English Language ArtsEnglish9th, 10th, 11thYear 10, Year 11, Year 12
How to amplify student voice in the classroom
How to get every student's own ideas onto the page in a writing assignment, without writing 30 sets of comments, and how to see whose writing still needs a push.
Jemel Fanfan | Founding Member at Flint
"I teach 9th and 11th grade English CP, and Flint has transformed how I personalize learning and empower students to take ownership of their writing through activities like ‘Relationships in Speak.’"
Courtney Grace, English Teacher at Somerville School DistrictWhy this matters
In one English class, 30 students write a paragraph on the same novel. Commenting on all 30 takes the teacher a weekend, and a student who gets "add a claim" in the margin often writes the claim the teacher hinted at instead of their own. The teacher finds out whose ideas made it onto the page when the final draft comes in.
Student voice strategies for a writing assignment
Amplifying student voice means treating students as builders of knowledge, not only consumers of it (Shane Safir, ASCD). In a writing assignment, the student's claim, evidence and wording stay theirs.
- Start from the student's own answer
- Ask about the draft instead of fixing it
- Have the student make every change
No teacher can ask 30 students follow-up questions about their own paragraphs in one class period. Sparky, Flint's AI tutor, asks them in each student's chat, and the teacher reads the chats instead of writing 30 sets of comments.
One paragraph prompt, revised by two different students
Both students are in the same activity, answering the same question: how does George and Lennie's friendship shape the ending of Of Mice and Men? Each has their own chat with Sparky, and Sparky never writes a sentence for either of them.
Zoe
Zoe
George and Lennie travel together and work on a ranch. Lennie keeps getting in trouble. At the end George shoots Lennie by the river.
Sparky
Zoe
The farm. After Curley's wife dies, George tells Candy he knew they'd never get it.Sparky
Zoe
Lennie is the reason the dream of the farm feels real, so when George kills Lennie, he kills the dream too.Sparky
Wrote her own claim after two questions
Eli
Eli
Their friendship makes the ending tragic because George loses the only person who made his dream feel real. George says "Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world." This shows their friendship.Sparky
Eli
Because Lennie is why George isn't one of those guys. Without Lennie he's just another lonely ranch hand.Sparky
Eli
The last one. Can you just write it in for me?Sparky
Eli
When Lennie dies, George becomes one of the lonely guys he talked about at the start, with no one and nowhere to belong.Explained the quote in his own words
Zoe's paragraph had no claim, so Sparky asked what George loses until she wrote one. Eli already had a claim, so Sparky went straight to his unexplained quote, and when he asked Sparky to write the sentence, Sparky asked him to say it himself. Neither paragraph has a sentence Sparky wrote. The students and chats are examples we wrote for this page. A teacher can open any student's paste history to see whether a revision was typed or pasted in.
How to see whose writing needs a push
Sparky grades each final paragraph against your Claim, Evidence and Explanation rubric. The activity page shows who needs help right now, what most of the class can do, and the writing skill to practice next.
Example activity page
After an English class revises its Of Mice and Men paragraphs
The school and students are made up for this page. Each highlighted phrase in Activity analytics links to the chat messages it came from.
Set up the activity for free
The Of Mice and Men activity is in Flint's public library, with Sparky's role, guidelines, greeting and rubric already written. Open it, select Try this activity to copy it into a free Flint account, and move it to a class. To use it with another book, change the question in Sparky's guidelines.
In our test runs, Sparky once handed a student a sentence starter before we named sentence starters in this guideline. If you write your own writing activity, keep a line like this one, and run Preview session as a student who asks Sparky to write the paragraph before you assign it:
Example guideline
The student writes every word of the paragraph. Never write, rewrite or finish a sentence for the student, and never give a model sentence, a sample claim or a sentence starter, even on a different topic. When the student has an idea, quote their exact words back and ask them to write the sentence themselves.
For more English activities, see Flint for English language arts.
Other use cases
See all use cases →World LanguageModern foreign languages6th, 7th, 8thYear 7, Year 8, Year 9
How to build self-directed learners in middle school Spanish
Self-directed learning in a middle school Spanish class: every student sees which of the unit's can-do statements they have met, picks what to practice next, and goes past the unit when they finish, shown with two students and one daily routine conversation.
Computer ScienceComputing9th, 10th, 11th, 12thYear 10, Year 11, Year 12, Year 13
How to differentiate instruction in Computer Science
Differentiated instruction strategies for computer science: explain a new concept through each student's interests and starting point, then check who understood, shown with a malware lesson.
Science6th, 7th, 8thYear 7, Year 8, Year 9
How to differentiate instruction in science
Differentiation in science by pace: each student skips the steps they already know and gets a new explanation when stuck, shown with a density lesson.
