Gamification for On-Demand WRiting
Written by Destinee Anderson | destinee.anderson@uamaker.nyc
Embedded Files
Problem of Practice
I’m interested in building confidence in my students' abilities to write on-demand. My students struggle to pick up a pencil and write anything longer than four sentences. They feel frustrated and boggled by the task and outcome, but also make claims that their writing is bad/ineligible/unstructured/not relevant and that their ideas are not good enough. What does it even mean to be good enough? I want to continue to find strategies to help them feel confident in writing and writing for long periods of time.
Hypothesis
If I can develop sets of pre-written questions in a sequence about their brainstorming and writing process then students will write in a sustained and specific time frame without issue as measured by timed writing practices and student outcome.
Strategy
Learning strategy explanation: In connection to timed writing practices, I created a game, called “The Amazing Race” that can be applied to multiple contexts. In connection to these pre-written questions, I wanted to encourage students to use them and use them quickly as there are various spaces in their lives that would require them to write on-demand, the ELA Regents included.
This game asks students to write a short response (ie a text analysis response, thematic paragraph, a intro, etc) in a team against other teams. With this task, students get 2 minutes or less to write a sentence (or as much as they can) before passing the pen to the next person in their group. The idea is that as a team, students are working as one mind – encouraging them to think aloud with their group members about the semantics, tone, and choices of their writing. This activity was also incentivized by a prize when I demoed it with my sections.
Target group
A problem I’m currently facing is that students in all my classes don’t really understand how to use their notes to guide their writing. They don’t see the connection between assignments and that past graded assignments can and should be used to write, especially long forms of writing. My students struggle with note-taking; they see note-taking as busy work, not as helpful to the writing process. They also only see feedback as an opportunity to raise their grade, not as an opportunity to use the feedback to revise their writing. They only see grades and thus have a low confidence in writing.
Then, low confidence leads to “opting” out which creates a cyclical pattern of something that doesn’t enable students to see their own growth as a learner. In general, my students don’t understand that there needs to be sustained attention and effort to see growth in any area of their lives, included, but not limited to writing.
All this to say, my target group was all of my sections, but I have data specifically from my A band on how the activity went for them.
Planning & resources
Chapters of Cynthia Gallenger’s “Puzzling Moments, Teachable Moments”
My co-teacher, Madeehah and her expertise around Text Analysis Response
Reflection
How I measured success:
Measured through Regents Scores — students who received low marks for the Text Analysis response on the Mock Regents scored a passing grade on the actual Regents for the Text Analysis response
Teacher reflection:
I think overall, this activity worked well for most students as they were excited to play and engaged the entirety of the class time. They also actively used the resources available and were motivated by each other to make sure they were addressing the task and standards.
When I do this again, I’m looking for ways to apply this strategy to longer forms of writing (ie 5 paragraph essay) and to find another way to structure the writing (where they write it) as I had a lot of chart papers on my walls after having students complete this task.
Student reflections:
Actionable steps
If you want to use this strategy in your classroom, I recommend …
Making sure students understand the purpose of the activity is to push them to build sustained writing practices
Pre-group students so that the structure works/encourages students to work with those who they don’t often work with
Stress the importance of “think talk” or talking aloud as when participating in this activity, students should think of themselves as one mind.
Reach out to Destinee Anderson if you have any questions, or want support adapting this practice to your classroom!
Email: destinee.anderson@uamaker.nyc
Page updated
Report abuse