SimplifyFeedback

A Visual Guide

By Gerard Dawson

Part I: Planning

for Sustainability

and Success

Assigning an essay with no plan for when, how and what to give feedback on creates teachers who are burned out and students who lose interest because too much time passes between drafts.

In Part I, you’ll learn how to use Kelly Gallagher’s “writing coach” mindset to plan for a manageable way to give students lots of practice without creating extra work. You’ll also find an example of how a group of freshmen students benefitted from this approach.

Use this tomorrow...The writing coach mindset helps make feedback focused and timely.

Ideally, students would write a lot AND teachers would read every word carefully and provide immediate, useful feedback. This takes hours and leads to burnout and papers returned late.

Tomorrow, consider the writing you’re students are doing. What piece of the writing can you focus your feedback on in order to leverage your time? Are you practicing the use of evidence in an analysis essay? Then try selecting one body paragraph in each essay and give focused feedback on the use of evidence in that paragraph. This cuts

down the time it takes for you to get through all the essays so the papers get back to your students faster. Fast feedback = learning.

When feedback is timely, it feels relevant to students, and they’re more likely to put effort into revising their writing.

As the previous page suggests, this technique can be applied by breaking a single draft into pieces, or having students write several drafts, and the teacher choosing one to respond to.

So, focus your feedback. Students write more than you can grade, and even more than you can read. When it comes to responding to student writing, sometimes less is more.

Plan with Purpose

You can start to adopt the writing coach mindset tomorrow, even if you’re students are in the middle of an essay.

The real benefit, though, comes when teachers plan units with this mindset.

Some guiding questions to use when planning writing units:

● What skills will students practice?● What products will students create?● How will I give feedback?

By keeping these in mind, you can determine how to give students lots of writing practice, without an overwhelming amount to read and evaluate.

Case Study: Writing Complaint Letters

As part of a unit on persuasive writing, my freshmen academic students wrote complaint letters. This genre approach to writing is the perfect time to implement a 3:1 writing philosophy.

Students chose a list of three people, companies or organizations that they wanted to complain to. They wrote to specific teachers, local businesses, and even ambiguous groups (“Dear misogynists…”).

The beginning of the unit was devoted to brainstorming activities, so students had plenty to write about.

Then, each week, students wrote a letter of 350 words or more. Each week, I reviewed the letters. This helped me determine what to teach in mini-lessons.

At the end of three weeks, students chose one letter, and I provided feedback using Kaizena. The students revised their letters and mailed them.

Draft 1

Skill 1 practiced

Teacher checks content in oneparagraph

Draft 2

Skills 1 & 2 practiced

Teacher checks structure

Draft 3

Skills 1, 2, 3 practiced

Teacher checks style

A Possible Workflow

To the right, notice a variation on the 3:1 approach.

Students write three drafts. For each draft, students receive instruction on one element of the writing. Here those elements (broadly) are content, structure and style.

The teacher gives focused feedback on that element of the writing.

As students complete subsequent drafts, they use past feedback and continue practicing previously taught skills.

A quick recap...

● Be a “writing coach,” not a reader and grader● Plan so students write 3X more than you grade● Break drafts into pieces that you can respond to● Ask students to apply past feedback and

instruction to new writing drafts● Allow students to choose their best writing to

revise and publishReady for part II?

Part II: “I’ve collected 100 essays, now what?”

Choose Your Path and Stick to It

In Part I, I mentioned that following a few guiding questions when planning writing units goes a long way in managing thefeedback process. One such question was, “What skills arestudents practicing here?” Now that the drafts are collected,remembering the answer to this question, and focusing on those skills is important to keeping feedback focused and timely.

Here’s where I make some enemies. I let tons of errors slide.That’s right. I ignore misplaced commas and thats in place ofwhiches. At this point, some of the readership has left the document, never to return. For those who choose to read on, here’s why:

Remember, this guide is for simplifying feedback by making it timely and focused. So, I plan the skills that students will practice during a specific writing assignment, then only address those skills in the feedback I give to students.

I usually have three to four categories--generally they include structure, style, grammar and content--and address one aspect of each of those in my feedback.

Case Study: Writing Complaint Letters

After students selected the complaint letter that they wanted to revise and send off to the recipient, I revisited the rubric that I’d created before the unit began. There were three criteria that we had focused on throughout

the unit, and I addressed only these three aspects of writing as I gave the students feedback:

While ignoring spelling and grammar errors may be unthinkable for some, I return to my

principle idea that feedback needs to be timely and focused in order for it to help student writers improve.

