Giving Better Feedback: Reflecting on My Written and Spoken Selves

I talk a good game to my students about the importance of reflecting on their work. When you take some time, I tell them, to look back on a single assignment or a whole semester and write about what you did and what you learned, it helps those lessons stick. And when they stick, you’re more likely to transfer them to other classes and other parts of your life, making the time you’ve spent in class more effective and efficient. I’m less good than I’d like to be, however, at following my own advice. At the end of every semester I mean to do some reflective writing . . .

So this is me reflecting, in a somewhat rambling way, on a semester of teaching writing. Specifically, I want to think about how I respond to student writing in the comments I leave on their papers and the things I say to them in class. I’ve chosen this particular topic for two reasons: First, I made an effort this semester to do more in-class work with students on their writing – not so much on finished drafts of their papers as leading them through the messier parts of the writing process – so spoken, in-the-moment commenting is an aspect of my teaching that I’m actively trying to develop. And second, for some time I’ve had a vague sense that my in-class and on-paper personae come across differently to my students. That is, that there might be a bit of a disconnect between the teacher they see in class and the one who has written comments on their papers when they get them back. Reflecting on these things might help me – and (who knows!) somebody else – be more thoughtful and deliberate about the difficult business of telling students how to improve their work.

Responding to the written products that students give us – what we often simply call “grading papers,” though it is much, much more than that – can be one of the most difficult and frustrating parts of teaching, whether it’s because we end up with more student papers than any responsible institution would foist on a single individual, or because we feel that our comments to students go unheeded. As a result, and as is well documented, we sometimes come off as cranky or downright mean. Most of us are aware of this so we try to build an on-paper identity that is serious but also caring, one that is directed not at the paper but to the student who wrote it and whose purpose is not to justify all the points we’ve taken off but to move the writer toward a productive, feasible revision. Even so, because our time (and patience) is limited, and because we aren’t looking a student in the eye when we give written feedback, our commentary can be terse and pay far more attention to a paper’s negative aspects, even if it’s a fairly good one.

I’ve paid pretty close attention to the identity I create in these comments because I have a clear idea of what I want it to be. I want that on-paper teacher to have high but reachable standards; to recognize what is well organized, or well argued, or simply well written; to express pleasure when it happens; to be clear about what steps need to be taken toward improvement. I also want him to foster a relationship with students over the course of the semester by showing a familiarity with their strengths and weaknesses, referring back to earlier papers and comments and expressing excitement, or at least anticipation, about what they’ll do next. I want to be what composition scholar Richard Haswell has called the “craft-wise” authority who can “home in on the main problem” presented in a student’s paper, but I want to wear that authority lightly.

I’m tempted to say that I want my on-paper identity to be an extension of my in-class identity, but when I really think about it the reverse is true. Since I’ve been more deliberate about creating my on-paper self (w/r/t responses to student writing), and have only recently made a concerted effort to interact regularly with students in class as they write, it’s actually my on-paper identity that I’m extending to my in-class self. And I sense that there’s room for improvement. In the classroom, I might lead an exercise where students are coming up with topic sentences for the paragraphs of an essay they’re working on and the evidence they might use to support those topic sentences. Maybe students are writing individually and I’m going around the room and talking with them, or maybe they’re offering up what they’ve come up with more publicly and I’m putting it on the board or projected computer screen. In either case, I’m still working out the proper balance between criticism and encouragement, and it’s more of a struggle than what I go through with written comments. 

Much of this struggle comes down to the difference between a public and a private interaction. In class I’m responding to a student in front of other students, which means that student is more publicly vulnerable than they are in an on-paper interaction, but also that there’s the possibility (the hope, actually) that more than just this one student will learn from the interaction. Because others are watching, I want to take extra care to be charitable and encouraging. But, because others are watching, I want to point out problem areas and discuss ways of fixing them. In many ways it’s the same balance you look for when making on-paper comments, but for me the in-class balance more easily tips in favor of the charitable, while the on-paper balance can too easily tilt towards the critical.

What I really want is the sense that I’m being more consistent. That – like I said above – my on-paper and in-class personae are matching up. I don’t want students to walk away from an in-class exercise thinking that the paper they’re working on is mostly okay and won’t require that much more work, and then find out when it’s returned to them that things were not okay at all and required quite a bit more work. Judging from the way my students have been revising and responding to me generally, I don’t think my two “selves” are that far off. But I do have a plan for how to create more consistency.

First, I’m going to try to make in-class writing and response more of a regular, predictable feature of my course. I think I’ll do this by working it into each of the three or four assignment units that comprise the course. In a freshman composition class, I typically divide the semester into genre-based units – one on the report, one on the proposal, one on the position paper, etc. – so I’ll have to figure out what feature of each genre is best suited to these kinds of exercises (bearing in mind that such a “feature” might not be part of the finished product of a given genre; for example, an exercise for generating research questions has proven useful even though these questions often don’t show up in a student’s final paper but instead act as a guide during the writing process). Second, I’d like to experiment with recorded spoken feedback on student papers. I’ve used screen-capture software like Jing and Camtasia to record comments for students in online classes, but since there’s no face-to-face component to those classes my goals weren’t quite the same. In the traditional class, I plan to use them to express the same kind of encouragement that comes more easily in face-to-face situations than on paper.

There are, of course, many other things I could reflect on as well. But in this I will follow my own advice to my students: I’ll focus my energy on just one or two things I’m confident I can improve, and then reassess.