When my daughter was a baby, she was a terrible sleeper. I spent many early morning hours trying to find advice online from research, experts, and parents in similar situations. As surely as there was any piece of potentially helpful advice, there existed its polar opposite. “Keep the baby near you, so it can form a healthy attachment,” one expert article might read. “Let the baby soothe itself, or it will never be independent,” read the next. I sometimes feel the baby sleep debate is similar to the teacher feedback one. When it comes to this absolutely vital issue, one that plagues teachers and often drives them out of the profession, why can’t research provide a more solid answer? One book calls for one approach, but there’s another in the next. And the next. And the next.
Here’s the thing. Baby sleep and writing feedback have something in common – they’re complex, they’re individual, and they’re so difficult that many, many people have tried to offer creative solutions. So instead of lamenting all these often frustratingly different possible approaches anymore, I decided to go hunting for treasure. Today on the podcast, I’m sharing my distillation of the feedback landscape. Ideas to keep in mind as you approach the feedback process, so that you can help students as much as possible while sparing yourself unnecessary angst. Because when it comes down to it, I think it’s waaaaaay more important that your students get to have you as a healthy, creative, energized teacher than it is for them to get an acre of feedback on their writing.
#1 Be Positive and Grade Less
Everyone who has ever assigned writing knows that many (most?) students don’t think of themselves as writers. Actually, they think of writing as an intimidating, even frightening thing. It’s sad. You can help them rewrite their own writerly narrative by giving them a lot of opportunities to write in class that don’t lead to a grade. Chances to experiment and develop their skills and identity as writers. And when you do grade their work, you can sincerely compliment the areas that they are doing well in, which will help reinforce those skills.
If you feel guilty about not giving students more grades, consider these thoughts from Alfie Kohn, from his foreward to the book UNgrading: “grading has three predictable effects — less interest in learning, a preference for easier tasks, and shallower thinking.”
#2 Mark Selections & Best Work
Along the same lines, as you build a culture of regular writing in class, you can let students choose what to have you grade. Sometimes it may be one paragraph of a narrative (the paragraph where they feel they really nailed the element you’re working on like sensory details or building tension) or one daily practice from a series of ten. The idea is that they can get a check-in with you on work that really deserves feedback.
In their book, Best Practice, Zemelman and Hyde weigh in: “Research strongly shows that the traditional intensive marking of student papers doesn’t promote improvement. Instead, a brief conference, or marking a sample paragraph for just one type of problem, results in more real learning” (Zemelman and Hyde, 64).
#3 Be Targeted & Specific
Once you are holding their selection, their chosen best work or the culmination of a real process, keep in mind that it doesn’t make sense to comment on things you haven’t worked on yet in class. If you’re working on analyzing evidence, and before that you worked on arguable thesis statements, then comment on those things, reinforcing the positive and giving a clear next step if they have a little further to go. But don’t get into long comments on the side about transitions, counter-arguments, more interesting conclusions, etc. Chances are you won’t be able to write enough to really teach these concepts, and your students may be more confused than helped by commentary that doesn’t follow up on any coursework.
In his wonderful book on teaching narrative writing, George Hillocks Jr. writes: “I always recommend focused, positive, short comments related to previous teaching for these grade levels and for high school students… If I have not taught the skill or concept related to my comment, I try not to make it” (Hillocks, 77).
Research analysis from Edutopia on feedback reinforces this same idea: “Focus on providing less feedback that’s more targeted. In a large-scale 2020 meta-analysis, researchers found that too much feedback is often “ignored, misunderstood, and of low value” to students. The best feedback helps students “understand [not only] what mistakes they made, but also why they made these mistakes and what they can do to avoid them the next time” (Terada and Merrill).
#4 Conference if you Can
Conferencing isn’t going to be practical with every piece of writing, but if you can build it in during a couple of your major writing units, it sure does make an impact. Carl Andersen’s book, How’s It Going?, presents the writer’s workshop model of conferencing, if you’re not sure where to get started. Like so many aspects of teaching, setting up a successful context for conferencing does take a lot of intentional planning.
