Megan's Menu Had Many Tasty Choices! (Megan's Demo, June 24, 2009)

[Pam Downing]

Megan Menard set our minds on fire with possibilities as she presented a rich response to a common dilemma: what do you do with a student who can't even write a paragraph...when you assigned an essay...and what do you do for a student in the same class whose essay could probably be published in The New Yorker? As Megan so thoughtfully stated, when she assesses student writing she finds that, "The results are really mine, not the kids." Also, the result of over-commenting on a student's paper (or, as one of her student responses put it, "...your Rainbow Bright pen throw up thing on my paper.") can be discouraging to student writers who struggle. Added to that, the amount of thinking and commenting that most English teachers do can take so much time that papers are turned back very late or we never get sleep. How to streamline these practices was central to Megan's demo.

Megan read her original poem, That Sucks, to bring home the point that we need to be careful to include students in the process of evaluating their writing, especially in the revision process.

Megan's demo question was: What happens to the quality and depth of writing when students are given a menu of revision strategies to use as a tool to take their writing to a more advanced level?" Fellows sought to help answer this question by using Megan's MAGNIFICENT menu and a Quick Check form to look at student work and direct them to the next step in their revision. Megan's menu contained a variety of student samples, as well as a few professional excerpts, that students could use as models for anything from Hooks and Introductions to Figurative Language and Proofreading. Fellows discussed how this menu gives students something really solid to refer to.

Woven throughout this whole process were some extremely entertaining movie quotes! ...and of course, relevant research citations as well.

Thanks, Megan. You stirred our minds, and you brought a very ambigious process into a very workable form. We're excited to see where your Demo leads you during the next school year.