Kirsten McWilliams: Throughout the next month, you’re going to practice one paragraph.

Dr. Pamela Cantor: Motivation has a great deal to do with the belief that we can be successful. So what does a grade do to motivation? It can shut it down pretty quickly, especially when children are learning something new.

Kirsten McWilliams: Okay, so we’re going to take five minutes to workshop and organize our writing. I’m not going to grade anything.

When a grade is issued, a decision has been made. The grade becomes definitive. So a lot of the teachers at King Middle School use delayed grading. If you were teaching someone to swim, you might not throw them in the deep end and have them swim. You would start in the shallow end and you would practice and practice and practice. It is a great way to just give them fluency and comfort with the writing process.

I am not assessing your spelling, capitalization, grammar or punctuation at this point. I’m waiting until the end of the unit.

I’ll say, “I’m just worried about your mind, heart and your gut. Put it on the paper.” I can then get to the thinking and the ideas and the details that they’re trying to practice using in their writing.

Masoumeh: It’s real and true that some people die in Syria.

Sometimes, when I write something, it’s, like, “Is this right? Is this right?” It makes me nervous about it. It’s good when she says, “Don’t worry about spelling.”

Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond: The teacher is both allowing these English learners to feel that they can be competent because they’re writing about themselves, which is something they know well, and she’s also reducing their anxiety and their fearfulness about the use of the language by putting grading aside and really enabling them to just become fluent before they learn all of the conventions.

Kirsten McWilliams: At the end of the unit, I need to see the entire writing process. We’re going to be handing it back and forth as you continue to make progress in your academic writing until we’re ready to make it into poetry.

In the practice and in the problem solving and in the troubleshooting, they get a chance to look at where their work didn’t go well or where they didn’t meet the target. Then they get to rework it and revise it.

Masoumeh: She says, “I love your mistakes. It’s okay to make mistakes. By mistake, you can learn more.” She’s a good teacher.

Dr. Pamela Cantor: This teacher wants children to embrace the process of figuring something out and making it better, and to enjoy that. So these kids, had they been graded early, it would’ve shut down that effort instead of opening it up.