Saturday, November 21, 2015

The Concept of Control in Teacher Responses: Straub and Looking Back as We Look Forward: Yancey

Straub's article deals with the important topic of teacher's comments on student's writing pieces. He stresses the importance that these comments have on the writer and how teachers need to be thoughtful and careful about their approaches. The goal is to ultimately have students develop their pieces and stand up and take responsibility for what they create. Too often, teacher comments are too controlling and judgmental. He emphasizes the point that writing instructors need to evaluate their commenting style and determine what and how they comment. There are many ways of looking at a piece, and many approaches to making commentary. It is sometimes difficult, but there should be a resistance to taking over control of the paper by guiding or instructing specific changes. The teacher should try to instill a feeling of collaborator.

Straub analyzes five different teacher comments on a paper and found many different methods used. He found teachers who focused solely on surface changes such as grammar and sentence structure, others who did not ask questions about the content but rather lead the student to make certain changes, and finally others who were less judgmental and provided comments that allowed the student to think about certain content driven points where she will be able to decide whether to make changes or not. He also shared an example from Peter Elbow where Elbow provides more of a summary of what he experienced as a reader. Elbow's comments felt very genuine and authentic.

We have discussed this topic at length during our semester and I feel that it is an important issue. Through the personal stories shared, we have heard that there have been those of us in class, who felt helped by strong commentary from teachers and those of us who have felt frustrated. There is  a lot of talk in education right now about the importance of feedback. I can only hope that it is important enough to provide some training or at least perhaps in house focus during school meetings. As always, things won't change unless we first acknowledge and second educate to strength or better the issue.

Yancey's piece this week was very similar to last week's reading of hers. It once again, looked back at the progression of the use of assessment in composition studies in higher education. I did enjoy this article more as she explained how the three waves overlapped and built upon one another. She shows the need for movement in this area and how the old methods of assessment become stagnant or how they simply didn't fit the dynamics of newer populations entering college.

The transition from multiple choice tests that focused on vocabulary and grammar skills in the 1950s to a portfolio assessment used today shows how compositional studies has come leaps and bounds over the years. The progression of how students are assessed highlights the value that there is on the content of writing over the correctness of grammar only. It also focuses on how instructors have become experts in the field.

As I stated last week, I'm sure that Yancey is happy with the progression that has been made thus far. However, where are we headed from here?

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