Being in Draft Mode

In our Tech Mentor meeting last week, Tricia mentioned a development within her lessons in which she has encouraged her students to leave their thoughts and work as a draft. It made me wonder how often we encourage the importance of draft writing in students work in their portfolios? How often are we as teachers modelling this notion of drafts in our own practise of portfolios?

Sometimes, it becomes very easy to focus on the completion of a project, to demonstrate and showcase learning, to work towards a goal. We all enjoy that feeling of when we have completed a target, finished a task, ticked another piece off our to-do list. Perhaps what I find most interesting about this process is that once we have finished, we can be very keen to set another goal. It seems that we tend to discuss the journey of fulfilling the goal, and often the completion may not be as satisfying.

This made me wonder, are we fixated with getting to the finish line and curating the perfect blog post? Perhaps not in terms of teaching our own subjects but in our approach to writing on blogs and portfolios. 

Can we find harmony is leaving blog posts in draft mode?

Is task of publishing a post on our blogs creating a mindset that we are only interested in the finished product?

So in order to explore the notion of being in draft mode, I am going to continue to share my posts even when they are incomplete from my perspective. Maybe it would be interesting for someone to read my edits, adaptations and new thoughts? Or alternatively, it could work to create a set of posts in parts or sections to encourage acceptance that it is ok to need to continue to work towards something.

What I am still thinking about but not quite sure how to put into words:

• How does a draft process help us to visualise and contextualise changes that have taken place?
• How can we use an acceptance of the draft process to support students within the Extended Essay or Internal Assessments?
• How do we value the draft process of writing?
• What are the research findings on this area?