Blog Post #7

Teacher Feedback

If you have been a regular reader of this blog, you probably will not be surprised to hear that marginal notes from instructors makes me geek out a little. And the notes at the end of the essay? Icing on the cake. Like most students, I always really appreciate a mixture of praise and constructive criticism. When I get a paper back, I honestly want to know that the instructor thinks about it. I am curious to see where I have done well and surprised him/her with my insights and where I have gotten lazy or completely missed the point. Sometimes the feedback is frustrating ("Oh man, I should have seen that when I proofread") and sometimes it is exciting ("Wow, I took a big risk there, but the professor really responded well"). But regardless, it all makes me a better writer. The frustrating bits remind me to proofread better, to revise as I go, and to continue to look back on the prompt to make sure I'm staying on task. The encouraging bits give me the motivation to continue to better myself and to remind myself of my intellectual abilities.

However, sometimes feedback feels very problematic. Rubrics without specific comments have been very frustrating. It gives me a very general sense of my strengths and weaknesses, but often times the feedback is not specific enough to revise thoroughly. The worst form of feedback, though, is the non-feedback - the letter grade at the top of the page with no comments at all. We should all just band together to do away with grading compositions so vaguely.

Appropriate Responses for L2 Writers

L2 writers have different needs than I have as an L1 English writer. However, the type of feedback that I have received in the past would also be appropriate for an L2 writer with a few tweaks. I have noticed that I occasionally get feedback that points to a sentence or paragraph and says something like,"vague," "too broad," or "sentence structure." While I could often re-read my work and figure out how to tweak it, by the time I was in high school, I'd already had years of training on the expectations of North American writing instructors. L2 students do not have that luxury, and comments need to explain the "how."

It actually reminds me of the way research tells me to parent my two toddlers when they misbehave - instead of telling them "no" (e.g. that I see a problem), I need to tell them the behavior that I want. The negative feedback I give them lets them know that I want to see a change, but it does not actually give any specific ways to change or concrete examples of what behavior I would like to see instead. So for example, as I write this, my three year old son is climbing onto the entertainment center to turn off Frozen, which my two year old daughter is watching. Better than just snapping an arbitrary "NO!" at him, I need to tell him, "You need to get down. Your feet need to stay on the floor." This gives him specific instructions on what I'd like to see. He still has choices - he can ignore me, he can choose how he gets down (jump, climb, slide), but it still offers specific feedback that lets him know where and how he can improve. In the same way, instead of pointing out mistakes and errors negatively or arbitrarily, instructors should provide specific feedback, pointing out specific issues to L2 writers while still allowing them to revise in a way that they see fit.

Concerns with Responding

As a future composition instructor, I believe that it is important to take the time to make sure that I understand the nuances of my student group - their educational and cultural background, their writing level, and the amount of time they have been in this country's educational system. My concerns would be with wanting to ensure that I provide solid feedback in a way that students understand while being sensitive to how students receive criticism. Another concern is the time it takes to provide feedback to individual students. I want to make sure that I provide solid feedback instead of lazy or rushed feedback as I try to get through my mountain of papers.

Peer Feedback

I only vaguely remember using peer feedback in school. I know that I did, but cannot remember the specifics. I imagine that that means the peer review activities were never too traumatizing to me. And since my writing was pretty strong and I was an avid reader, reading another student's paper did not give me anxiety. I knew I would be able to provide small bits of valuable feedback, helping my friends to receive better grades on their drafts. However, I remember feeling unqualified to give peer feedback in my upper-level Spanish classes when paired with students who were grammatically stronger than me, so I can also empathize with the anxiety that students may experience. Because of that, I would want to have specific classroom instructional time dedicated to teaching students how to review peers' work and, at least initially, give step by step instructions in a teacher-directed peer review session.