Imagine the worst football coach ever. He watches his team
play a losing season but waits until the very end of the final game to let the
players know everything they’ve done wrong in each game. As the team is getting
chewed out and lectured, they feel terrible about what they’ve done. They feel
like failures (though the scores on the scoreboard also have given them some
hint of that all along), some want to quit and never play again, and even if
they wanted to change and improve, it’s too late now. The games have been
played and the record books are closed.
In my English classes, I was sometimes like that coach. I
let my students work on pieces of writing, gave them little guidance beyond the
initial assignment and perhaps a skills lesson at the beginning, and then
collected their completed papers, which I spent hours of my outside-of-school
life grading. It was like a second job, and I was the manager who was writing
hundreds of scathing employee evaluations. My students received their grades--usually
not as high as they’d hoped for--along with countless corrections and
frustratedly scribbled comments explaining how far they had fallen short of my
expectations. And that was that. No wonder many students shut down and began to
view themselves as failures. I had prevented any hope of a growth mindset
taking hold. Except for the most resilient and determined ones who sought help
to pull their grades up, most of my students decided then and there that
writing was a skill they just weren’t any good at, and they lost all hope for
future improvement.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about the feedback
we give our students. I have yet to find one expert in the field who says that
the time and effort I spent writing comments on my students’ finished papers
was worth it. I should have known that already. My students had already given
me the feedback I needed in the form of crumpled up essays left in the trashcan
or abandoned on the classroom floor. They weren’t planning to use my comments
to help them improve; mostly, they resented me for writing them.
Several things were problematic about the way I was
approaching writing in my classes. First, I had created a culture where the
grade was the one important goal. Learning and improvement were not on the
students’ radar screens at all. Second, I didn’t realize when the feedback was
necessary and welcome: along the way as the students were doing the writing. I
should have been working feverishly while my students were writing, holding
brief conferences with each student to pinpoint precise moves that would help
that student along the way, and I should have spent much less out-of-class time
scrawling comments on student papers. Of course, this was often impossible
because much of my students’ writing time occurred at home where I was not
available for assessment. My class time, I thought, was too precious to waste
on allowing students to sit there and write. Finally, I mistakenly believed
that it was my job to rewrite my students’ papers for them, to use my expert
editing and revision skills to spot and correct every error and to reword,
reorganize, and clarify their writing for them. It was a rigorous mental
exercise for me; my students, however, learned nothing from it.
I’m embarrassed now as I think back on some of the types of
comments I wrote on student papers. Here are some of the types of things I said
and what I really meant:
What I wrote: Why didn’t you [whatever thing you were
supposed to have done but didn’t]? We talked about this in class!
What I meant: By “we talked about it,” I mean that I
mentioned it to the class as part of my lecture on things to include in your
paper. Why didn’t you do the thing I told you to do but never checked to
see if you knew how nor even understood what I was saying. Though I didn’t let
you do any thinking about this on your own or process this skill with other
students, I am still holding you fully accountable for this concept.
_____________________________
What I wrote: Fragment!
What I meant: I know the difference between a
fragment and a complete sentence, and I have just proven that by pointing it
out on your paper. Apparently, you have not mastered this skill, and it’s
probably because I didn’t spend any time allowing you to explore this
grammatical concept with any guidance.
____________________________
What I wrote: (I didn’t write any words here; I
just circled a bunch of errors, added some necessary commas, and corrected some
capitalization issues)
What I meant: Proofreading is the most important
thing, and you don’t do it well. In fact, it’s more important than the ideas
you are writing about or whether your writing communicates its intended
message. Since I have clearly spent a ton of time finding every error and
correcting it in red pen, you can just make the changes that I’ve made for you
on your original draft and know that your paper will be better. I just hope
you’re learning about punctuation and capitalization while you make those
changes.
__________________________
What I wrote: Good job! Nice! Excellent!
What I meant: I have access to a thesaurus so that I
can give you many positive words that are actually rather vague and don’t let
you know what you have done that has met my approval. I hope you’re a mind
reader so you’ll know to keep doing those things in future essays.
__________________________
What I wrote: Weak thesis.
What I meant: You may have noticed that I wrote
this on nearly every student’s paper in the class. I taught it. Why didn’t you
or anyone else get it? Surely it couldn’t be my fault, right?
__________________________
What I wrote: You need to [whatever I think the
student should have done instead of what the student did…].
What I meant: Obviously, I know best, and this has
become my paper instead of yours. Writing is a science, not an art, and it’s
full of rights and wrongs. What you did was wrong. I’m not going to make
suggestions or ask you questions to help you make the best choice; I’m going to
issue a commandment. Your omnipotent teacher has spoken.
__________________________
I could go on, but I will spare you the gory details.
In hindsight, I could have been more thoughtful about the
way I worded much of my feedback in written comments and in conversations with
my students. My feedback frequently took the form of “you” statements and
commands (“You should…,” “Move this…,” “Don’t…”). In my writing interactions
with student writers, I now try to focus on “I” statements:
- “I see
what you’re trying to do here, but I’m a bit confused by what you mean.”
- “I’d
love to hear more about this.”
- “I am
a little unclear about how this quotation relates to the point you’re
trying to make.”
- “I
generally expect to find a thesis statement somewhere in the first
paragraph of an essay, but I’m not sure which sentence you’re intending to
be your thesis.”
Statements such as these put the writer in the driver’s seat
and make my comments seem a lot less like attacks. I’m speaking as a reader who
is interested in what the writer has to say and is sharing reactions with her.
I hope that my reader responses will prompt the writer to think about the
choices she made and to consider making some changes to help other readers.
Improving the quality of my written feedback is one step
toward improvement, but I think there are still better ways to achieve the
results I wanted. If I had been more intentional about providing feedback along
the way rather than at the end of the writing process, I could have had small
conferences with students to address the aspects of their writing that would
produce the most improvement in the moment. If I noticed that several students
were experiencing the same difficulty, I could have stopped class for a bit to
teach a quick mini-lesson to address this common issue. Then I could have
followed up with any students who needed some individual attention to master
that concept as they practiced.
On mornings like today as I leave my car and walk into work,
I see and hear the Vines High School marching band practicing on the parking
lot across the street. Their director, whose comments I often hear as he
addresses his students on a loudspeaker from atop his observation tower, offers
excellent feedback in the moment. He’s consistently encouraging but meticulous
as he pinpoints his musicians’ point of confusion, gives them some instruction
or advice, and then asks them to retry the trouble spot and make the necessary
adjustments. I imagine he gets exactly the results he seeks.
I wish I had been more deliberate at offering that sort of
feedback for my students when they needed it most rather than waiting until the
end and providing them with a lengthy list of problems to address.
Like many teachers, I struggled with assessment and providing feedback and did what I thought I was supposed to do. I wasn’t deliberately negligent and certainly put in ample effort, but I seldom saw the growth and results I hoped to achieve. I needed to remember that I was a coach too--a writing coach--and that timeouts and halftime pep talks were necessary to redirect my students, to pump them up when they were feeling defeated, and to send them back into the game with a plan to lead themselves to victory.
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