Roger Powell
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
The purpose of this revision plan assignment is to help students in first-year composition courses effectively process teacher comments on their writing and make a plan to use them to revise their writing. The assignment rests on the notion that if students approach comments on their writing with a growth mindset, then they will react more positively and utilize these comments to revise their writing. Dweck developed the concept of mindsets after studying people’s beliefs about their skills and intellect. She discovered that individuals tended to fall along a continuum from fixed mindsets to growth mindsets (Mindset the New Psychology of Success). Fixed mindset individuals believe that their skills and intellect are innate and that no amount of hard work can change the skills or intellect they were born with, while growth mindset individuals believe that skills and intellect can be developed with enough hard work, persistence, and learning from failure. Mindsets fall along a continuum because they shift given context. However, Dweck’s research highlights that if an individual has a predominantly growth mindset, it leads to their success, and she lists numerous examples of successful professionals with a growth mindset such as Michael Jordan, Mia Hamm, and Bill Gates (Mindset the New Psychology of Success). Recent research on mindsets in writing contexts shows that approaching teacher comments with a growth mindset can help individuals learn from these comments and revise their writing effectively from comments, especially when the comments are critical of their writing (Powell and Driscoll, forthcoming). The revision plan assignment is usually given about 3-4 weeks into a first-year composition class when students are revising their first longer writing assignment and is repeated with each longer assignment in the course. Students will begin by learning about growth mindsets and how they relate to writing and comments. They will then read the comments and try to do so via a growth mindset. The next part of this assignment will describe how students can build off the previous activity to make a specific revision plan that talks about how students might actually make specific revisions based on comments, discusses how the individual writer develops an aspect of their writing that is not commented on, which promotes continued improvement, and thus presents a further opportunity to think with a growth mindset, and lastly, discusses how they will maintain a growth mindset on future writing projects in this class (or other classes if this is a revision plan for a final paper).