Comments and Responses to Students

This week's readings each had to do with the ways educators interact with their students in and about writing.  "Writing Comments on Student Papers" was practical in its approach, offering detailed examples, while "Response to Writing" dealt more with theory.  Both articles stood against the outdated, overly-directive, surface-level types of responses to student writing and advocated responses/feedback that encourage the student to engage in thoughtful revision.   

I found John Bean's "Writing Comments on Student Papers" both vindicating and useful.  As part of my work in the Writing Center, I have served as an in-class mentor twice.  Both times, the professors with whom I worked asked me to read and write comments on students' papers.  I was not asked to give grades; I only provided feedback, which would later be appended to feedback from the professor.  Among Bean's advice I was able to see some techniques I had already used, such as offering praise for things that are working (335 par. 2) and asking specific questions to help a student improve their argument (335 par. 5).  Both of these techniques are things that I had stumbled into based purely on instinct or as adapted forms of writing center tutoring protocol.  Seeing them provided as sagely wisdom for the teaching of writing was very encouraging.  It was kind of a sign that, yes, I have been doing this commenting thing correctly.  Or at least certain parts of it.  That was very valuable to me, because I always second-guess myself for fear that I'll do something wrong and turn a student off of writing forever.  I was particularly concerned that maybe offering praise (and I offered it on everything I could; if a student got only one smiley face in their comments, it was a bad sign) could be a destructive thing because students would only read the praise and then feel like they didn't have to revise.  Reading that "positive emotions enhance cognition" (Bean 319) and "to promote meaningful learning [...] teachers should build on student successes, evoking feelings of hope and confidence rather than failure" (Bean 320) removed a lot of the doubt and guilt in my mind.   In Bean's article I also saw some techniques that I had never thought of, and which I would like to use in the future.  The use of directive bullet-points in end-comments (Bean 334) struck me as a something I would like to try.  In addition, I particularly liked the notion of the old-new contract (Bean 326-329).  I had actually never heard of the old/new contract before, but it made a lot of sense.  I also really liked how referencing the old-new contract with "O/N" became a sort of "inside" thing for the author's class.  I know I've read somewhere that inside jokes/memories help build bonds between people and strengthen relationships, so I assume that same concept would extend to the teacher/student relationship. 

This social quality of the classroom was also a part of our other reading, Beach and Friedrich's "Response to Writing."  According to the article, "demonstrating to students how to use teacher and student feedback to reflect alternative perspectives on ideas and beliefs leads to a reenvisioning of one's beliefs, perspectives, and ways of knowing that are essential for revision (Lee, 2000 as cited in Beach & Friedrich 223).  I chewed on this idea for quite a while because I'm still becoming used to the idea of knowledge itself as a socially-constructed thing (this concept is a big part of two of my classes this semester).  As a student, when I saw comments from the teacher, I usually tried to figure out what the teacher wanted from me. In other words, my audience was one person and I had to "play-out" my knowledge in the way my audience-of-one wanted, just because that audience-of-one was in power.  I suppose I thought of it more as a complicated command-obey exercise: figure out the command, then obey it. That worked for me, so I never really thought further into it.  Now, after working in the writing center, studying to be on the other side of the equation, and reading things like this, I am beginning to reenvision the purpose of feedback, and the entire nature of the professor/student dynamic.  Teachers of writing shouldn't be like animal trainers teaching tu-tu clad lions to perform clumsy verbal ballet on command; we should be teaching the lions how to speak coherently so they can join our discussion of Tchaikovsky instead of just roaring.        

With my interest in writer identity, I also appreciated the part of "Response to Writing" about teachers interpreting students' personas through their writing assignments (Beach & Friedrich 224).  It seems like common sense that teachers would translate their students' writing into caricatures of the students themselves, but somehow I had never thought of that occurring.  I think letting students know that others' perception of their identities could depend on their writing could make them care more about it.  This could be framed within the context of social media, where written content is often the first contact a person has with another person.  Perhaps there could even be an assignment where students write short, anonymous blog or forum posts about their interests, families, majors, etc. and then their classmates have to guess which post belongs to which student.  This could demonstrate to them just how much power one's writing has to define them.  Ideally, this would lead to the formation of an embryonic writer identity, even if they only ever apply it to looking cooler than they actually are on Facebook.