"Formative Assessment and the Paradigms of Writing Center Practice"

I have to admit this article took me a while to wade through. (That's what I get for reading only murder mysteries.) Some of the central ideas I took from it were:

1. Writing centers help change the writer;
2. Real education changes the learner;
3. Social constructionist theory argues that we need to help students not to just fit into an academic paradigm but to challenge it; and
4. It's time to question our traditional standard of literacy, which penalizes nonstandard discourse communities.

Although nos. 3 and 4 are interesting and valid points, I don't know that we're ready to tackle them.

I'm intrigued with the idea that to really have an impact, we need to change the writer/learner. As Ann has said repeatedly, we focus on the writer more than on the paper. One key seems to be promoting reflection on the writing/learning process itself. I was especially struck with the quotation, "Writing centers...focus on another important component of formative assessment: generating in the learner a capacity for introspective evaluation of the writing process and the quality of written work created through that process." This is why we ask our student writers so many questions: We learn to write better by thinking about our writing.

What ideas did you take away from this article?