One of the more awkward, dark and uncomfortable things I’ve participated in recently was evaluating student reflection papers. For one week, several hours a day, I confronted myself with numerous interrogative questions as I took to my pen to student papers, “Am I a good person? What, exactly, am I trying to communicate to this student? Why do I think this sentence is awkward? What if they hate me, or worse, hate writing after this? What, again, did I specifically ask them to do in this assignment?”
I understand and salute Chiseri-Strater when she reflects on her grading process as feeling “vulnerable and confused, so that my grading was one of avoidance” (179). After our first introduction to composition evaluation, I think we can all agree that indeed, evaluation “is a web of the personal, the textual, and the developmental” (182). Dissecting this web and understanding its layered components, I suppose, will take more time in the lonely and confusing grading trenches. We are novice evaluators. After examining my first official numerical evaluation to my students – I feel a strange sense of defensiveness to my rubric, my time and my comments. The same can be said for our students. They are on the other end, perhaps expecting something entirely different that what you’ve labeled their paper with or what you’ve communicated in class. What’s left is this strange, multilayered conversation that only takes place on paper, meant to serve as an equitable conversation between their work and your expectations. It’s dangerous and scary ground. Here we are in a class that only offers one form of numeric evaluation halfway through the course – this is a challenge for both our students and ourselves. Fresh out of public education, where perhaps the only sense of worth and evaluation is communicated to our students through numbers – we are trying to do the same, only through commentary. “Grades are important to students; moreover, they have a twelve year history of dealing with them that is not easy to erase…Both students and teachers, then, have troubles about grades and the influence of grades on our teaching and learning practices” (180).
The Sommers article highlights a lot of possible confusion between unhealthy evaluation commentary and the kinds of meaningful, successful, commentary that is possible, “Written comments need to be viewed not as an end in themselves – a way for teachers to satisfy themselves that they have done their jobs – but rather as a means for helping students to become more effective writers” (155). What I hope to take from this introduction to the complicated world of student evaluation is that the ultimate and underlying goal in our commentary should serve as a message of encouragement. A message that seeks to help the growth of writing skills. We should steer from a sending of the kinds messages based solely on correction informed by our opinions, which may lead to feelings of determent. From this moment on, I hope to take Sommers advice in maintaining a healthy parallel in what I say in class – and on paper. “The key to successful commenting is to have what is said in the comments and what is done in the classroom mutually reinforce and enrich each other” (155).
I’m going to reflect on this experience of first-time evaluating, take a deep breath and move forward with these new and hopeful philosophies of evaluation. For next time and the remainder of the year, I’m going to tape this section of Sommers in my office:
“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 our new, that 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” (156).
Jenny, I like your focus on the mutual reinforcement of what is done in the classroom and what is said in evaluative comments. I would add a third component to make for triple reinforcement (whoa!) which is using evaluative comments as a model for our students' own comments to peers during workshops and conferences. Granted, this is something we're already doing subconsciously simply by exposing students to comments that reflect critical thinking. It may be helpful, though, to make explicit this use of modeling and to encourage students to use teacher comments on their papers as a model for the types of things they should be looking for and thinking about during peer workshops (as opposed to comma placement).
ReplyDeleteJenny,
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that I felt Chirisi-Strater's vulnerability and confusion during grading over this past month. And as you said, I wondered what the implications of my evaluation would be: I found myself thinking "How will this comment effect so-and-so's perception of his writing skills? Will it make him motivated to improve, or will he feel defensive or helpless?"
Ultimately, I decided that I felt I had prepared my students to receive my feedback by providing it at key points during their writing process, echoing Sommers' assertion that "it is necessary for us to offer assistance to student writers when they are in then process of composing a text, rather than after the text has been completed" (149). I also reasoned that the students should be prepared for my feedback because they themselves had been providing critical, constructive feedback to others during pair conference and peer review. To touch on Nancy's comment, not only does "using evaluative comments as a model for our students' own comments" help them develop and implement their critical thinking skills, but it also exposes them to receiving feedback more often AND gives them a small taste of how we feel grading. As they struggle to word their comments just right--to make a suggestion or point out an error without hurting their classmates' feelings--they're afforded a glimpse of the decisions we make (and sometimes agony we feel) while grading all 24 of their papers.
I especially liked Sommers' suggestion that instructors use commentary for "an additional pedagogical purpose"--to provide a reader response, so that the teacher-student relationship shifts to a reader-writer one (148). I think this idea is key, because a reader-writer relationship is one they will have when producing any text in any context (save, perhaps, private diary entries, although even then they are their own readers). It's a relationship that extends beyond the classroom, and since one of our duties is to show them that their writing skills can be applied outside of academia, I think the reader-writer relationship is important to emphasize. Thus, in my marginalia and final remarks, I did highlight the fact that many of my comments were questions or ideas that arose to me as a reader, things they needed to clarify for their audience.
"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..."
ReplyDeleteAfter getting through the first rounds of grading, I noticed a tendency in many students to avoid global revisions between drafts. They focused on removing commas, moving a few sentences around--small changes to the text. I saw very few real moves that altered the meaning of the essay, regardless that I'd suggested this to the students in conferences. A fear of change exists with my students. So I'd like to join Jenny in stapling, taping, nailing this bit from Sommer's to my office wall. Sommer's assertion that the students often fail to realize the importance of different changes resonated with me: "No scale of concerns is offered to a student, with the result that a comment about spelling or a comment about an awkward sentence is given weight equal to a comment about organization or logic"(151). The changes in sentences and small changes in structure didn't have any real affect on my students' papers. I'm curious now about how to get students engaged in global edits that change the overall meaning in the paper. So to maybe to take a different look at Jenny's idea of parallelism between comments and class, I am now thinking of ways to introduce the comments into the class: I'm on the hunt for twenty-four pairs of scissors. We're going to chop up every paragraph of our Op-ed drafts and move things around globally in effort to show the students how big changes can positively affect their writing.