Ten Reasons Why

I believe teachers may be on shaky ground if we make evaluation of the student's writing part of the public performance, which is what I saw Will doing with his students.

There are a few concerns here:

1. The legal concerns. FERPA prevents distribution of a minor student's "educational record" without parental consent. What defines an "educational record" isn't clear, but in my experience most districts interpret it liberally to err on the side of caution.

Posting to weblogs might be considered public performance and parents usually don't accuse districts of FERPA violations because the star student in the school play was listed in the program. Of course, that program with the student's name isn't distributed world-wide either. :-/

However, once you start posting evaluations of student work (by teachers or peers, like Will did) to a publicly available weblog, I think that districts would be right to worry about the legality of making evaluation of assignments public.

With kids under 13 you might run into COPPA violations as well. Again, parental consent is the key.

2. The ethical concerns. Legal issues aside, I find exposing a evaluation of a student's work -- even informal evaluation such as peer reviews -- to the entire world to be problematic. Even if feedback on writing assignments is provided constructively, it can be apparent which students have excelled and which are having trouble. Students who receive poor evaluations, or even feedback that makes it apparent their writing skills are not strong, may suffer more and feel shame if those evaluations are posted for anyone in the world to see.

3. The pedagogical perspective. As a writing instructor, one of the hardest things to overcome is the lack of confidence the vast majority of learners feel about their writing skill. In my classes, I always endeavored to provide a "safe" environment in which the students can explore their writing skills. Part of creating that sense of safety is the understanding that "drafts don't count." No one but your teacher and your peer review group sees them. Assuming the peer review group and teacher can provide constructive feedback, this idea of a low-risk draft should ideally provide the student with the freedom to experiment more. Making the drafts available online for the world to see works against the idea of a low-risk environment; some students may feel additional pressure to perform in the draft phase of the writing process because that's being made public. And they shouldn't -- drafts shouldn't "count." But making the draft phase -- and particularly the evaluation of those early phases -- available to the world may make them "count" more for students who are already intimidated by writing.