Early Harvest - Selecting Stories
Over the school holidays the young editors met for an important mission: to finalise the list of stories and poems to include in the next edition of Early Harvest for the theme Adventure!
This was the culmination of a process that we've been chipping away at since our very first meeting in August this year! The first thing we did was determine the rubric we'd be using to fairly and consistently judge the submissions we'd received. We did this by looking at last year's rubric and making changes/improvements to suit the theme and our own ideas about what makes a good story.
Here’s a screenshot of the very messy democratic way we decided to choose the rubric system:
Each week editors were assigned a set of submissions to read, ensuring that they were all read and reviewed by at least 3 of our 14 young editors. As a group we all provided individual feedback on what we loved and ways to improve each submission.
Based on this feedback and the combined scores given to the submissions, we whittled our list of 130 submissions down to a "longlist" of 40. Which was an epic but exciting task!
Once we had everything in place, the process of decision-making went like this:
Looking at all the submissions, we discussed which stories were similar enough that including them alongside each other would cause the book to feel repetitive (part of our audience experience was that we wanted the book to feel like it had variety!). So a decision was made on which to keep and which to cut.
Individual editors were then asked to "advocate" for a specific submission, saying that they thought it belonged in our book and why. After hearing their reasons, we asked for anyone to "double-advocate" and support the first editor, and then we did a "pulse-check" to see how people were feeling.
After a seriously hard-working session full of debate, discussion, and confident advocating from the editors, we had decided our final list of 15 submissions! We can't wait to share them with you.
Early Harvest is a dynamic program for upper-primary students that gives them an in-depth experience of the publishing process. Under the program, we bring together an editorial board of Year 5 and 6 students who publish an annual fiction publication written by their peers.
View and buy all our previous fiction books from the program.