One very onerous thing about writing assignments is that they take a long time to read and respond to. If I have one hundred students and I ask them each to write five pages, I’ve got five hundred pages of reading and grading ahead of me. It will take weeks if I do a decent job of it. This is bad for me for obvious reasons, but it is worse for students. By the time I hand back their work, the act of writing the paper will be a distant memory. In many cases, I imagine, students will simply glance at the score and read none of my meticulous written feedback.
Students need feedback as they are writing for it to be actionable. Feedback after the fact is a list of ways you went wrong; feedback during the process can be oriented towards creating a better version in the future.
There are at least two sources of feedback for students: the teacher and each other. I recommend that students receive feedback from both.
Instructor feedback
Prior to receiving feedback from their instructor, students need to come up with a starting point for their writing. This can be as bare as a thesis statement and a few quotes or as robust as a full outline. That will depend on the situation. In any case, once the students have generated some ideas and been briefed on their writing assignment, it’s time to get started. At this point, I generally have all of my students work on digital documents that they share with me and grant commenting privileges. I let the students have some time to get some words out, and then I bounce from document to document and make comments.
This is an excellent way to quickly give a small amount of feedback to a large group of students in time for them to incorporate it. It is very early in the process, so the students do not have much written yet. This means that you can quickly scan what they have and ask a short, pointed question or highlight something that needs revision. It is important not to give them the solutions to all of their writing problems, but it is equally important to point out to them what the most significant problems are.
Pulling this off requires teachers and students to have access to and facility with a certain amount of technology. In a more low-tech setting, a teacher might simply stop by each student’s work station, but that is likely to be less efficient. During the session, the teacher will have to capture student questions without engaging them in the moment, or else the teacher will not be able to give live feedback to everyone. This can be achieved with a google doc or a simple directive to students to write their questions down for later collection.
This approach to instructor feedback has advantages for students and teachers. Students receive feedback which is actionable in the future rather than an irreversible account of errors in the past. The benefits of this are laid out remarkably well by Joe Hirsch, but the short version is that learners have a more emotionally positive and useful experience with this type of feedback. Jennifer Gonzalez has a fantastic blog post on this as well. Teachers benefit from this approach because feedback given in class is feedback that does not have to be given later from home by the teacher. The more feedback students get during the process, the less important it is for the teacher to write detailed comments on the final product. This technique effectively moves time spent at home on assessment into the classroom where it will be more effective anyhow. This technique also works in a remote or hybrid model without missing a trick.
Peer Feedback
Peer feedback is a great way for students to take control of the process. The act of reading and commenting on peer work primes students to metacognate about their own writing and moves them into a central, active role. The risk with peer feedback is that students may end up giving poor feedback to each other because they are not necessarily masterful writers. Even worse, conflicts may emerge as students get defensive. In order to avoid these pitfalls and reap the benefits, peer feedback needs to be carefully scaffolded.
Whether students are at a physical table or a digital breakout room, they need step by step instructions about what to do which leave no room for ambiguity. The common core standards for ninth and 10th grade writing specify that students should be able to, “Introduce precise claim(s), distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and create an organization that establishes clear relationships among claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence.” Here is what peer feedback session directed at this standard might look like with a group of tenth graders who have just finished rough drafts of their essays.
Step 1 - Students partner up either in person or in digital breakout rooms. Partners compare birthdays; the younger partner always goes first. Partners give each other viewing permissions on rough drafts if using digital documents.
Step 2 - Partners read each other’s rough drafts to answer these questions:
Can you identify a clear thesis statement in your partner’s paragraph?
Can you identify a clear claim at the start of each body paragraph which supports a part of the thesis statement?
Step 3 - Partners each share how they would answer the questions from step 2 with regards to each other’s pamphlet. The younger partner goes first. If there is any confusion about what the thesis statement is or how the claims of each body paragraph connect to it, the author of the draft clarifies what their intent was and both partners discuss how to make that intent clearer.
Step 4 - Partners re-read each other’s drafts to answer these questions;
Does the draft draw on quoted evidence from the text we are writing about in each body paragraph?
Can you identify this draft’s reasons for why the quoted evidence supports the claim the paragraph is making?
Step 5 - Partners share their answers from step 4. If there is a lack of evidence, partners discuss what sections of the text might support the claims which lack evidence. If there is confusion about reasoning, partners discuss how the reasoning might be clearer.
Step 6 - Partners prepare to present a short excerpt from each other’s rough drafts. They agree on a short (three sentence or less) bit of each other’s essay that is shows particularly effective reasoning.
Step 7 - The whole class reconvenes. Students take turns sharing short summaries of their partners’ best arguments and the agreed upon excerpts of their sharpest reasoning.
This could, of course, be modified substantially depending on the situation, but there are hopefully some principles at play worth applying. This setup works because the students have a directed, methodical process which requires them to be active at all times. Notice that students are directed when to read their partner’s work and, more importantly, what to look for when they do so. They don’t have free rein here to just talk about what is good or not in a general way. The questions students ask in this version are closely aligned with the standard we are working on and directed at improving the draft vis a vis that standard. The end of the sequence is a product which requires students to say something to the entire group. This bit may have to be pared down depending on class size, but it adds a bit of ungraded social accountability that takes the form of saying something positive about a classmate’s work.
As this is going on, you are in a position to hop between groups to answer questions and ensure that students are on task. If students happen to be in digital breakout rooms, Stacey Roshan has an excellent video on how to set things up such that the teacher can monitor all the breakout rooms simultaneously.
Final Thoughts
Giving students feedback on writing can be onerous and ineffective if it comes late in the process as a thing which happens to students. Giving students feedback on writing can be highly effective and efficient if it comes early in the process as something that students work with and provide to each other. The more that writing feedback can be moved into the classroom, the better off students and teachers will be.