Ch 14 Responding to writing

Responding to Student writing

I feel like I’ve been teaching writing wrong all these years. My students almost always never do a first draft, and at the end I’m so pressed for time I just make them turn it in and move on because we have this pacing plan to follow. When I do give feedback, it is usually on the final draft, something they never look at because all they see is the grade. I spend all that time commenting for nothing. Over the past year, I have focused only on giving limited feedback, maybe 3 per paper. Something vague, like “deeper analysis”, “connect analysis back to topic sentence,”  or “use specific examples”. What the hell do these kids know about deeper analysis? I don’t even know how to teach “deeper analysis”! How do I get them to analyze, and how to I respond to student writing so that it’s practical and it’s something they can DO. One idea that I really like is when Lindemann talks about holistic scoring and she says that we can teach students to score one another’s work, and that the scoring is dependent upon the effectiveness of the essay as a whole, not on its different parts (245). I feel like when we grade essays, don’t we always use holistic scoring. Sure, we look at each paragraph and see if the analysis is “deep” or connects back to the topic sentence, but in the end, the overall meaning of the essay is what we grade students on. I would love to see my students grade their own and each other’s essays, and see how they would respond to each other’s writing. That would be perhaps a beneficial activity for me to see what kind and how I can give feedback. We have previously created rubrics in our class, but students have never used them to grade each other. It could be a worthwhile activity to try with out next class.