How to keep students motivated to proofread: Practical strategies for the classroom

Proofreading is a critical skill that helps students refine their writing and become more independent writers. However, convincing students to engage deeply in proofreading can sometimes be a challenge. Often, they see it as tedious or irrelevant, leading to disengagement. At the end of the day, they are children. In many ways, they have a wonderful naivety and lack of prejudice when it comes to people’s transcriptional accuracy. They just don’t seem to care about keeping to conventions as much as us adults seem to! However, by drawing on motivational psychology (see our eBook Motivating Writing Teaching for more details), teachers can develop a classroom environment where proofreading becomes a meaningful and motivating part of the writer’s process.

Here’s how you can apply these theories to keep your students motivated when asking them to proofread their writing.

1. Help students see the value of proofreading

Students are more motivated when they see a task as valuable. Many students think proofreading is just about nitpicking grammar, but you can reframe it as an opportunity to strengthen their voice and make their writing more impactful for their readers.

Practical tips: 

• Connect with real audiences: Let students know their writing will be shared beyond the classroom walls — that is going to be published for real. Make sure they know that the proof-reading they are doing therefore matters. You can do this by setting a high-value publishing goal with or for your class at the beginning of a class writing project. 

• Develop peer expertise: Encourage students to become ‘proofreading experts’ in specific areas (e.g. the capitalisation captain, the vocabulary use vixen or the spelling superhero) to build their sense of mastery and writer-identity. These proof-reading experts could be called upon by their peers to help catch a few extra proof-reads! I know of some teachers who give children different hats to indicate their expertise. Extrinsic rewards can be given out to these experts for helping their peers too.

2. Build expectancy for success: Boost their confidence

Students need to believe they will be successful each day. When proofreading feels overwhelming or overly technical, their motivation plummets. Focus on growing their sense of daily proficiency.

Practical tips:

• Model just one proofreading strategy explicitly: Provide clear, step-by-step methods for checking a specific aspect of their manuscript (e.g. using the CUPS method).
  
• Start small: Let students focus on finding one type of error at a time to build success and reduce cognitive overload. As children become better proof-readers, they can slowly be asked to do more within a single session.
  
• Praise effort and improvement: Acknowledge and celebrate every proof-read they find! For example, ask students to count the number of proof-reads they make and reward the winner(s) as being the best proof-readers in town! You should also celebrate the student(s) who have the least number of proof-reads to find (because they write extremely accurately as they draft). Don’t be afraid to use extrinsic motivators and rewards at the proof-reading stage.

• Provide scaffolds: Use checklists, modelled examples, and posters to help guide students (see our eBook: No More: My Class Can’t Edit! for more details).
  

3. Lower the ‘cognitive cost’: Make proofreading feel quick and like no sweat.

If students believe proof-reading is too time-consuming, boring, or likely to end in failure, they’ll see the ‘cognitive cost’ as too high. You can minimise these barriers.

Practical tips:

• Break proofreading into bite-sized tasks. There are lots of ways to do this. For example, proofread for just one CUPS item or proof-read just one paragraph a day.
  
• Make it social: Let children proofread together – and let them see how many proof-reads they can find together. Gamification can work well here. For example, you could introduce a leaderboard. However, it’s important that you celebrate the teams that had the least number of proof-reads to find and the team who found the most.

• You might not like this suggestion – but I’m afraid it’s true. Some of the writing we make needs to be more correct than other pieces. That’s a reality. Maybe for some writing projects, you don’t need to put as much instructional focus into transcriptional accuracy. Instead, you might want to focus on developing other areas of children’s writing proficiency. There are lots of ways to organise writing units with different focuses. Take a look at this article for more details: The Components Of An Effective Writing Unit.
  

• Give timely, supportive verbal feedback: When students see you’re noticing their efforts and not just their mistakes, the emotional ‘cost’ of proof-reading decreases rapidly. Below is an excerpt taken from our eBook: Pupil-Conferencing In The Writing Classroom.

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