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Can you Hear Me now?

Making sure students’ voices are heard in feedback process

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http://tinyurl.com/conferHAVSD

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Jen Ward

@jenniferward ms.jen.ward@gmail.com

http://about.me/jenniferward

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Feedback

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Why focus on feedback?

For as long as there has been writing, there have been teachers of writing. And for as long as there have been teachers of writing, there have been questions about how to respond to student writing. When do I provide feedback? How much? What kind? A quick glance at the Amazon search results for books on feedback will give you a quick sense of just how much we struggle with providing feedback in a variety of different situations. But you would think that as someone who has been teaching high school English for over a decade I would have figured out strategies to provide students with feedback on their writing that both engages and empowers their revision.

Nope.

I struggle with providing feedback moreso now than when I started teached. As a teacher in a suburban high school just outside of Philadelphia, I work with a diverse population of students. Some of my students walk into my tenth grade classroom on their first day chock full of writing advice from SAT tutors and college preparatory programs. But I also have students whose parents did not attend college, who do not have a great deal of support at home, and who struggle to form a correctly punctuated sentence. In our 90-minute block schedule, I typically interact with between 60-90 students per semester, between 120-170 teenage writers each year. How do you get that many students writing often, revising often, and have the time to provide meaningful feedback that empowers reflection and revision not just on a single written work but how students engage in their composing process?

I needed to hear how other teachers were tackling the feedback problem.

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What teachers say

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My Survey

I put together a short online survey, and using social media, asked writing teachers to respond to questions about their feedback process. I heard back from 25 teachers who hail from my district and neighboring districts in the Philadelphia area and from as far away as England and the west coast of Canada. A majority, 14, of the respondents are high school English teachers, but I also had teachers respond who are currently working in higher education, elementary schools, and as support staff. My hope was to find out how comfortable teachers are with providing feedback to their student writers, learn from their successes, hear where there might be common pleas for support, and think about how digital tools might be leveraged to improve how we provide feedback to our student writers. Here’s a little bit of what I learned:

Of the 25 teachers who responded, only three teachers reported feeling they had successful strategies in place to provide their practicing writers with feedback. And all three of those teachers reported using individual verbal writing conferences to connect with students.

Nine out of the 25 teachers reported feeling they has some good strategies in place that helped students reflect on their writing choices, but the teachers felt that there were likely better strategies they could be using to provide their young writers with feedback. The largest proportion of teachers reported feeling that they still had much to learn about providing feedback. A majority of teachers felt overwhelmed by the paper load.

There were two themes that emerged from the teachers’ responses that did not seem to connect with how they felt about their use of feedback. Teachers that responded that they had successful strategies in place to provide feedback as well as teachers that responded that they struggled with how to provide feedback all mentioned two areas of concern: the type of feedback they provide and the time it takes. When asked “What do you struggle with in terms of providing student writers feedback?” eight respondents mentioned a concern with over-correcting student written work. One ninth grade English teacher wrote, “I struggle with the balance of correcting errors and giving overall feedback. I know that making corrections does not help the students learn how to do it themselves.” A similar concern was voiced by a creative writing and eleventh grade English teacher when she wrote, “In Creative Writing I struggle with overcorrecting. I have to watch my comments to make sure that they are accurate for the writer but aren’t related to a type of style I prefer. In an academic setting I struggle with providing feedback during the writing session. I am much better at articulating what I’m looking for and how to approach a prompt when the essay is complete (I can see what’s missing better than I can guide early on)”. It is the fear of the dreaded red pen that looms over these comments. Writing teachers struggle with when to address errors and mistakes.

And we also struggle with time, specifically that there just isn’t enough of it. Eleven of the 25 responding teachers expressed a strong desire for more time to respond to student writing. An eleventh grade English teacher from a suburban public school responded, “Doing it in a timely fashion while also making it meaningful. I can grade quickly or I can grade thoroughly. I can’t do both. And neither is truly quick.” Another high school English teacher from Canada responded, “It’s hard to find time to give specific feedback for each student - especially when they have such a wide range of needs.”

