During this semester, you will be reading drafts of papers from real students in class.  We will negotiate how we will be responding to them, but we will be considering the assignment parameters designed by the classroom teacher as well as the types of responses appropriate for various drafts. 

You will be able to include these papers in your portfolio for this class.  During your student teaching experience, I encourage you to add to this section WITH THE STUDENTS' PERMISSION.  You might want to write a short permission form, which the student will sign, to indicate to the portfolio reader that you have gained the students' permission to use their work.  You should remove the students' names from the originals and keep the forms in a separate section so they cannot be tied to each other.  Again, this is a section of your portfolio that you'll want to keep updating throughout your career, and you'll begin in this class (you won't need the permission for me), in a safe and supportive environment.

You should write an introduction to this section of the portfolio, an introduction that contextualizes the writing, your collaboration with the client, and your responses to it.  You might want to discuss what the original assignment was as well as why you are including that particular student piece in your portfolio.  Here is a sample introduction from my portfolio:

Responses to Student Work

Introduction

 Teaching has afforded me with many opportunities to respond to students' writing.  These selections represent some of the ways that I try to engage students in a dialogue about their work.

 The teaching philosophies were written for the Teaching of Literature, English 296 course that I teach.  As a former secondary teacher, I feel it is important for the students to articulate their beliefs about teaching before they go into student teaching as well as to supplement their professional portfolios and prepare them for job interviews.  I try to respond as a fellow teacher, as their teacher, and as an administrator, balancing my comments between encouraging their hopes to promote learning for all their students through constructivist pedagogy and cautioning them to remember how administrators will view non-traditional teaching styles.

 "Reflections of Mother" is from a young woman who writes about her relationship with her mother.  This was the first essay the students wrote for English 101, a "significant personal belief."  I found that this essay was especially difficult to respond to because while the student was trying to deal her feelings about her mother through writing, she wrote only in generalities and in an ornate style that was hard to read at times.  I tried to evaluate her paper as an objective reader without invalidating her experience.

 "What if you didn't join a Fraternity" represents the fourth essay of English 101, a response to the essay to persuade.  In the original essay, the student wrote an essay persuading freshmen men to consider joining a fraternity.  In the response, the student has developed a persona, a freshman who didn't join, and he responds almost as a peer reviser to his original essay.  In this way, the student is able to see his original arguments and find the weaknesses, thereby getting ideas for his portfolio version.

Questions?  Please raise them in class so that everyone may benefit from the clarification.