Managing the grading�(and responding) workload

Dilger @ ICAP Convocation, Spring 2020

Remember this slide from Convocation?

NO.

(the art of saying it)

“Many veteran readers find the experience of responding to student writing to be one of constantly deciding not to comment on less important issues. Such restraint allows you to focus your energies on just a few important points and also tends to yield a cleaner and more easily intelligible message for students.”

—Nancy Sommers, Responding to Student Writing

Today’s workshop

• Read some writing and talk about how we’d respond
• Discuss ways to think about grading & responding
• Practical suggestions:
• Response itself
• Managing workload
• Designing for response

Activity

Let’s read the reflective memo in portfolio P048 (pp. 1–3).

Assume it’s a first draft.

How would you respond?

Purdue, response, and you

“Provide useful, relevant, and timely written feedback that helps your students become better writers.”

ICAP outcome #4

Provide constructive feedback to others and incorporate feedback into their writing.

• Effectively evaluate others’ writing and provide useful commentary and suggestions for revision where appropriate
• Use comments as a heuristic for revision
• Produce multiple drafts or versions of a composition to increase rhetorical effectiveness
• Learn and apply collaborative skills in classroom and conference settings

Purdue general education standards (or lack thereof)

“Demonstrate an understanding of�writing as a social process which includes multiple drafts, collaboration, and reflection”

Response is learned!

By us, and�by our students too

Difficult

Helpful

Timeconsuming

Teachable

Selected transfer metaphors

• Transportation or movement (Perkins & Salomon 1988)
• Travel / boundary crossing/guarding (Reiff & Bawarshi 2011)
• Application (Robertson et al. 2012)
• Transition (Beach 2003)
• Integration (Nowacek 2011)

• Generalization (Beach 2003; Frazier 2010)
• Repurposing (Roozen 2010; Wardle 2012; Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak 2014)
• Negotiation (Donahue 2005; Reiff & Bawarshi 2011)
• Recontextualization (Nowacek 2011)
• Assemblage (Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak 2014)

Activity

Metaphors

What are the metaphors we use to think about responding to writing?

Challenges

Thinking about students

• What do these papers tell us about the learners?
• About what they know?
• About what they need to know?
• About what are they doing well?
• About what do they need to work on?
• If you could only reinforce two or three things either way — what would you pick? Why? How?

Thinking about ourselves

• How do we respond at different stages of writing?
• How does that change with our roles?
• What information would help you respond to these papers? Why?
• How would you help these writers...
• in an instructor-facilitated conference?
• to turn to a consultant in the Writing Lab?
• in a consultant-facilitated Writing Lab session?
• If responding in writing?

Activity

Challenges

How does responding to writing challenge us?

Our students?

Our relationships with our students?

If working with an example is easier — let’s use the draft in P048 (p. 22–29).

Practical suggestions

Sommers: Six best practices

• Make some positive comments.
• Comment primarily on patterns—representative strengths and weaknesses.
• Write in complete, detailed sentences.
• Ask questions.
• Use a respectful tone.
• Write legibly (in any ink but red).

Managing the workload

• Begin responding soon after assignments are submitted.
• Read all student work before starting to make comments.
• Use a timer to limit response time per student.
• Make comments with a pencil, so you can erase.
• Return student work as soon as you’re ready. You don’t have to wait until feedback is ready for every student.
• As previously discussed: when you feel it would be better to defer response to conference with a student — do it.

Designing for response (1/2)

• Assign the shortest possible length. Quality beats quantity every time.
• Test your assignments with other readers before distributing them to students
• Take your assignments to the Writing Lab for feedback from consultants experienced with 106 writers — or 106 students themselves!
• Assign a prior review (e.g. a self-evaluation) to help you respond.

​

Designing for response (2/2)

• Describe your approach to providing feedback.
• Build response into assignments and other apparatus; don’t make it seem like an optional part of students (or your) writing processes.
• Talk about response with students:
• How do they prepare to share their writing for a review?
• How do they respond to reviews — both short and long term?

Activities

• Pick ONE of your challenges. How can you mitigate it?
• Pick TWO responding metaphors to balance Write one sentence to describe each one.
• Pick ONE response friendly design strategy. Adapt a current assignment.

Thank you!