One of the tasks that I struggled with during student teaching and even now as a Humanities teacher is giving effective feedback back to students. I do not remember this part of teaching being emphasized greatly in my undergraduate work, so while reading Tompkins and Zoi Philippakos article, "Giving Feedback: Preparing Students
for Peer Review and Self-Evaluation" I feel like I have gained some deeper understandings of what effective feedback can look like. One part in Philippakos piece that stood out to me was the section on Peer Feedback. When I was in high school and we did peer feedback
as a class, I remember not necessarily taking the
peer feedback seriously nor did I pay much attention to what my peers marked on my paper; I remember feeling offended that they found something wrong with it. Philippakos makes note of this when she writes that, "Often, students do not value their partners’
comments as much as they would
value their teacher’s comments,
and students are not always able
to identify problems in their peers’
papers" (Philippakos, 2017, p. 14). I think the reason that students feel this way is because they may not have necessarily received training in
peer feedback that they should have been given, and I know that I felt this way too. I felt like I did not know what I was doing and valued the teacher's opinions more than I did my peers. As teachers, we should provide students with the right training to give their peers this feedback because as they progress into the world, they will be experiencing feedback like this in their daily lives and will eventually have to give feedback to other individuals. It may not necessarily be on someone's writing, but it could be on someone's performance in a workplace and students should know how to provide that
constructive feedback. Here is a great resource to use to prepare your students in advance for a peer review. This comes from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Click me!
One other piece that I thought was noteworthy came from Tompkins chapter on feedback as well. When determining a student's grade for a writing piece after going through the writing process and providing time for writing workshops in class, there should always be
two perspectives to look at when grading the physical writing piece, not simply the finished product. As Tompkins says, "Writing, however, is a complex cognitive activity, which means that measuring only one or two dimensions of a student's composition is inadequate" (Tompkins, 2012, p. 93). We need to look at a student's writing from a
holistic and a
primary (or
analytical) standpoint; not only is this helpful to see the progress made from a student's draft through their finished piece, but this can also be accommodating for struggling writers. If a student struggles with writing and does not produce a finished writing piece that hits the highest points on the rubric, looking at their progress can definitely boost their grade. This is why we value the writing process so much. We cannot ignore it when it comes to grading the finished writing piece that our student's produce. We always say to trust and honor the process, so shouldn't that be equally as valued as the finished writing that gets handed in for a grade?
Holly, each entry you offer the reader some really interesting points for consideration. The only place I would like to hear more from you is what you think *you* will do, moving forward. For example, in your second paragraph you often talk about what "we" will do. How might you be able to better imagine possibilities if you focus more on what *I* will do.
ReplyDeletePS. I liked the link you included from U.W-M. Just goes to show you that the effort to support peer review continues even on into college. :-)
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