Module 4: Meaningful Feedback

Module 4: How to Give Students Meaningful Feedback without Killing Yourself

Teaching students to write a good paper is a noble, worthwhile goal. But getting them to become better writers is even more noble, more worthwhile. Thankfully, one cannot happen without the other.

Because revision tends to make for better papers and better writers, our Core 110 outcomes feature revision. When students leave this course, they should know how to “build an essay through multiple drafts, using peer assessment, instructor assessment, and self-assessment, developing revision and editing skills.”

This outcome is wise. Not only is it good pedagogy to have students give feedback and take it from different angles, it will preserve your sanity. If you fly solo and do all the assessments, you will likely end the course exhausted by the work and frustrated by the mixed results you will see. This module describes an array of tools you can use to encourage meaningful revision that leads to better writing and, in the long run, better writers.

1. Multiple Drafts

Of all the habits of mind needed for success in college writing, revision emphasizes openness, engagement, flexibility, and persistence--especially persistence. By structuring a writing project that develops beyond a single draft, you set the stage for them to practice sticking with a piece through phases of construction, doubts, deconstruction, and, we hope, reconstruction. And as they face coming back to the same project again, they not only change the writing but they also re-shape their understanding of your course’s content.

The most significant constraint on the number of drafts per project is, of course, time. We have a 15-week semester, which seems plenty long enough, but in terms cultivating meaningful revision, it’s never enough. If you have three high-stakes writing assignments in your seminar, you can manageably build in two or even three cycles of drafting-revision-redrafting into each project. If you have four or five, you can easily manage one or two cycles. Also, you can spark re-thinking and re-writing with a few low-stakes writing efforts that support the major project. (For more about structuring multiple drafts into a writing project, consult sections 2 and 3 of Module 2, "How to Design Your First-Year Writing Seminar.” )

Multiple drafts are the ground upon which meaningful feedback and significant revision can grow. We turn now to activities that provide feedback from different angles—peer, instructor, and student.

2. Peer Assessment

If you had all the time in the world (which you don’t), and the patience of a saint (no matter what Carroll says, we are not saints), you could read and re-read each student’s draft, provide meaningful commentary, and then, remembering it all (because you have a steel-trap memory too), you could provide thoughtful assessments of how well they revised. While instructor assessment is clutch (see section 4), our limitations press us to spread the work around.

Spreading the work around makes the paper load more manageable, but it has other benefits too. By having other students serve as readers, each writer can learn to see what may otherwise have been invisible to them—the weaknesses in what they thought was strong, and the potential strength in that which they had little confidence. Another benefit of peer review is that the reviewers can practice critical reading and tactfully delivering substantive critiques.

While peer review has become a staple of the writing classroom over the past five decades, it is not without its critics: “The blind leading the blind,” these critics say. This view makes some sense; even at their best, students are works in progress, all of them at various stages of proficiency in reading, writing, and grasping content. But if you are interested in using peer review, you should believe that your students are not blind so much as in the dark, and a structured peer review gives them some light. So let’s take a look at the structural options you 
have to set the stage for meaningful feedback and, we hope, meaningful revision.

2.1 Use the Rubric—or not? 
Not only do rubrics provide direction to your teaching and some consistency for your grading, it provides a structure by which students can learn to support each other. Asking students to assess their peers’ drafts by the criteria of the rubric makes them mindful of the outcomes for the assignment and the entire course. It gives purpose and relevance to the work they are doing together. It is light for the dark.

Some writing instructors, mindful that the evaluative criteria of an assignment may not be the only way to assess writing, use different structures. They might use the formal conventions of the essay, encouraging feedback on the quality of the introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusions. They might ask students to underline sentences that were not clear, and remark on why they weren’t, and, conversely, highlight sentences that were effective, and why they were so. Still others might provide a review sheet with columns headed up by “what works,” “what needs work,” and “suggestions.”

2.2 Evaluative or Descriptive Feedback? 
Another consequential choice in the structure of a peer review is to decide how directly you want your students to assess each other’s writing. Do you want them to pass judgment on a peer’s writing, or do you want them to describe their experience in reading the paper, allowing the writer to recognize problems and consider remedies based on those descriptions? (It is, of course, possible to create a mix of both evaluative and descriptive feedback.)

Here’s a table from John Bean’s Engaging Ideas that illustrates the difference between evaluative and descriptive feedback (p.297):

Exhibit 15.3 
Judgment Versus Descriptive questions for Peer Review

2.3 To Give Advice--or not? 
Whether you structure the review around evaluative judgments or less-judgmental descriptions, reviewers and writers alike will begin to recognize problems, and the ability to recognize problems is the most fundamental skill in revising. And while it is natural for peer reviewers to then suggest remedies, do you really want them to? Or, would you prefer that your writers, having learned what may not be working in their paper, create their own solutions?

At issue in these questions are concerns for authority and authorship. Given the power dynamics of any group, a student giving well-intentioned advice may steer the paper in directions that an author really does not want to take it. That author may yield to the force of the other student’s view and end up with a result they later regret. That said, every author needs help now and again, and the attentive presence of peers reveals solutions they might never discover on their own. At the very least, remind your writers that they are the author—the authority—of their own work. That entails the responsibility to accept, reject, or modify any advice given.

