Beginning with the students: ownership through reflection and goal setting

Harford, M. (2008). Beginning with the students: ownership through reflection and goal setting. English Journal, 98,(1), 61-65.


This is a short “how-I-did-it” article by a former urban high school English teacher. Harford wanted her students to take ownership of their writing and to become independent, self-critical, reflective writers.

The strength of this article is the real-life examples of various types of student writers. These will ring true for high school teachers, who are the article's audience. The article feels “authentic.”

I saw the article as a description of writing/writers’ “dispositions” (though that word was never used) under development. It also was a description of the development of self-evaluative skills and of decision-making skills. The most impressive piece to me was goal-setting. The idea of taking one moderate, concrete goal at a time was sound, and is grounded in motivational research and theory (a tad of which was cited here).

This article is not a complex discussion of research and theory, though. Rather, it is a classroom story about a teacher who decided to help students reach a higher level.