Dissonance Blog

After pondering my topic for the dissonance paper, I finally buckled down and decided to focus on one specific area that is in line with this week’s assigned readings. While I haven’t completely generated a definite research question(s), I do know what I would like my paper to address. I would like to focus my research on responding to student writing. After careful reflection of this idea, I discovered I have been more involved with response of student writing because of my personal experiences, my teaching experiences both past and present, and through general conversations with other instructors about responding to student writing.

As I reflected back on my own writing both at the high school and college level, I discovered my writing, based on teacher feedback, ranged from “great writing” to “needs improvement.” In high school, my teacher responses on my writing were almost nonexistent. If I did happen to receive comments on my essay, they would include the standard editing marks that addressed my grammar and mechanics mistakes. However, as I can recall, they did nothing for me as my main concern, as it is with many students, was the grade that was found on the very last page. I am not quite sure why they never really provided commentary on my page, but being a student, I feel I probably would have benefited from it as a young writer.

It wasn’t until I entered into college that I actually began receiving feedback on my college papers. Grant it, the comments I generally received only were done in my composition and literature courses. My first year English 101 instructor approached student feedback in two ways: 1) direct response on my essays, and 2) He would post papers on the overhead and respond /critique the paper in front of the whole class. To be quite honest, the latter really prompted me to do well (probably because I hate looking like an idiot). In this class, the responses I received ranged from grammar and mechanics to more of organization and coherency type feedback. Again, I never really received comments or suggestions about different ways to approach the paper, or points to consider regarding my content etc.
During the latter part of my undergraduate career, I had a unique experience with two courses I was taking simultaneously: I was taking an intermediate composition course and an upper division literature course. Throughout the duration of these courses, we had to write the same amount of essays; however, one was obviously literary analysis and the other was more along the lines of the modes. Needless to say, the comments and grades I received for both courses illustrated some stark differences. In my literature course, I received more praising comments and hardly any negative comments in regards to grammar and content. In my composition course, I struggled to barely receive a B on my assignments. I received much feedback, which was quite helpful, but I wasn’t sure if it was because of the structure of the essays or if the comments that were being presented were just not clicking for lack of a better phrase.
My teaching experiences include teaching at the high school level and at the college level. Composition instruction (instruction on the process of writing) is predominantly found at the freshman level. Traditionally, the process of writing is not taught beyond that as the main focus of the curriculum is on literature and literary analysis. When writing is taught, it becomes quite cumbersome to respond to student writing when dealing with 170+ students. Therefore, it either did not occur or the responses were short and probably not helpful at all.

In my third year of teaching, I was assigned a sole composition course. Typically, the curriculum for this course was quite rigorous and was designed to prepare students for college level writing because this course is taken at the senior level. Despite this fact, the composition course was treated as a dumping ground for students that were far below the senior writing level. In fact, many of the students that were “dumped” into this composition course were students that could barely construct a sentence let alone an essay. In essence, what was supposed to be an intermediate composition course turned into a fundamentals writing course. Unfortunately, there was little room to provide the kind of teacher feedback that was necessary to elevate writing. A majority of the feedback that I provided was more structured base rather than content based. At this point, students were accustomed to receiving grammar and mechanics type feedback because this was what they knew how to respond to.

In my transition to college composition instruction (Freshman Composition), I quickly identified students that were accustomed to developing essays that followed the 5-paragraph model. They too were preoccupied with the notion that errors only consisted of grammar and mechanics. My responses to my students’ writing attempted to avoid, as much as I could, marking for grammatical errors and provided comment sheets attached to their essay. Many of my comments consisted of more questions than anything else and the occasional “why,” and “elaborate.” Based on my observations and students’ reactions upon reviewing their comments, most students quickly glanced over the comments and noted the grade. It is difficult to say why comments are taken into consideration, but I am betting most students overlook the comments or do not take them into consideration because as Murray points out, instructors do not know what they are talking about. I suppose this could be my fault just the same, or any instructors for that matter. What do we in fact do to ensure that students actually understand the comments made or where we were coming from? How do we know whether our students even know how to correctly make change when considering the comments? It seems most instructors, including myself, assume the students will just “get it.” An individual conference with the students is one way we could ensure students understand comments and are applying them. However, most student conferences do not occur until the end of the semester when it is too late. We could easily rely on our keen observation skills to see if students are applying our suggestions. However, it is difficult to determine whether students are applying critical thinking to their writing, but it is easier to determine whether students are making the same grammatical mistakes.

I hope the research I am able to find on teacher responses will shed some light on whether it is in fact worth the time to respond to student writing. Also, I am attempting to find whether the research shows if teacher response to student writing is in fact effective and how it is determined if it is effective or not. How is teacher response and student performance/product measured?