Before reading Richard Haswell’s article on Responding to Student Writing, I hadn’t given much thought to commenting. I suppose a lot of this has to do with the fact that I’ve never been in a position of power to judge and grade student writing before. While I did work in the Writing Center during my time as an undergraduate, I only provided thoughts and suggestions to student’s writing and never passed judgment or assigned grades to their writing. Now that I’m in a position where I’m force to respond to the student’s writing and assign an actual grade to it, I’m also forced to consider how my comments will affect the student. I do believe very strongly that comments play a huge part in how students learn to become better writers; it certainly helped me in my writing experience and while I don’t necessarily think that it is the only way students learn to write, I do think feedback and adapting to feedback is a necessary part in anyone’s writing education, especially college freshman.
It seems strange to me when I mention to people that I was forced to take freshman composition at my undergrad they always have the same response of: really? I think I learned a lot about writing during that course, things that I probably hadn’t even considered during my writing life in high school and I am grateful for that. Looking back at that course, I can’t remember what assignments I had to complete or what the actual material we covered was. But the one thing that I always seem to remember is the impression I had after reading my instructor’s comments, simply because they often pointed out things that I hadn’t thought of to write about. Before that class I never had any teacher thoughtfully respond to my writing; it was always “great job!” or worthless comments that didn’t help me whatsoever. I never had comments about how to actually improve my writing. And while a lot of people in this program didn’t take freshman composition, and probably never needed it, I still see a huge amount of benefit in it mostly because of the feedback in teacher’s comments. It’s these comments that allow the student to hear other ideas and forces them to make a conscious decision about their writing that ultimately allows them to write better. The complexity theory, or whatever it’s called, which makes the theory of evolution makes perfect sense when applied to writing and commenting. Giving feedback as a teacher and allowing students to adapt to that feedback is a natural process of writing, and I think that this goes hand in hand with writing pedagogy.
I agree with the sentiment that giving feedback and allowing students to adapt accordingly is a very natural learning process--for the student. We are students too though, and we're just now learning how to grade and comment on papers effectively. I'd like to think a minute about the learning process we are engaged in as first-time graders.
ReplyDeleteSo, we give feedback to students. Then we get feedback on our feedback--from Dr. Lang. As a future teacher, I can't help but wonder whether student feedback is just as important as expert teacher feedback.
I spoke to Dr. Lang about that when we met for my evaluation. She told me that if I had concerns about my commentary, I should talk to my CI. My CI would be able to tell me whether anyone had complained or had questions about one of the documents I graded. I didn't find that too helpful though. Maybe students aren't complaining about my work, but that doesn't mean they didn't have a very specific reaction to it.
So, we're adapting to the feedback we get from a teacher who knows the students. Isn't the feedback we would get from the students themselves just as valuable though, given that we will be interacting with them on a much more personal level later on? Is our learning process being compromised?
I absolutely agree that commenting truly does affect students when they read it. This is based off my own experience in high school, where time and again I would have that little squiggly line under half a line or so with the letters "awk" beside it, once again telling me how my diction and sentence was awkward and needed revision. Because of that however, I have worked on that aspect of my writing and feel as if I have improved greatly on that one thing specifically. While I am not sure if these freshmen are reading and soaking in every word of red that I type onto their essays, I do believe they get something out of it that will help them somehow, even if it is just in their next assignment.
ReplyDeleteI think that is awesome that you had to take freshman composition. I almost feel that it would have been beneficial for myself to have to go back over the basics and remember those fundamentals that I subconsciously use all the time in writing.
Daniel knows my point of view. I pushed it enough in class. Effort, feedback, adaptation, another effort. And repeat as necessary. All the "writing knowledge" in the world doesn't help unless it is tied directly to the student's own effort. And I think the same about feedback on instructor commentary. The feedback itself may not be as useful as the feedback _process_ itself: simply participation in a feedback system that requires a repeated self-interrogation of one's own effort.
ReplyDeleteFeedback is probably the major force which improved my writing over the years, especially when I took 1301 in high school. Likewise though, I agree with Dr. Kemp's comment: "Effort, feedback, adaptation, another effort." I wasn't in the class discussion, of course, but I think I can identify with the fact that I couldn't have gotten better (because of that feedback) if I didn't first tie that to how I could apply that across different composition circumstances. Feedback is generally ad hoc; it's the student's effort to learn how to apply that feedback to different circumstances.
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