How to Make Feedback Really Count
by Valerie Balester, Executive Director
If you are giving your students feedback on their writing and allowing them time to revise, you’ll probably see improvement. But maybe you still see unrealized potential. If you think your feedback isn’t going far enough, some of the following techniques might give you better results.
1) Develop criteria to guide and evaluate writing in collaboration with students.
If you want students to understand what you are looking for in a document, ask them to help you write a rubric. The rubric identifies the criteria for evaluating a document, and by deciding on what it should require, students learn more actively what standards they need to meet to produce quality writing. Start with discussion about what makes good writing of the type you want them to produce. In class or for homework, have them analyze a model—a good example of the type of writing you expect—and use what they see to create a description of A quality. If you have more than one class to devote to the exercise, you might ask them to also describe poor writing. Use their notes to build a rubric, then ask them to practice evaluating another piece (this time it can be student writing from another class or professional writing) using the rubric. Discuss how the class rated the samples. By the time you are finished, most of your class will have a much clearer understanding of the rubric.
2) Students don’t trust each other to edit, so don’t ask them to.
Peer editing is risky; peer response gets better results. If you ask students to be peer editors, they won’t (rightly) trust one another. They know their peers may be shaky on the finer points of grammar and punctuation. They should be responding to each other’s content, organization, and argument.
3) Provide peer and instructor feedback.
The more readers, the better. Every time a reader provides feedback, the writer has to consider revisions, and we know that writing improves with revision. So build incentives to revise frequently into your syllabus.
Instructor feedback. You don’t have to comment on every paper to provide helpful feedback. Randomly select two to four student papers at the end of a peer response day and read them carefully. From those papers select some passages or sentences that are strong but need improvement. If you select weaker writing or common errors, be very aware of the need for tact. You want to keep the level of trust high. Make a handout for discussion in the next class.
Another way to provide feedback is the in-class conference. On days when students are doing peer response in class, you hold 5-minute conferences with anyone who wants one (if they all do, you may have to devise some system like a lottery for those who get to see you during class). Use a timer to ensure you spend only 5 minutes per student. Basically, students should come to you with one specific question. If they don’t, concentrate your time by checking their introduction and structure (look at the beginning of each paragraph) or by reading a paragraph of their choice and giving in-depth feedback on that.
Peer feedback. Besides the class workshop devoted to peer response, you can ask students to read each other’s work for homework. No matter how you organize peer feedback, encourage specific suggestions and make sure students understand their roles. I usually ask them to give honest, tactful, and specific feedback k about what they like and what they don’t like or understand. I also arrange so that they hear from at least two peers and explain that reactions and suggestions may well differ, since we all bring different skills and expectations to the task of reading. I stress that as writers it is ultimately their responsibility to weigh all the feedback they receive and decide how and whether to incorporate suggestions.
4) Set them up to provide feedback to themselves
Suggest they work on a revision for an hour or so, set it aside then come back and review what they did earlier, again making changes. Talk about your own writing process and how you revise based on feedback from others. There is no better way to convince them—they don’t care much that their English teachers revise (unless they are English majors), but they may be very surprised that their engineering, biology, philosophy, or math professors do.
