Providing feedback on Student Writing

Here is an excellent essay on editing student writing by Ilana Reimer from Editors Canada:

http://blog.editors.ca/?p=6956

That article also linked to this other excellent article on teaching writing

https://curiosityencouraged.com/help-students-revise/

Curving Class Grades

Found on Twitter

Found on Dr. Alex Couros (@courosa March 10, 2018) Twitter feed with the comment "Well played".

I deeply appreciate any instructor who grades the answer as presented rather than only the expected replies. Full marks here for both the student and the professor!

Meme: ESL Test Answer

Another stimulus from the internet. So two principles here:

First is, "you can't mark it wrong if it answers the question asked" so, the solution here is to you congratulate the student on her imagination and authenticity and then ask the student to read you the answer in English so you can tell if they have the concepts you were actually testing for. And then you ask her if she'd care to share the (translated) answer with the class because she probably has a better sense of the actual answer than you do, especially if she asked mom about the family's stories handed down from great-grandmother.

Second, it is a good reminder of an assessment technique to use with ESL students in your classroom (though in this case, the student was obviously bilingual since she is taking the exam in English): it's vital to give the ESL students in your class the opportunity for success. If they are constantly struggling to express themselves in English, the quality of their responses will obviously always be less sophisticated and more error-prone than their native-English peers. So, whenever possible when doing this sort of written assignment, get them to write it in their own language, and have their parent or another adult fluent in their language grade it for content. Because, if they're writing fabulous poetry in Chinese or Italian, you don't want to give them a grade in the poetry unit that says they don't understand poetry. That's just incorrect assessment. English Literature and social studies instructors can make good use of portfolio assessment strategies that allow for the inclusion in the portfolio of pieces in the student's own language, alongside pieces that show the students progress/improvement in writing in English. The inclusion of work in their own language is a huge moral booster for the student—that says, in effect, "I may not have mastered English yet, but I'm still a pretty damn good poet!"—which, if one's purpose is to teach kids an appreciation of poetry, is kind of the whole point of the exercise. Without occasional success and reinforcement, what we are teaching the student is that school is a horrible experience to be avoided whenever possible; that they are a failure at our subject— that poetry, or whatever is not for them; and that they are failures and unworthy generally. I don't know a lot of teachers who signed up so they could oppress and discourage kids, but I have met quite a few who think their job is to enforce English instruction to the point of tears and beyond. Yes, let's have assignments in English, but let's make sure we have some parallel assignments in their own language to remind the student—and frankly, to remind us, the instructors—that these are talented, motivated, and hard-working kids. The reason they only put two line answers to that essay question is that writing two lines in English took them as long and five times the effort as the native-English speaker who wrote three pages. Seeing their eight-page essay in Italian or page in Chinese (Chinese characters are words, remember) with an "B+" from their Uncle reminds everyone that this is not a lazy or inferior student.

It should go without saying that the native language assignments must be optional for the student...at some point, asking a student to do any work in their mother tongue becomes the layering on of unnecessary additional work, which would be both dysfunctional and maybe a little racist. But it should remain an option in every teachers' toolbox.

Defining Learning/Assessment Objectives

Bob Parson (University of Ottawa) said:

In my continuing quest to refine, define and sublime learning outcomes, objectives and competencies I would like to share a new challenge. All of the above require clarity (both parties should be able to agree on what that goal or outcome is) and be able to be assessed. I thought of one that fit both those requirements but…

In the department of “That sounds simple, yes I agree, and of course, I’ll get right to it!”, I would like to offer an example of how the warm reception of an agreed-upon outcome/objective can be misleading:

“At the end of this lecture/course/event the student will be able to… get their ducks in a row"

This is a very common expression. We use it all the time: it can be agreed-upon as an outcome or objective because it sounds reasonable, constructive, observable and easy. But, have you ever thought of how difficult it would be to actually get ducks in a row? How would you do it? Who do you know that can talk “duck”? and if they did would the ducks pay any attention to them? I don’t think so.

If you had treats they might come to you, but in a row? Are you kidding me? (Perhaps polite Canadian ducks might line up but I wouldn’t bet my B+ on it.)

Is this an impossible goal that we keep striving for?

Perhaps this is a complete misunderstanding on my part, a trick question. Perhaps it is very easy to get all the ducks in a row. They would have to be immobilized (as in tranquilized or shot) but I never considered that as an option when contemplating the task: sounds pretty nasty even if it does get me the B+.

For an “A” I think you have to herd cats, but that’s another story.

Beware the simple-looking objective my friends.

As I often say “Every job is easy!... until I have to do it.”

To which I might add:

If it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck, probably a duck. If they produce six duck-like ducks in a row (i.e., multiple data points) then pretty sure that's an 'A'. So I don't have a problem with students getting their ducks in a row.

It's what grade to give the student who turns in a goose that I have a heard time with. Is that an original, better-than-asked-for duck...or did that student miss the target completely?

[Which is why, when multiple markers weigh in on the same paper, a small percentage of papers get an F from some instructors, an A+ from others. Doesn't mean marking is completely and randomly arbitrary; just means one interpreted objective literally and sees answer as off topic, while the other saw paper as thinking outside the box.... (In Alberta provincial exams, such a paper goes to a special committee to decide which of the two markers is correct in this instance.)]

I'm An A Student, But You Only Gave Me a C

I get this from students fairly often; enough that I wrote a paper on how to turn such incidents into a more positive learning experience for the students: I'm An A Student, But You only Gave Me a 'C': Addressing Student Misconceptions of the Grading Process. The introduction provides some general strategies for reducing student confusion (and therefore complaints) but the best part is the section entitled "Sample Responses to Common Student Misunderstandings" that provides solutions for the most common (and annoying) student complaints.