2.4 To Edit--or not? 
There is one category of advice-giving you may want to avoid, and that is what some of your students will call “peer editing.” “Peer-editing” is what some of your students might remember from high school, and it appears to be exactly that—an effort to correct each other’s papers. While calling out simple misspellings and grammatical glitches can be useful, some students have absorbed stylistic preferences and misinterpreted them as hard-and-fast rules—things like “never use the passive voice,” or “never end a sentence with a preposition,” or “always use a comma before ‘and’ in a series.” Some high schools appear to require British punctuation rules when using quotations, placing commas and periods outside quotation marks in certain circumstances, while others 
follow American practices of always placing them inside quotation marks. Having students edit each other’s prose can therefore cause more confusion and erratic choices than if it were not done at all.

Moreover, peer editing diminishes the full range of important work that can happen in peer review. Editing assumes that the rough draft is truly ready for finishing touches; in reality, it could probably use more work on thesis, paragraph order, evidence, and so on.

2.5. Practical Considerations 
No matter where you land on the broader issues of peer review worked out in sections 2.1 to 2.4, it must take practical shape in the day-to-day work of your course. Here are some other questions and tips for conducting a meaningful peer review:

1. Use writing samples previous semesters that model excellent, average, or poor responses to the assignment. Examining and discussing these gives you the opportunity to “train” their faculties of judgment and tact. If using a rubric as the center of peer review, you can hold “norming” sessions with your class, assessing a handful of essays and forming consensus about the relative merits of each. This practice gives them a strong, informed basis for judging their colleagues’ work as well as their own. And as they are developing this informed stance, you can also prompt them to consider how they would convey those judgments if the writer were in their workshop group.
2. Plan your procedure for peer review well ahead of time. How many writers should be in a group? (Pairs can work, but there’s no variety in the feedback, while five or more can be unwieldy and time-consuming. Having authors read aloud can help them see their own errors, clumsy phrasing, and shaky arguments, but it’s taxing for listeners to remember high and low points of the essay. Response sheets with prompts on them can help reviewers document and discuss their experiences as they read—or listen.
3. To preserve valuable class time, some professors assign reviews as homework outside of class. If you wish to do this, be careful in how you can hold the groups accountable for doing the work. If you do reviews in class, you can join conversations, monitor progress, and make sure meaningful work is getting done. You can also use the workshop module on Moodle to structure out-of-class peer reviews. This module is the most one of the most complex in the Moodle-verse, treacherous terrain that you might not want to go into alone. If you have not used workshop before, contact Ryan Hazen or Dan Case in Instructional Technology to get started.
4. Giving feedback on the feedback encourages students to engage more fully with peer review. If you use Moodle workshop or have them fill out reviewsheets, you can collect their comments to each other and assess the feedback they give. A rubric like the one below could help you quickly place a point value on each student’s feedback. While it does take time, it sends a clear signal that you take this work seriously and expect them to do a good job.

Table 1: A Rubric for Assessing Workshop Feedback

Taking Action, 4.1 
Create a peer review workshop that you can use for your first-year writing seminar. Think through everything, from how you will prepare students to provide each other with feedback, to the size of groups you would like to try, to the points of assessment you want them to use (evaluative or descriptive feedback), and so on. Consider, too, how you might give them feedback on their participation in the workshop.

3. The Writing Center

Another form of peer review is to have students work with Peer Writing Consultants (PWCs) in Carroll’s Writing Center. Students hired to work in The Writing Center are excellent writers with a zeal for learning. They take an 11-week training course that bridges the gap between writing instruction and working face-to-face with their peers. In regular staff meetings they continue their education as consultants.

Carroll’s PWCs understand how writing is a messy process, and they know how to work with students by assessing where they are in managing an assignment and how to assist that student through knowledgeable conversation and resource-driven guidance. They also know their

Taking Action, 4.1 
Create a peer review workshop that you can use for your first-year writing seminar. Think through everything, from how you will prepare students to provide each other with feedback, to the size of groups you would like to try, to the points of assessment you want them to use (evaluative or descriptive feedback), and so on. Consider, too, how you might give them feedback on their participation in the workshop. guardrails, so they never assess the merit of a piece of writing (that’s your job), nor do they cosign on students’ complaints. They never fix a piece of writing for the student, nor tell them what to write. And if they do not know how to advise a student, they will research and get back to them, or refer your student back to you for guidance.

Some Carroll professors require a writing center visit as part of the criteria for completing a specific paper, while others require students visit once or twice throughout a semester to work on whatever the student thinks to be most pressing. Still others offer extra credit for visiting the center. We keep regular and detailed records of every tutorial, so if you ever need to learn whether a student attended or what got accomplished during a session, please contact the Writing Center director, Dr. Jeff Morris.

The Writing Center is also there to work with students who need regular help to do well in the course. If you believe you have a student who needs regular tutorials to manage the demands of the course, please contact the Writing Center director to formulate a game plan.