So what is at the root of these two concerns?

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Theory

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Why all this concern about not having enough time to correct papers? As English teachers we talk about “correcting papers” or “grading papers”, an act which puts the teacher in the role of the sage who is handing down knowledge, whose role is to evaluate how well our student writers have performed. The emphasis on this act of grading or correcting is not indicative of what the student is learning. We know from process theorists, from writers like Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, Donald Graves, that slapping a grade on a piece of student writing does little to motivate student reflection or revision. We know that circling every mistake with the dreaded red pen does more to shut down our practicing writers than it does to inspire their engagement with composing. Yet, we continue to circle misspelled words and misplaced commas. Why?

One of the early and most influential proponents of the current-traditional approach to teaching rhetoric was Edward T. Channing, chair of the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard College in the early through mid-nineteenth century (The Bedford Bibliography for Teaching Writing). It is his work outlining rules for correct grammar, style, and organization in composition that continues to reverberate through our primary and secondary teaching of writing to this day. His approach, passed down through his predecessors and through the secondary writing teachers who hoped their students would attend prestigious schools like Harvard, helped define a canon of literature, how readers discussed that literature, as well as how we taught writers.

The current-traditional rhetoric (CTR) focuses on writing style to the near exclusion of anything else. Theorists of this approach believe that writing is linear, meaning that because writers know what they want to write before ever laying pen to paper, the act of composing is the process of selecting the most appropriate rhetorical form for the work. There is no back and forth, no revision or rewriting, except to correct style mistakes. Writing, as understood by CTR theorists, is not connected with invention or thinking. The act of teaching writing then is one of helping edit the stylistic choices of the writer (Hairston 78). As such, CTR is focused on the product of writing. As long as the “finished” piece of writing follows the grammatical and rhetorical conventions, it is an acceptable work of composition. Such a formulaic and prescriptive approach to teaching writing does simplify how writing is assessed, making this approach easy to both teach and grade. And it is this tradition, this focus on assessment, that continues to impact our teaching of writing today. Take a look at your Common Core State Standards rubric for expository writing. How much of that rubric addresses invention, critical thinking, rhetorical choices that fit the writing situation versus how much of it is dedicated to correct grammar, variety of sentence length, use of the correct number of supporting details, and the presence of a thesis statement?

However, it is not simply a shift in how to give feedback that changes how students engage with feedback. The process-based approaches, which developed as a reaction to the rigid style concerns of CTR, also changed our understanding of the importance of agency. In the current-traditionalist approach, teachers were the seat of knowledge. Teachers held all the knowledge about composing which they bestowed upon their students. However, the process approach is student/writer centered. The seat of ownership and agency is with the writer. In her book Write Beside Them, Penny Kittle writes of a writing class with Donald Murray in which another class member handed Kittle back a draft of her essay marked with feedback and corrections. Kittle wrote in her own notebook of the experience: “You smile as you hand it to me - so efficient and sure you’re right, but your movements on my work are YOURS, not mine. Worse, they’re insulting, distancing, shocking. I’m unable to look you in the eye” (212). As a teacher of writing, Kittle realized that her students felt much like she did when their written work came back marked with corrections and comments. Their work had been invaded. Their agency and ownership over their own writing had been taken away. And so the work of the writing teacher is to find ways to use feedback to help grow student writers as they write but in such a way that the student writer maintain authority and agency over their own work.

What I find interesting is that even though many of us have read and use elements of the process approach to teaching writing - e.g. freewriting, writing workshops, conferring - where we struggle with providing feedback is when we return to the more formulaic approach to teaching writing. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as editors of our students’ writing, and start thinking of ourselves as coaches who facilitate writing opportunities and discussions.

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Editing versus Revising

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We don’t want to graduate students who are simply good copy editors. Our goal is to develop thoughtful and reflective writers who are able to revise their composition based on the purpose and audience of their writing. This is at the heart of editing versus revising.

