really appreciated it. Even in graduate school, I appreciate seeing the teacher's comments in the margins of my papers. It might be interesting to try this kind of journal with students reading and responding to each others' journals. Although the dynamic would be completely different with a student responder. Encouraging words from a teacher go a long way; Dornan says "students are more likely to remember what teachers praise (and do it again in future papers) than they are to value comments on problems in the paper." But I have to say that one of the teachers whose comments are still at the forefront of my mind when I'm writing papers today are those of my college Shakespeare professor. He was super old school, (his first name was Standish, I kid you not). He was SUPER critical of papers (and this was my junior year at Madison, I thought I had a pretty good idea of how to write a good paper by this point), and he TORE my papers apart. I've never seen so much red ink on one of my papers. But despite the fact that he was not full of encouraging words, he had a major influence on how I write academic papers. So it's not all butterflies and smiley faces. Although they help...especially at the secondary level where students are still striving to find their voices and their strengths. Perhaps part of why I appreciated Standish's harsh critiques was because I was at a more advanced level of writing by that point in my academic career. As secondary English teachers, we don't want to critique student work harshly so that they are turned away from the subject matter...we need to challange and encourage at the same time.