Red Light Green Light: a First Draft Response Method
During a three hour class on Thursday, the students are in two groups, doing a guided workshop. While they are working, I fast read each story. I wanted to give them some feedback. Tell them, essentially, what grade they’d get if this was the draft they turned in.
I was sitting there trying to think of how helpful or unhelpful it would be to get a C on your draft. Even a C that didn’t count. Would that improve your ability to write? Encourage you to spend more time on your story? Create a crisis of confidence? Cause the student to lose faith in my ability to discern fantastic writing? I didn’t want to give all As and Bs. I wanted to give the students some signal they were on the right track, or not on the right track. A helpful signal.
Numbers? A 1, 2, 3? Then I’d have to explain the system, which would be A B C.
The clock was ticking away. I still didn’t have a plan. Rhonda’s Stop/Start/Continue thing was in my mind, rattling around helpful. That would be helpful feedback for me as a teacher.
Signal—then it hit me. Red light, stop this story; yellow light, proceed with caution, you are in dangerous territory, or green light, keep going you are right on track. I could draw a quick rectangle with the lights, and indicate which applied to this writing. So I did that. I think it works fabulously well.
“How’s my driving?” Grades should be a signal offering the student information on how well it’s going and A B C grades do that. But they don’t offer any insight in what to do next. The traffic light does. If it’s not going well, instead of lamenting the D, you need to stop, pull over, conference with the teacher, reread the book, follow the directions (write by hand!). There doesn’t need to be a cop around for you to get that information—red light, stop—from the traffic light. You don’t need a ticket. The information alone is very helpful. Slow down. Slow down. Slow down. Attend to your pace. Go with the flow of the unconscious.
That Red Light Green Light is also a children’s game pleases me. I remember playing Red Light Green Light under the palm trees during recess in Mrs. Varner’s first grade. The goal was to get to that twisty crazy palm whose trunk went horizontal for such a long time. For no reason. It was the greatest tree, the perfect tree, the tree that could become anything you needed it to be. Exactly the goal of writing fiction. Get to that impossible imagination tree. That sweet funky memorable singular thang.
The best teaching strategies come to us in the moment, on the spot, when we are dreaming in front of fifteen people. Just like writing. The best stuff comes only when we’re in it, way down in it.
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Sounds interesting–like the sense of image and imagination. We’ll try it and let you know how it works up here in Minnesota.