In a 2013 English Journal article titled “A Formative Assessment System for Writing Improvement,” San Diego State University professors and high school teachers Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher surveyed nearly 550 high school students about their experiences with feedback and grading. Not surprisingly, Frey and Fisher found that the students echoed much of what process and post-process composition theorists have been writing about for decades: “When feedback focuses on a summative task, such as an essay or research paper, it is not likely to change students’ performance because there is no opportunity for students to redo, or rethink, the work” (66). Even when writing teachers did require students to resubmit final essays, students were dutifully compliant in making requested corrections, but there was little evidence of advanced reflection and revision of their written work. The students made only those edits requested by the writing teacher, but continued to make similar mistakes in the next writing assignment (66). This is the same phenomenon that Peter Elbow, Donald Graves, Lucy Calkins, and many other teachers of writing explored in the 1980s and 90s.

In his piece from the College English journal published in 1993 titled "Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgement,” Peter Elbow explains that this process of ranking student work following the crafting of the composition often works to deter the type of reflection on rhetorical choices that we hope to foster in our practicing writers. Instead, student writers focus on the grade, on editing only the parts of the writing that the teacher has critiqued. “Ranking leads students to get so hung up on these oversimple quantitative verdicts that they care more about scores than about learning...” Elbow writes, “- more about the grade we put on the paper than about the comment we have written on it” (390). Students asked to rewrite a work them simply obey teachers rather than carefully considering the merits of our suggestions (397). At its worst, Elbow as well as Frey and Fisher state that our hours spent writing feedback on final essays works only as a justification for our grades rather than as tool to encourage reflection and revision on the part of our student writers. And this is supported by what Frey and Fisher’s students reported.

When asked about the feedback that they received followed extended writing tasks, over 80 percent of Frey and Fisher’s high school students stated that they attended to feedback only “To know what grade I got and generally how I did” (66). However, when these same students were asked about the feedback they found most helpful as they drafted compositions, 92 percent of the students responded that they would like feedback to improve their writing, 84 percent also wanted “Specific and detailed information about my performance,” and nearly half of the students wanted feedback on their “understanding of the content” (66-7). Frey and Fisher’s group of high school writers were less focused on grades during the formative stages of their writing and more focused on the quality reflection and revision necessary to grow writing confidence. The shift to a process approach to writing, giving feedback to students during the writing process rather than after, and conferencing with students as they write expands and enlarges the student’s writing experiences. Feedback given during the composing process helps the student writer learn from his audience. As Nancy Sommers states in her piece titled “Responding to Student Writing” published in the journal of College Composition and Communication, providing student writers feedback in the midst of their composing helps to "dramatize the presence of a reader, to help our students to become that questioning reader themselves..." (379).

And it is this idea that student writers benefitted more from formative rather than summative feedback on their writing that lead to the popularity of teachers engaging in verbal writing conferences as a means of providing practicing writers with more meaningful and timely feedback.

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Conferring

Imapge shared on Huffington Post

Conferring with students isn’t about fixing the particular errors in a particular piece of writing. Instead, as Lucy Calkins’ suggests in her book The Art of Teaching Writing, “[We] are teaching the writer and not the writing. Our decisions must be guided by ‘what might help this writer’ rather than ‘what might help this writing’” (228). The act of conferring is a dialogue between writers about rhetorical choices, and those conversations support the writer, not simply a single piece of writing. The goal of the writing conference is to provide a student with supportive feedback and a writing strategy that she can use in her current writing piece as well as in her future compositions.

And it is that conversational approach to providing feedback that is incredibly powerful. Conferring with students maintains the student writer’s authorial control over his work and opens greater opportunities for teachers to have conversations with the writer about his rhetorical and content choices. Rather than the one-sided feedback that students get through a teacher’s written comments, writing conferences encourage reflection and support the student’s autonomy. But opening up space during class to engage in writing conferences requires time.

