Happy Monday! What a wonderful start to my first full week of student teaching at Essex Middle School. As someone who loves great timing, I was very excited to find out that today, our eighth graders would begin a new unit on westward expansion in the United States— how could I not love starting a new teaching adventure with the start of a new unit? Absolutely perfect, if you ask me.
Since I would like to give myself some time to process the classroom dynamic at the start of our new unit before writing a post (and of course, I would love to pair my reflection as a teacher with the coming reactions of students as we dive deeper into the unit’s introduction), I decided that I will reflect on the unit’s opening days later this week. For now, I would like to focus on a phrase that was said between students last week while working on their literary device poster projects, and then came up again in casual conversation today: “It’s a rough, rough, rough draft. Things can always get better.”
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Originally, I overheard this phrase when a group of friends was encouraging each other to complete their poster rough drafts before the end of class Thursday. Students had two days to complete the entire poster project, and ideally, the rough draft would be approved by the end of day one (the Thursday of our short “welcome back from winter break” week). Mr. J emphasized the idea of having a “rough” draft, asking students to carefully consider their poster layout and examples without pouring too much time into fabulous drawings that would then need to be recreated. Some students took the “rough” draft idea very seriously, sketching quick drawings so they could instead focus on having a plan in place that was worthy of Mr. J’s approval. Other drafts were too detailed to be considered “rough,” while the rest needed a good sanding. For the group of students that I overheard, the concept of a rough draft tended to lean more toward the overdone direction, and I was relieved to hear the friends offer each other both motivation and kind reminders to use their time wisely. After all, two days is not enough time for eight beautifully done drawings. Four sketches and four final examples required careful planning and equitable consideration.
Admittedly, I was (and sometimes still am) one of those students that took the idea of a rough draft and erased the word “rough” from the title along with every mistake I made in the process of its creation. However, with the start of my undergraduate studies, I began to value more deeply the importance of planning out larger projects: the benefits of thinking about an idea and revising that idea repeatedly until it works in both theory and practice are not only obvious, but also enlightening. Measure twice, cut once, right? Well, to pre–college me, rough drafts always felt like a waste of time when art or writing was involved. Why measure twice if nothing was going to be cut and my computer had a backspace key, or my pencil had an eraser? Of course, as my OCD settled in and my thinking matured as an academic, I realized how distracting eraser marks and typos can be from the intended impact of a final product. But, as educators, aren’t we supposed to teach our students that mistakes are something we can learn from? Why not let the final product feature those editing marks as a way to help our students embrace that learning and creating are both defined by flexible pathways to success?
I can see both sides to the argument about how useful a rough draft is when completing a graded assignment (or any project for that matter). Ultimately, I tend to support the completion of a rough draft before moving on to the final product, but I do see where a rough draft may become a “catch–22” when working in a short time frame. However, I was thrilled to hear my students embrace the growth that a “rough” draft implies will be achieved, especially since they only had two days to work on the posters in class. Together, my students encouraged each other to meet deadlines, manage their work time wisely, and apply their skills in a way that allowed them to gradually meet their full potential when it really counted. Assigning students a rough draft as a part of their poster project not only allowed for Mr. J and I to ensure students were on the right track with their examples and understanding, but it also forced students to employ their time management and executive functioning skills in order to complete their projects on time. So, although rough drafts sometimes feel unnecessary, it is clear that they serve a purpose beyond micromanaging student work. In a way, “rough, rough, rough drafts” are really the first layer of a final project, and whether they are physically constructed or not, they must always exist. Encouraging students to actually make the rough draft, therefore, can only further develop their executive functioning skills while aiding in the fruition of their ideas.
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