Foster a Culture of Redrafting
"One of the big messages of this school is to do things in greater depth," says Peter Hyman, a co-founder and executive head teacher at School 21. They achieve this through their redrafting process. "What I want to see is not just how good the third draft is, but what is the journey that you've gone on?" adds Hyman.
"It's the drafting and critiquing process that really drives the project," explains Pardoe. In his project with Ahmet, their students will bring in a plan for their essay and get it critiqued, then an introduction which is also critiqued, then a whole first draft focused on grammar, spelling, and punctuation -- and they'll continue to bring in drafts for critiques diving deeper into the concepts behind the essay. They show off their final essay on exhibit night -- either displayed in a book or on a wall.
Their students go through the same critique and redrafting process with working on their immersive play. "They make, they redraft, and they are critiqued," says Ahmet. "We do something called an audience response -- a peer critique. I don't want a top-down structure. I want them to make it for themselves. I want them to own what they do."
Seven teenage boys are standing together at the bottom of a school stairway, looking up, wearing white masks covering their eyes. A girl without a mask is standing across from them, looking toward them.
School 21 students are rehearsing their immersive play.
© Edutopia
Students participate in a weekly audience response, giving feedback about what their peers might keep, add to, or take away from their play. "It points them to the direction of what needs to be improved, what's not clear, and where they need to add more knowledge," says Ahmet. "Our students are buying into this idea of a process. It's OK to not know enough. It's OK to have an idea and then find that actually that idea is completely irrelevant by week 10. What the play looks like in week one will have no resemblance by week 12.