Teaching and Evaluating Writing (Part 1)

I am attending a writers' conference (When Words Collide Festival, Calgary) this weekend, and especially enjoyed listening to the Keynote Address by Diana Gabaldon. In it, she talked about how writing is taught in schools: in every grade 5 class, the teacher has the students write down bullet points about their topic; then break up into groups to share and critique their bullet points with each other; then use that corrected list to write an outline; share outlines in pairs or small groups; take outlines home to parents for proofing; then turn that into the teacher to provide feedback; then use the teacher's feedback to produce a good outline; then use that outline to write a rough draft; have the students breakup into pairs to read and review each other's rough drafts; then take rough draft home to parents to correct (rewrite); then have them write a good draft; break up into pairs to proof each other's good drafts; and then hand that into teacher. [Well, she actually described the process in greater detail, but you get the idea, and most people recall something along this line from their own experiences.]

Then Diana Galaldon asked the banquet hall of writers, "Does anyone here actually write like that?" And of course, everyone agreed that "the writing process" as taught in schools has almost no connection with real writing or real writers. Diana Galaldon then described her own personal writing process to gales of laughter, because (almost) no one else in the hall wrote remotely like that, and could not begin to fathom how anyone could possibly work like that. It's not that Diana Gabaldon is weird, it's that anyone else's approach to writing seems unworkably bizarre.

What real writers know is that there is no one process that works for everyone; on the contrary, every writer has a different approach to the process of writing. Derrell Schweitzer interviewed something like 1,000 American SF authors about their writing and writing process, and the one thing that stood out for him was that (1) every writer in the sample said there was only one way they could write; and (2) no two writers in the sample wrote using the same process. (Sociologist Howard Becker, in his book Writing for the Social Sciences, came up with the most credible explanation for why that is, but going into that is beyond the scope of the current posting. Sufficient to say, everyone's process is inherently unique.)

The problem is that by insisting on this one outline-roughdraft-finaldraft approach to writing, teachers get passable product out of our kids that allows teachers to assign grades as if these grades were meaningful. It is easy to confuse this manufacture of product for the teaching of writing, but the production of 'final copy' under these conditions has little to do with learning how to write. In the late 1870s, the newly invented public schools decided to pay teachers by the linear foot of writing produced by their students. That seemed fair, because the more your students wrote, the more you got paid. Payment by results. But of course, it only took teachers twenty seconds to figure out that if they set their students to copying out the bible, they could significantly increase their salaries. Consequently, schools became factories that produced written work, without any regard for actual learning. If we know, as we emphatically do, that "The Writing Process" as it is generally taught in school is largely unrelated to the actual process of writing, then someone needs to explain to me how the current approach in schools is in any way an advance over the obviously ludicrous situation of paying by the linear foot in the 1880s?

But suggesting there is only one The Process of Writing" not merely a mistake, it's a destructive lie. I spend a lot of time when I give writers workshops undoing the damage caused by high school English teachers who have dictated "The Writing Process" as "how you write". Because many people believe their teachers that this is the only way to write, if that one approach isn't working for them they come to erroneous conclusion that they cannot write. This is actively harmeful! to the majority of students. I think teachers should also subscribe to the Hippocratic Oath: do no harm. But our assessment practices for writing do a lot of harm. We are supposed to be teaching kids how to write, but the vast majority learn instead the more fundamental lesson that writing is not for them.

I am perfectly fine exposing everyone to the notes-outline-rough-final-draft approach as one possible option with which students should experiment. But that is not the only or even best way to write. I remember one of my English profs talking about how he used to teach THE WRITING METHOD and developed a four stage assignment structure that force students to do the notes and then the outline and then the rough draft before the actual paper as essentially four separate assignments, because it was the only way to force students to do all the require steps. Then one day a girl brought in a paper because she had seen something on TV the night before that had totally inspired her and she had sat down and pounded this (brilliant, as it turned out) paper. Then she said, "sorry, I didn't have time to write an outline yet, I'll do that for Monday if that's okay." And he had suddenly realized that half the class wrote the outline by writing the paper first, and then deconstructing it to come up with the outline. And he smacked his forehead because he finally 'got it', and he stopped using that industrial-model assignment and started designing assessments that helped students become actual writers by helping them discover theirprocess.

I have in workshops and in my editing business occasionally told writers they had to make an outline. This tends to come up more frequently for nonfiction, and especially academic, writing, but even sometimes fiction as well. Notes and outlines help some specific writing problems, and when I see people with those problems and they take my advice to use an outline, they improve rapidly and say things like "thank you for teaching me about outlines." Sometimes that's exactly what they need to become proficient. But it is not universal, and for other writing problems, not only would that advice not be helpful, it would actively make the problem worse.

This should not be hard to grasp. Yet when I teach my English Major student teachers that the traditional approach is the wrong approach to assessing writing, they resist. Because actually assessing writing is complex, challenging and requires getting to know each student to diagnose their individual needs and remedies. The old way is simple, easy, and can be applied to the class without knowing anything about anyone. But um, if your job is to teach writing, then you should probably do that and not turn your class into a factory producing writing by the linear foot.

Meme: Grade Deadlines

Every prof ever...except maybe for the bad ones who decided on your grade BEFORE marking....

Registrar once told me 25% of profs don't get their grades in on time, so make that "two days after grades are due". I always struggled to make the deadline, but it made me feel a lot better to know that getting marks in at the last minute still better than a lot of my colleagues.

On the other hand, students should not be in the dark about their grades until they are posted. Grading processes, including how grades on assignments are weighted, should be completely transparent.