The Importance of Feedback

            The biggest problem in writing instruction that I have witnessed and read about is lack of timely, clear, and useful feedback provided by teachers to their students when returning work. In my own writing instruction, I have experienced teachers who wait several months after a major paper to return it, and at that point the feedback is sometimes missing entirely or incredibly vague.  I have also observed several teachers who know the importance of offering helpful and timely feedback, but explain that it takes too long or that they never know when it is a good time to return papers without having the time to discuss the grades. As a future writing instructor, I know how valuable feedback is and hope to provide my students with close to immediate feedback which addresses major patterns in their writing so as to not be overwhelming.

            Atwell believes that it is important for students to be able to anticipate the patterns of response during conferencing so that they can learn how to incorporate her responses into their writing while they are in the act of writing. Atwell (1998) claims that “after-the-fact response from a teacher comes too late; it assumes students will not only hold a teacher’s advice in their heads until the next writing occasion and apply it to a new context, but that they actually read the teacher’s written comments” (p. 120). With the knowledge that feedback is most useful during the writing process, I plan to incorporate many one-on-one conferences with my students and also give them time to peer conference with each other. 

              However, with this added time for peer conferencing, I must be sure to teach my students how to offer each other effective feedback. Many teachers I have observed simply place their students into groups and tell them to read each others' papers and give comments. Students primarily focus on things like grammar and sentence structure without commenting on ideas and organizational structure which would be more helpful for the writer. VanDeWaghe (2004) explains that students need "direct instruction in ways of responding, as opposed to just expecting effective responses" (p. 97). Therefore, before implementing peer conferencing, I will demonstrate the ways in which students can respond to each other by modeling how to give helpful feedback and how to properly conduct a peer conference.

            Winn and Johnson (2011) explain that “feedback should be clear and concise” (p. 81). They explain that instead of simply writing ‘good’ next to a sentence, a teacher should explain why; “This is a good sentence because you chose some very colorful and concrete words to describe your dream” (p. 81). In this way, the feedback is actually useful to the student and because it is so specific, it will allow them to understand more deeply what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in their writing and they will be less likely to repeat mistakes. By making sure that feedback is clear and useful, teachers can also ultimately save time by not needing to explain grades or ambiguous feedback to their students. I will also not make the mistake of covering a paper with red pen and overwhelming my students with extensive amounts of unfocused feedback that will be more likely to end up in a trash can. I want my students to recognize the patterns of their errors and learn to incorporate feedback in their writing.

References

  Atwell, N. (1998). In the middle. (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

VanDeWaghe, R. (2004). Research matters: "awesome, dude" responding helpfully to peer writing. English Journal, 94(1), 95-99.

Winn, M., & Johnson, L. (2011). Writing instruction in the culturally relevant classroom. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Additional Resources
http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson261/peer.pdf
This is a great guide from Read/Write/Think for peer editing. This emphasizes the importance of useful feedback while also explaining how the writer and the responder should conduct themselves during the conference.

 http://busyteacherscafe.com/literacy/writing_workshop.html
This website offers many helpful hints to guide a teacher through the entire Writer's Workshop process. It also offers many links to other resources like mentor texts, answers to questions about conferencing, strategies for planning mini-lessons, etc. 

http://www.virtualsalt.com/comments.htm
This website is specifically about writing comments on students' papers. It offers suggestions on how to comment as well as things that a teacher should avoid writing. Helpful for first year teachers who do not have a lot of experience commenting on writing.