Responding to Student Work
PWR guarantees students ample opportunity to revise their work,
so you should consider at length how you plan on responding to
drafts of student work, including written, oral, and multimedia
projects. This early consideration will enable you to prepare
any forms you will use for feedback (and ultimately for evaluation),
to convey to students during the first week of classes what they
can expect in terms of your responses, and to ensure that you
effectively budget your time outside of class for responses.
Each instructor has favored response styles related to personality,
teaching persona, and other factors. Your job will be to examine
your own response styles and evaluate how successful they are
in reaching your students. Consider the differences in your response
on drafts, in student conferences, on peer review work, and in
assigning final grades.
Many instructors are most comfortable assuming the role of
coach or consultant when responding to drafts. You needn’t
comment primarily on surface features unless you notice a pattern
of error. Instead, ask direct questions; make suggestions for
additions, omissions, or clarifications; challenge assumptions;
and push for connections that need to be established.
The following method can help you work most effectively and
efficiently in reviewing drafts. You can begin the process by
having your assignment and criteria sheets close at hand and
then by reading through the entire set of drafts very quickly.
Doing so will help focus your attention on the set as a whole.
After a break, begin your detailed response. Read each draft
again quickly to make sure it is substantial enough to warrant
your effort.
The form of your response is part of your effectiveness. On
hard copies, you may write a running commentary in the margins
of the draft with a final analysis at the end. You may instead
choose to comment on a separate sheet, computer text, or tape
recording, in which case you may want to put numbers in the margins
that correspond to the sheet, file, or tape. If you accept electronic
submissions, you may want to take advantage of “comment” options
available on most word-processing software. Marginal comments
often verge on editing, and students take them as such. End comments
force students to look for and fix problems themselves. Some
instructors make comments in the margins of only the first one
or two pages and then refer to repeated errors in their final
comment as a global problem that the students should attend to
in the revision. Many instructors use commenting shorthand; if
you do, make sure your students are familiar with the marks,
perhaps by providing them with a key or list of your standard
terms.
Whatever your method, your response should be focused, offering
specific areas for the student to reflect on and improve in the
draft. Remember that your responses will guide the students’ revisions;
thus you should give serious attention to these drafts, providing
concrete and specific suggestions for improvement throughout.
Remember also to offer responses that record how the essay is
striking you—about what is interesting, puzzling, and so
on—as well as evaluative responses--about tone, rhetorical
stance, and so on. End by writing a final response that focuses
on what needs attention in the draft.