Both Kelly Gallagher and Carl Anderson write about a shift that happens when teachers begin to implement writing conferences as their strategy for providing student writers with feedback. Rather than spending a majority of our time responding to the final, polished writing pieces our students turn in for a grade, we need to shift our time so that we provide more feedback as they write. This is a more valuable use our our efforts to support our emerging writers.

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Feedback 2.0

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Many students and teachers are now using collaborative online writing tools like Google Docs to turn in written assignments. Students know they have access to help when and wherever they need it. Learning and writing are no longer confined to the classroom. The teacher-student relationship is no longer confined to a physical space. So as my students are working on a writing piece, it is not unusual for them to message me or shoot me a quick email to ask a question about a sentence or a paragraph idea. And wherever I happen to be, in front of a computer or shopping for groceries, that little ping from my phone alerting me that a student is working on developing their writing makes me smile. I must oblige, and so I send off a quick response, a question to guide their revision. But as you can imagine, the few days before a writing piece is due, those pings multiple becoming a cacophony of unmanageable requests for feedback. I see students engaging deeply in the process of their writing as they request feedback, but those requests are often last minute and many times requesting help editing rather than support for larger revision issues. So, how do we spend less time answering emails at all hours and encourage more meaningful revision and reflection on writing?

Combine writing conferences with technology!

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Audio tools

photo by SFHandyman

Many students and teachers are using Google products and shared folders to turn in written work. Digital tools like the shared folders within Google Drive makes it easy for teachers and students to give feedback on each other's work throughout the drafting process since both can access each other's writing at any time, either in school or outside of it. In addition to using the comment feature found in Google Drive products to provide written feedback to student writers, there are also a number of Add-On features which make it easy for both teachers and students to access audio recordings embedded within a specific writing document. And accessing such tools will make it easy for teachers to record their writing conferences.

Why record them? When writing conferences happen in the presence of other students in the classroom, there is the added benefit of supporting other writers in the room who overhear. Penny Kittle writes in her book Write Beside Them, "Students want to hear what other students are writing about and will listen in, doubling or tripling the value of that writing conference. Writing depends on talk" (86). So it makes sense that using audio recording tools to capture and share these conferring moments can become a powerful tool for providing feedback to student writers.

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conferring digitally

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Listening to Teachers

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Co-director of the National Writing Project at Rutgers University, Sara Bauer published an article in 2011 in the English Journal on her experiences using audio comments to provide feedback to her high school writers. In her article "When I Stopped Writing on Their Papers: Accomodating the Needs of Student Writers with Audio Comments," Bauer writes, "...audio feedback enables my comments to become much more developed and targeted to the individual writer than they had been when I confined myself to cryptic and cramped notes written in the margins" (66). Using audio commentary allowed Bauer to more clearly develop her reactions to a student's written work, and in doing so, opened up opportunities for her students to reflect on their rhetorical choices. Bauer's comments were not limited to fixing grammatical or content errors, but instead focused on how she responded to her students' work as an interested reader. What did the writing evoke in her as a reader? What did it make her wonder? Where did her understanding break down? "The practice of making audio comments goes beyond assisting students with revising a particular assignment," Bauer writes. "I was able to target my instruction so that students could learn about themselves as writers and develop strategies for avoiding common pitfalls on future assignments, thereby strengthening their writing performance over the year" (66).

Similar to Sara Bauer’s experience, Professor Jeff Sommers in the recent volume of the Journal of College Literacy and Learning writes about the power of recorded voice responses to student writers, an activity he calls “Response 2.0”. He writes, “Response 2.0 can be fuller, deeper, and broader than written response because most teachers can speak faster than they can write or type, and the technology itself frees audio and video responders from the constraints of space on a printed page of text” (35). Sommers’ review of how university writing professors are using audio and video commentary to give feedback to student writers gives writing teachers from levels ideas for how technology may be able to help our practicing writers reflect and engage more meaningfully with their writing endeavors.