4. Instructor Assessment

Of course, your assessments are central to helping students know what to reach for, how well they did, and what to improve upon next assignment. This dimension is so important that we explored rubrics in the first module and devote the fifth to commenting on whole drafts. In this brief section, we explore strategies for working with students one-on-one before they turn in a final draft.

4.1 Spot Checks 
A spot check is a short piece writing that allows you to assess how each writer is progressing at key moments of the writing process, such as topic choice, thesis construction, outlining, or drafting. And while you can assign all students to email you about their progress, you might find that it clutters your inbox and tempts you into longer 
replies than you have time for. As an alternative, you might distribute 3x5 cards in class and have them, for instance, list their top three topics, putting a star by the one they are leaning toward.

You can then evaluate these quickly and provide timely but brief feedback about the promise—or lack thereof—that you see. You might want to provide a bit more feedback with thesis statements or outlines, but the point is to keep it quick. Affirm progress with a “good work!” or “this looks great,” and intervene with those who are falling behind or who are lost in the assignment. In these cases, keep your response simple, something like “I think I see where this outline is going, but not sure—can we talk after class?”

For high-stakes assignments, especially those requiring research, consider having them construct a short prospectus, asking such things as:

1. Define the problem or issue you will be addressing.
2. Describe your audience—who are your readers? what are they likely to know about the topic already? What biases or judgments are they likely to bring toward this issue?
3. At this moment, what do you think your position will be (of course, this is likely to change with more research and thinking)
4. List (three, five . . .) sources here that you have already found that will help you with your argument?
5. Thinking ahead to the work in front of you, what questions do you have for me about your paper?

These topic proposals can be as brief or extensive, depending on the nature of the project and your course objectives. The point is to bring them to a point of consideration and choice, allowing you the opportunity to help them anticipate problems or see promise where they lack confidence.

4.2 Conferencing 
Conducting one-on-one conferences with student writers was made popular by Donald Murray in A Writer Teaches Writing (1968; 2d. revised ed., 2004), and they have been in the writing teacher’s repertoire ever since. In the purest Murray-esque form, conferences are student-centered—an opportunity for the teacher to learn from the student about what the student is doing to put learn and to put that learning into language. They are occasions for surprise—for the teacher to show enthusiasm for progress made, and for students to marvel at their own progress as the teacher urges them onward. And, of course, conferences can be occasions to discover roadblocks and collaborate on strategies to help the writer break through.

Compared to spot check writings, conferences are wonderful opportunities to develop rapport with students and have a spirited give-and-take about writing that cannot be captured in a written response. The drawback is obvious, though—they take time. Writing teachers committed to conferencing will cancel a few class meetings and set up appointment times, and hold a few special office hours to boot. Another approach is to assign conferences for a handful of students per paper—for example, with twenty students in your class and four major papers, work with five students per assignment.

As with spot checks, conferences can focus on a variety of matters. The easiest and most pleasant conferences tend to concern topic selection and planning. Not much has been ventured yet, and students appreciate the guidance. The more challenging conferences follow a rough draft, especially when significant revision is necessary or there are lots of struggles around editing. But conferences can do one thing that conferences cannot: they can address a student’s overall progress in the course, or it can take up recurring issues in a student’s writing.

The amount of time you devote to each conference is up to you, but it certainly has its limits. While Murray contends a five minute conference on a draft that you have read by not commented on can help, some remain unconvinced that such a light touch can have impact. A fifteen-minute window allows for more depth and direction, but much more than that and you’ll be killing yourself.

One last pitch for conferencing: you will find that when it comes to writing instruction, it’s the weaker writers who rarely seek out feedback during office hours. Dispirited through experience, they have learned to invest little time in writing and will duck challenges to improve. And though an assigned conference can only go so far in changing minds, it does at least afford you the opportunity to provide a bit of encouraging direction.

5. Self-Assessment

Students cannot learn how to revise without cultivating a habit of constant reflection on their own writing and how to improve it. You can help instill in them these habits of reflection by including meta-cognitive activities within some of feedback strategies we have already examined.

Peer Review Workshops

• In rubric-driven workshops, have students evaluate their own drafts without sharing that evaluation with peers.
• Ask them to list the questions they have about their draft and incorporate those questions into the workshop.
• Assign a spot check writing in which they tell you about the feedback they received and what they plan to do about it.

Writing Center Visits

• Assign students to write you a quick paragraph about the visit—what agenda did they set for the visit, what got accomplished, and how might it change the draft in progress? How might it change their future writing efforts?

Instructor assessment

• Include an evaluative dimension in spot checks: If you are asking them to decide on a paper topic, ask them to also disclose how confident they are that their choice is a good one, and why. Or if you’re asking for a thesis statement, ask them to assess whether it is an arguable, challenging, and relevant to the assignment.

You can also involve them in other forms of self-assessment. Some professors ask students to grade their own papers according to the rubric or other set of grading standards that the professor will use. In addition to such a self-assessment, the following questions can help them reflect on their work: What most pleases you about this paper? If you had one more week to work on this paper, what would you revise? Most students welcome the opportunity to take stock of their 
own writing and learning, and even if they do not, it sends the message that self-reflection is an 
important part of improving as a writer.