Blog #7   Jeanne Nixt

Responding to Student Work

The Lindemann reading this week contrasts different ways of responding to student writing.  She discusses current/past practices and offers suggestions for improvement moving forward.

I think my favorite part of this chapter was the remarks by the student who fragged and awked too much.  A student’s response to the teacher’s response to the student’s work is a lesson for teachers everywhere. [This sentence sounds like the Abbott and Costello comedy routine called “Who’s on First?” which was way before my birth, but I included a link for you to follow if you’ve never heard it.] This student is mystified by the abbreviations in the margins, and is so turned off by them that he can not wait to be done with writing.  The student says that he didn’t ‘know why she said it; writers did it. But he guessed that since he wasn’t a writer he didn’t have that privilege” (p.232).  

Students don’t always want to learn – sometimes the subject matter is beyond us or just plain uninteresting.  However, I hazard to say that teachers want to teach.  We want our students to get something out of the lessons we lead and the messages we share.  In this instance, this student’s lesson from the teacher was that he was a bad writer, that he could not use literary tools, which other writers used. He was so bad at writing he should not do it at all.  I imagine that his teacher was in deed trying to be helpful, however the system she used was not an aid but rather a deterrent to future writing.  The question here, and Lindemann offers lots of suggestions for answers, is how can we support our student’s writing and help them to improve in such a way that we do more good than harm?  I like Lindemann’s idea of blind peer review.  Teaching the students how to respond to each other’s work, showing them examples of work with remarks is a way of allowing agency into the classroom.  In this way, students can improve their own writing by thinking about the writing of others.  This too allows for more feedback from different voices, and more feedback in quantity as it alleviates the need for the teacher to be the only feedback provider.  Sounds like a win for the teacher and a win for the students.

 

 https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=mcafee&ei=UTF-8&p=who%27s+on+first+abbott+and+costello&type=E210US977G0#id=1&vid=071bc493dd6130722b5a1ffadbfb488c&action=view

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