“The writing teacher’s ministry is not just to the words, but to the person who wrote the words.” William Zinsser
“It must be tough looking at a very large stack of papers, but it is the most helpful part of the essay process because without a reader the whole process is diminished.”
Alexandra Hays, college student
Our collective interest in responding is deeply professional and personal. We feel a weighty responsibility in responding to our students’ words, knowing that we, too, have received comments that have given us hope—and sometimes despair—in our abilities as writers. The words teachers scribbled on our papers are often the same words we scribble in the margins or at the bottom of our own students’ pages. These words, we hope, our students will take with them as they move from our class to the next, from one assignment to another, across the drafts. Responding to student writing reminds us of the pleasures of teaching writing, the call and response between our students’ words and our own. Yet most of us acknowledge that we don’t know how students use our comments or why they find some comments useful and others not.
In this workshop, we will engage with the words and ideas of one student writer. We’ll read the student’s draft and reflect on what it means to be a thoughtful reader of this student’s work. We will be asking questions such as:
- What lessons do students learn from comments?
- What distinguishes comments to inspire revision from comments to assess a final draft?
- And how do we engage students in a dialogue about their drafts?
2 comments:
A big thanks to Nancy for her fine presentation at the outset of the Bedford Symposium. I found it to be quite valuable and affirming of some intuited response approaches.
I wanted to share an intriguing dynamic that emerged as our table discussed the sample essay. Although we were instructed to frame areas for improvement as ways to build on existing strengths, we frequently would default back to one of two response strategies:
1) The deficit model, wherein we'd identify what the text lacked (e.g., it lacks a clear overall focus).
2) A needs model, wherein we'd identify what the text needed.
I was intrigued by the fact that although we would occasionally remind ourselves to frame our responses on top of the foundation of strengths, our attempts to do so came out forced or not clearly linked to those strengths. Some say that we teach as we're taught, and respond as we were responded to, but that's an oversimplification, and perhaps only a starting point for our teaching and responding. When we encounter new ideas and new research findings like Nancy's, it encourages us to rethink our teaching and responding approaches.
I found it intriguing that we returned to the deficit or needs model as if by default, and had to consciously remind ourselves to *try on* the build-on-strengths model. Perhaps this is what we are more used to, or perhaps it's just easier, takes less cognitive effort, so it becomes a default. I don't know. Just exploring here. I went away wondering what it would take for the build-on-strengths approach to become my default response strategy.
Perhaps just time and consistent, conscious effort to unlearn other strategies....
Anyway, thanks again to Nancy for the thought-provoking presentation.
Jon A. Leydens, Colorado School of Mines
Jon,
I was at the same table as you, and I noticed the same thing --both in myself and in our discussions. We did have to be conscious to build on strengths, to narrow our frame to one thing.
At the end of the day, during the wrap up, I shared something Peter Elbow recommends: collect papers from your students and simply read them for the sake of reading them. Don't collect them to grade or evaluate or assess. Read them without a pen in hand. Read them and simply return them and look the student in the eye upon handing the paper back and say simply, "thank you for sharing your essay."
I think doing something like that --and it's hard to do at first because we're teachers and reading without commenting on student writing is difficult-- will help make reading to comment on strengths come a little bit easier.
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