Kids Care Who their Audience Is
Their intention was to make each other laugh - it was silly, gratuitous violence; I would call it going for a "cheap laugh."
My CT handled it with authenticity and in a well-considered way when she talked with the students. In speaking to me about it, she said she understood that
some of this is fitting with the kids' development stage.
But the thing she said that got an audible groan from the kids was that some of them must have forgotten that the sixth graders would be reading their completed stories to their third grade buddies.
It was amazing to see how instantly the kids were able to understand how inappropriate some of their stories were after they got that piece of information. The sixth graders love their reading buddies, so they did care about the effect their writing could have on them. With some guidelines for revision, they were able to make the stories o.k. for the little kids (e.g., bullets become marshmallows). It was such a nice example of the power of knowing who you are writing for.
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I absolutely love how your CT handled this. It just goes to show the importance of giving our students an authentic purpose for their writing! Do you think your students' stories would have looked different if your CT would have reminded them of reading to their third grade buddies from the start?
ReplyDeleteThe audience saves the day! Here is the evidence that audience does matter for student writings. I agree with above comment, it is curious to think what their stories might have been like had they been aware of their audience from the beginning. Do you think that would have focused their writing in a different way?
ReplyDeleteI love how your CT handled this as well, this approach pushed the students to come up with their own solution. I also love the idea of writing stories for younger buddies. It is so much easier to think about writing for your audience when you actually have one!
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of the way we learned how to give feedback in science notebooks, it removes the teacher from the focus and makes the audience someone else.