#5 Use Peer & Self-Revision
Peer and self-revision can be major players in the feedback process, saving you exhaustion and helping students improve their writing and even their understanding of what’s required a great deal when done right. The key is to provide a clear structure to revision. Exemplars, checklists of what to look for, rubrics to show levels of needed elements, demonstrations from you on how to improve a weak area in a piece of writing – all of these things will help make the peer and self revision processes more powerful.
#6 Give Feedback First
Many teachers are understandably frustrated when they see their comments land in the trash after passing back work. Consider an easy switch-up, giving students your comments BEFORE you give them their grade.
You might have them write down their plan for the next piece of writing, based on the feedback (or their plan to revise the piece they’re holding, if you’re going to allow another draft), showing you their plan (and keeping it in a safe place or turning it in to you to do the same) before they get their grade.
Consider the research cited in that same study of feedback at Edutopia that I mentioned earlier: “In a 2021 study, students who saw their grades first, followed by feedback a few days later, scored two-thirds of a letter grade lower than their peers who received feedback first” (Terada and Merrill). That’s a pretty significant shift when we let students focus on feedback first without a grade.
#7 Track the Plan
Let’s say you write an argument paper at the end of Q1, then do book clubs and a podcasting project, then a poetry unit with some short argument practice but mainly creative workshops, then another argument paper at the start of Q3. Will students remember the advice you gave them on their argument paper back in October? Not a chance. They’re going to need help with that.
This could look many ways – they could have a chart glued into their notebooks with the types of writing for the year written across the top, and boxes where they can add the key feedback they get from each piece of writing throughout the year, so they can always be leveling up. Or it could look like a Google Doc shared between you and them where they can put in their plan, moving forward, after each piece of writing and you can both see it. Or it could look like a survey they fill in after their writing, which you give back to them before the next writing project and ask them to staple to their paper, so you’ve got their plan for improvement right in front of you as you go to give feedback on the next work.
Keep in mind, this will only work when students understand the feedback they’ve been given. In his book, Making Learning Whole, David Perkins shows the problems with giving margin feedback students misunderstand and then expecting them to improve based on tracking that feedback. In my interpretation, that means feedback really needs to follow up on clear course content so it’s easy for students to understand (Remember #3, “Be targeted and specific”).
You can check out my solution to this issue of clarifying the margin comments in a previous blog post, Build a Common Errors Hyperdoc.
Be Your Own Advocate
If your school is still pressuring you to copy edit and comment exhaustively on every student’s work, spending half an hour with each paper when you’ve got 100+ students, I hope you’ll try to start a conversation about how your team can give the best feedback possible in a more doable way. This approach isn’t fair to you, and it isn’t even the best for students.
Here, I’ve shared seven strategies reinforced by the research I’ve read, and NONE of them point to how wonderful it is for students if teachers spend hours giving exhaustive, extensive feedback in the margins. Quite the opposite. Intention over exhaustion, every time. It’s good news!
Save it for Later
Want to remember these tips? Save the image below to your desktop or Pinterest account! Share it with your department. Print it for your faculty room.
Sources:
Andersen, Carl (2000). How’s it Going? Heinemann Educational Books.
Graham, S., MacArthur, C., & Hebert, M. (Eds). (2019). Best Practices in Writing Instruction. The Guilford Press.
Hillocks Jr., G. (2007). Narrative Writing: Learning a New Model for Teaching. Heinemann.
Kohn, Alfie (2020). Forward to Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum, West Virginia University Press.
Perkins, David. (2009). Making Learning Whole. Jossey-Bass.
Terada, Youki and Stephen Merrill. (2024: November 8). “Why Teachers Should Grade Less Frequently.” Edutopia Online. https://www.edutopia.org/article/why-teachers-should-grade-less-frequently
Zemelman, Daniels and Hyde. (2005). Best Practice. Heinemann.