By focusing on three to four skills at a time when I read student writing, I’m able to analyze the students’ papers more

efficiently as well as more effectively. I’m not haphazardly searching for errors; I’m evaluating and responding to the student’s mastery of specific skills.

Style: Selecting diction (word choice) and syntax (sentence structure) thoughtfully to create an appropriate tone for the letter.

Grammar: Accurate and effective use of parallel structure and complete sentences.

Content: Effective use of ethos, pathos, and logos to achieve the purpose of the letter.

Keep off the marginsI can remember the first writing assignment students completed, my first year of teaching. It was an analysis paragraph on Alice Walker’s short story, “Flowers.”

After pouring over the students’ writing, correcting errors and leaving notes in the margins, I returned the papers to students with comments and a grade on top.

Students improved their free throws on that day, using their papers as a ball and the trash basket as a hoop. No revision occurred. Few comments were even read.

Since then, I’ve shifted the feedback process into the drafting stage, and separated extensive comments from the grading period of the writing.

I’ve also removed feedback from the margins of the paper, and made it a vocal conversation between me and students.

The biggest return on time investment in feedback comes from using the power of the voice.

This can come in the form of a face-to-face conference, a set of comments recorded and shared on a smartphone, or dynamic, resource-rich feedback shared using the Kaizena Google Add-on.

So, in the remainder of part II, you’ll discover:

● How to maximize effectiveness of writing conferences

● How to use a smartphone to give audio feedback

● How to use Kaizena and move students toward self-directed revision

Let’s get started.

“Surely what writers need most is the

experience of being heard and

a chance for dialogue” -- Peter

Elbow

Say this, not that: a note on language

Raise your hand if you want to take your beliefs, values and work-in-progress arguments, and ask a stranger for critiques.

No takers, huh? I often forget, and I imagine other teachers are with me on this, that it’s hard to share your writing with people, especially people you don’t know too well. We want students to write openly and honestly, but we don’t always use the language of our feedback to encourage this.

In “About Responding to Student Writing,” an article by Peter Elbow, he reminds us that, “when we write comments that purport to be true in general or true for other readers, we are very likely to be wrong.”

A survey of my own academic experience proves this. I’ve had many English teachers, and many different interpretations of what is considered “good writing.” Let’s study some examples of how to keep comments considerate and constructive.

1. “You don’t use enough evidence to prove your argument here”

2. “Make this more descriptive”

3. “This is confusing and needs to be clarified.”

1. “You convinced me in the last paragraph, but here I don’t quite believe your claim.”

2. “I can’t picture this scene. How can you make it more vivid?”

3. “You lost me here. How can you reword it?”

The objective comment The subjective commentbecomes

The table below gives example of objective comments that purport to be “true,” even though they are based on only one reader’s experience. These are the types of comments that cause

conflict, because they are opinions stated as facts. Again, consider all the English teachers you’ve had, and the variety of standards they’ve imposed on you. By seeking to make subjective

comments like those on the right, we acknowledge that feedback is a conversation, and a reaction to writing, not an end-all judgement of the writing.

The Tools

Doctopus

In-person conferences

Kaizena

Let’s get real...

Why reinvent the wheel?

I learned to use feedback tools by watching the following tutorials (click the images). They’re made by people with more experience than me, so I think you can learn from them, too. First up: the master, Penny Kittle.

Questions for your notebook:

1. Which techniques that Penny uses would you be comfortable using?

2. Which techniques

would push you out of your comfort zone?

3. What’s one line

that Penny used that you could repeat in a student conference?

A challenge for you:

Set up Kaizena in your Google Docs account.

Use Kaizena to give feedback on one student’s writing, even if you’ve already responded to other essays in another way.

Choose a student who you are comfortable speaking with and who seems to adapt to change well.

Ask the student for their reaction to receiving feedback this way.

Get help setting up Doctopus by emailing me:

Gerard.Dawson1@gmail.com

Putting it all together...Giving students feedback on their writing is the task that I consider most important as a teacher. It’s one-on-one teaching.

You’re not supposed to work less on student writing after reading this. If that’s what you took away, then I haven’t made my point clear enough. You might, though, have a mindset, system and set of tools that can make your work have a bigger impact on your student’s writing.

Every teacher has some favorite materials, activities and lessons that these use as part of their teaching tools. Hopefully, this guide has provided some ideas that will help you think of responding to student writing in the same way as lesson planning--a task that requires a clear goal, specific strategies, and a broad set of tools that can be used in a variety of situations.

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