Skip to content

3 Mistakes You’re Making When Giving Feedback on Student Writing

    7kviews

    image

    My guess is that at some point all teachers have made—or still make—these simple mistakes when giving feedback on students’ work. Fortunately, there are quick ways we can remedy the situation.

    #1: You’re spending too much time on each student.

    This may feel unkind to say it so bluntly, but it’s probably true.

    Recently, I’ve begun setting a timer when grading student writing and experimenting with the Pomodoro Technique. In 25 minute chunks, I try to “beat the clock” and see how many students’ essays I can fit in to one “Pomodoro.”

    No, I’m not racing through work without reading them. I am creating a sense of urgency about it.

    If I can give feedback to more students in a shorter amount of time, more students are able to apply the feedback to their writing with faster turn-around. 

    And that increases the likelihood they’ll retain the content or master the skill in the long-term.

    For me, setting the timer pushes out other distractions—like email, social media, etc.—so I can focus on each student’s composition.

    It’s neither effective nor fair to give lengthy feedback to our students many days or weeks after they’ve drafted a piece. We cannot expect them to apply the changes when such a distance has occurred.

    #2: You’re writing too much on each essay.

    Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to sit in on a number of new hire interview panels.

    As a part of the interview process, in the English department, candidates are given a student essay and asked to provide feedback and confer with the student writer (played by one of the teachers on the panel).

    Regardless of the pressure of this situation, most candidates overwhelm the student’s writing with feedback, marking up every error.

    I’m not sure if this is an effort to show future department colleagues “Look! I understand grammar!” or they actually think this is an effective way to give students feedback.

    The thing is, I know I made this mistake when I first began teaching.

    It would take me weeks to return papers. I’d spend hours at Panera, marking every forgotten comma, shifting verb tenses, or urging the writer to “Elaborate.”

    Fortunately, I had an unofficial mentor who saved me.

    A former teaching colleague of mine Jen Van Der Heide—now an Assistant Professor in MSU’s Department of Teacher Education—shared her research about feedback.

    Essentially, the impact on students isn’t any different when we 1) only write a grade or 2) mark up every possible error.

    Both of these forms of feedback have an equal impact on the students. Most kids aren’t going to read every bit of ink you add to their paper, so don’t even waste your time.

    It’s best to give them a few specific “nuggets” of feedback at different stages during the writing process. 

    And remember you can actually do this if you spend less time on each student.

    {Read more about Jen’s action research in her article “Changing Roles: Providing written feedback to student writers by moving from the ideal-text bearer to the roles of coach, reader, and editor.”}

    #3: You’re taking it too personal.

    Sometimes, I can give myself a real mental beating when I’m evaluating students’ writing:

    “Ugh! We practiced this skill for a week. How could he keep making this mistake? I must not have explained it well enough.”

    Sure, sometimes I don’t teach it quite right {Ahem. The new SAT Rhetorical Analysis}. And yes, we can gather instructional data from student work. But my guess is that most of you go-getters don’t drop the ball every essay nor do we struggle with finding data to analyze.

    Instead we procrastinate grading essays because we feel bad about ourselves when we read sloppy student work.

    In the end, when you’re finally grading those essays—rather than continuously shuffling the awful ones to the bottom of the pile or pouring another glass of wine—remind yourself that this is not an evaluation of you as a writing teacher.

    I’ll say it again because we all need to hear it:

    You cannot read each essay as an evaluation of your effort or merit as a teacher. 

    Ultimately, it comes down to them choosing to follow your instruction or not. Students are choice-makers. If you’ve followed the “I go, We go, You go” gradual release model, I trust that you’ve done enough. At some point, it’s on them.

    Your Turn…

    What mistakes do you notice teachers making when giving feedback?

    What tips do you have to make this a smoother and more effective process?

     

    Extra Tips: I have my students submit essays on Google Classroom to speed up my feedback time as shown in the photo.

    Also, I often write a motivational note to stick on my essay stack. Sometimes I write something simple, like “Don’t take it personal.” Other times, I take Better Than Before author Gretchen Rubin‘s advice and write out the positive argument for giving timely feedback because, in reality, do you ever procrastinate on other tasks in order to grade essays first?

     


    But wait–there’s more! If you like what you’ve read here, check out my resource page for products/downloads, contact me about workshops/presentations, and join my mailing list to receive posts sent directly to your inbox: Follow Erica Lee Beaton on WordPress.com

    6 thoughts on “3 Mistakes You’re Making When Giving Feedback on Student Writing”

    1. Lynsay

      Erica, I absolutely love this post. Thank you for helping us be more effective and efficient in our jobs (and reclaim our Sundays)! I would also add using shortcuts to speed up the feedback process. My two favorites are:
      1) Batch Processing, where i put kids in piles based on what primary mistake they’re making (ex. the No Topic Sentences pile, the Boring Introduction pile, the Superficial Analysis of Text pile, the No Paragraphing Whatsoever pile), and then I speedily write the exact same thing on 10 kids’ papers in a row.
      2) Pre-Printed Feedback, where I print the top 5 most common Glows and Grows right on the rubric or grading sheet, and I circle what’s applicable for each kid. If a kid’s Most Important Thing isn’t printed, I just write it.

      1. Erica Beaton

        Thanks, Lynsay! I always appreciate your kind words and good ideas. You’re so smart. 🙂

    2. Caitlin

      Thank you for this–I definitely made some of these mistakes when I first started out. The thing I’ve learned the most since I started teaching Writing & Reading is to focus more on the content and the goal. So if my goal is to get students to integrate outside sources meaningfully into their writing, then I will focus only on that. As the revision process takes hold, we will look at other areas that need improvement, but in order to avoid overwhelming students with feedback, it helps to look at OUR focus as instructors. Of course this isn’t always easy to do, but it’s helped me a lot. Also, giving oral feedback (recording myself going through their essay) helps speed up the process as well. You can use screen casting software to do this and students like it, too!

      1. Erica Beaton

        Caitlin, you are not alone making these errors in the early years of teaching. Unfortunately, the problem persists for too many teachers later on, and sadly this leads to burnout in ways we don’t even realize. You are one of the smart ones realizing that we need to focus on just a few things! THANK YOU for sharing that!

        Your comment reminded me of my own ELA classes back in the 1980-90s where we were graded on Focus Correction Areas (FCAs) instead of some of these universally “blah” rubrics. As a student, I had a clear idea of what skills my teacher would grade and was certain to really nail those areas, just like you mention.

        And I LOVE that you brought up audio comments. I’ve been hearing that from a lot of teachers on Twitter. It reminded me of a conference years ago where I heard Jim Burke mention that’s how he speeds up feedback, but I’d forgotten it until now (I blame conference-information-overload). I love that you’ve tweaked it to include screencasting. Then it’s audio and visual. Very smooth!

        Thanks again for adding such solid insight!

    3. Callie Sockett

      Giving feedback via Google Docs/Classroom submissions is also sped up when I combine typing with voice to text (built right into Google) – I wear headphones and for summary comments I usually just “talk” to the student and the device does the rest. Once you get the hang of it, it speeds things up, and I can provide much “richer” summary comments. It does require re-reading to ensure that the comments don’t contain errors (e.g. the device “heard” you incorrectly and put in the wrong word) but I find that it is pretty intuitive.

      1. Erica Beaton

        Thanks great advice, Callie! I love the “talk-to-text” feature on my phone, but I never considered using it for feedback. Thanks!

    Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

    This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.