My Philosophy of Response.

"You can Do Better," But How?

In high school, grades meant a lot to me. A grade meant I was passing or failing and I had to figure out how to either maintain the status or improve.

Commentary feedback was rarely given and if it appeared at all then it took two distinct forms. One was the usual “Good work”, “Excellent” and similar positive feedback that appeared against my grade. Second was the one that pointed out that I needed to improve but never really said how I was to go about that. They were constructions such as “You can do better”, “You need to revise” or even the dated “Pull up your socks!” One other type of comment that would rarely appear on my assignments was the dreaded “See me!” that would often end punishment for failing on a test. The teachers at this point lacked targeted feedback that would give me a clear indication of what I needed to work on. This was a challenge especially in English and Literature classes where we wrote endless compositions and essays.

The Power of Feedback.

Over the years, especially in college, I have come to experience the power of feedback through the varied kinds of professors I have had. My ideas about feedback being a grade coupled with a well-done or not-so-well-done phrase have taken a different perspective for the better. Generative feedback that prompts me or rather motivates me to revise has greatly influenced my performance in courses as a student. Through the various readings we have had in class, It is clearly important to offer feedback that helps students to not only see the areas they need to improve on and how to improve them, but also have a sense of why revision is important. In a writing course, it is significant to let students learn that writing is a process, that writing is learning how to write, that writing is a skill developed through drafting, self assessment, and revision. Without motivating feedback, constructive revision does not occur which hinders progress in the learning process. Nancy Sommers notes, “Without comments from readers, students assume that their writing has communicated their meaning and perceive no need for revising the substance of their text” (149). In addition, the student as a novice writer, may not be in a position to gauge the audience’s response to their writing. Nancy Sommers describes feedback as meant to help the student assume the role of the reader and question their own writing, “we comment on student writing to dramatize the presence of a reader, to help our students to become that questioning reader themselves, because, ultimately, we believe that becoming such a reader will help them to evaluate what they have written and develop control over their writing” (148).

All this has taught me one important thing: just a grade is not reliable way of providing feedback. Students need more substantial methods of measuring their performance and suggestions that prompt them to revise in order to improve and become better writers.

What I Believe

One scenario I wish to avoid as a teacher is to have a student confront me for failing to get a higher grade even after fixing the mistakes in their paper in line with the kind of comments I gave on previous drafts. This means, in giving feedback to students, I should be careful to provide open ended generative comments that are not just pointers to easy-fix writing mistakes but are suggestive of a large scale revision of the entire assignment.

Feedback is to be given from early in the course and be consistent and frequent. I believe it is important to make students realize that writing is a process and therefore, as a teacher, I have to walk them through this process by providing the needed motivation at various points of the course. Early and timely feedback goes into ensuring a successful writing process.

Commenting on students’ work both verbally and in writing, in class and on their written assignments are all important aspects to progressive learning. Sommers explains that successful feedback is achieved when classroom activities and the comments written on students assignments are connected in a way that they mutually reinforce and enrich each other (155). This is one aspect that I will incorporate in my teaching so as to have my students realize that what they do in class is equally as important as what they produce in their assignments and therefore both are deserving equal attention to ensure their success as writers.

In responding to students papers, I believe it is important to first view a student’s essay as an end in itself, that is, the essay is separated from my own requirements as the instructors and presented as an attempt to communicate to an audience for a given reason. Therefore, I first approach the essay as a common reader before putting on my grader cap. This way, the comments that I give to this student are not only from the grader point of view but also the point of view of a reader who has no idea of the specific requirements the student was supposed to follow.

I believe it is important to give thoughtful feedback to students which engages them with the issues they raise in their own text in a way that they are able to question their own writing and attempt on ways of making it better.

Feedback is a means to achieving the objectives of a composition course for both the teacher and the students. Through teacher feedback, peer feedback, comments on papers and comments in the classroom, students learn how to develop their writing which is a common goal for both parties involved.

Final thought: “The challenge we face as teachers is to develop comments which will provide an inherent reason for students to revise; it is a sense of revision as discovery, as a repeated process of beginning again, as starting out new, that our students have not learned. We need to show our students how to seek, in the possibility of revision, the dissonances of discovery-to show them through our comments why new choices would positively change their texts, and thus to show them the potential for development implicit in their own writing” (Sommers 156)

Reference: Sommers, Nancy. "Responding to Student Writing." College Composition and Communication, vol. 33, no. 2, 1982, pp. 148-156.