Scott Lunn LAE3333 Amy Piotrowski

CASE STUDY: MR. FILALOS During the fall semester of 2013 at Florida State University, I was able to have a case study different from anything that I had done in my educational career. When my professor Amy told us that we would have the chance to grade REAL high school students essays this semester I was thrilled. This was very exciting for me because I am feeling more and more like an English teacher the further along in my schooling that I go. This semester I had the chance to grade twenty or so essays that students had written while practicing for the FCAT. The main thing that I have noticed while grading all of these essays is how inconsistent the knowledge of the students is. I would go from one essay that had a well-developed thesis, transitions, argument, evidence for the argument, and a conclusion, and feel like Mr. Filalos was doing an exceptional job teaching the student writing structure; then I would flip to an essay that only had one paragraph with none of the elements that I stated above. It was hard for me to understand how such a large gap in writing skill could happen and I knew that there could be several reasons that could probably explain this such as socioeconomic status or an English language learner. Going from one students writing to the next I noticed a trend of under-developed paragraphs and the lack of formal speech while writing a formal paper. Many of the students have used I and would use clich statements to try to solidify a point. I am not saying that the students having a voice in their writing is a bad thing; however, there is a fine line during formal writing where voicing your opinion can be unbeneficial. Moreover, many of the students would state claims and then just move on to their next idea without support for their argument. I think it is important for Mr. Filalos to teach the students that they can claim anything in their paper, but

the support or evidence for their claim is most important when trying to persuade someone. Without support, an argument is simply an unprovable opinion. When I was grading these students essays, I was constantly giving them feedback where it was appropriate. From the very first sentence, I was looking for elements in the paper that could use improvement and make the student a better writer. Most of the time, I would give feedback that ended with a ? mark. I did this because I did not want the students to feel like my comments were set in stone or 100% the right way to write. After all, writing is an artistic thing that students should be comfortable doing with their own personal style. The question mark gave students the chance to think about the possibility of writing in a different way to accomplish the same overall purpose. The majority of the time like I mentioned above, I would need to ask where the support to their argument was and if there was a more formal way of saying something that they said in their paper. I think this is a method that I will use when I am a teacher as well. Unfortunately, I was carrying a fever when Mr. Filalos made a visit to our classroom so I cannot talk about that in great detail. However, I did hear a classmate talking about how Mr. Filalos does not write lesson plans. I was really surprised by this and it made me wonder how many of my old teachers did the same thing. It started to click with me that there was this possibility because I used to have teachers that I would think wow, how can they be so flexible with their lesson and just act like they were going to see where the class would take us? Now this made some sense and I began to think if I would be more structured than Mr. Filalos? One thing that I have learned by grading some of the students writing this semester is a quote from one of my textbooks, teach the writer, not the writing. I say this because it has never been clearer to me that every student will come in the first day of school at a different

academic level. I think that grading these essays has opened my mind and shown me that I really am going to have to be the teacher and not assume anything from a new group of students. Lastly, I have learned how to use a new style of grading called holistic scoring. This type of grading usually jumps in increments of five or a scale of 1 to 5, with nothing in between. Thus, it makes it very difficult to give someone a 47/50 when the only options there are is 45 and 50. Personally, from my experience I found myself wanting to give students scores that would fall in between two of the scoring levels. When I would run into this situation I almost always gave them the lower score because it was never quite good enough for the higher one. I did not like this aspect of this type of scoring because I felt that it did not give a clear representation of the grade that the student deserved. If at all possible I will not use holistic scoring but lean more toward an analytic scoring rubric so that I can award a specific amount of points while grading. Overall, I learned a great deal about myself and about grading essays through this case study that I will be able to apply in my profession.