Comment Philosophy

I've been reading an article today by Nancy Sommers titled "Responding to Student Writing" published in College Composition and Communication. I found it quite enlightening because the errors that she found teachers make in responding to student essays are errors that I feel I make all the time! I don't know about you, but one of the most challenging parts of being an English teacher, I feel, is making the assessment of writing meaningful for both me and the student. I feel that sometimes I make comments just to make comments and that they're often not really the most amazing pieces of advice I could be giving students.

So, here are some snippets from her article that I found interesting:

"We read (student papers) with our preconceptions and preoccupations, expecting to find errors, and the result is that we find errors and misread our students' texts. We find what we look for; instead of reading and responding to the meaning of a text, we correct our students' writing. We need to reverse this approach. Instead of finding errors or showing students how to patch up parts of their texts, we need to sabotage our students' conviction that the drafts they have written are complete and coherent. Our comments need to offer students revision tasks of a different order of complexity and sophistication from the ones that they themselves identify, by forcing students back into the chaos, back to the point where they are shaping and restructuring their meaning."

She also said this:

"What is said in the comments and what is done in the classroom mutually reinforce each other." We should be giving "comments which will provide an inherent reason for students to revise."

So, after reading this article, it did make me want to evaluate how I evaluate and really come up with an awesome plan of action for this year! One strategy that I've always wanted to actually do but have been too lazy to enact is to have students keep an Error Log. This would be a place where after every writing they do, they write the original sentence, fix it, and identify what type of mistake they made. I think this would help make writing more individualized.

I also think that I will try to do more conferencing and do more drafts of essays so that students see a quality piece of writing does take revision.

I know that many teachers now are using rubrics as the sole place where students can get teacher feedback, but I really think this is a backwards approach. It does seem like teachers need to get much more individualized than rubrics allow.

What do you both think? Any ideas and strategies that you find work??