Teaching Community Report
Spring 2014
Teaching Community Focus:
The spring 2014 English teaching community focused on ways to create meaningful feedback through both instructor comments and peer-feedback. To further our discussion and understanding of this topic, we read chapters from two texts, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers by Erika Lindemann and The Discovery of Competence by Eleanor Kutz, Suzy Groden, and Vivian Zamel. Through the readings and discussion, we sought to improve the kinds of comments we leave on student drafts and/or the comments we want students to be leaving on each other’s drafts as well facilitation of peer-feedback workshops and teacher-student communication around essay writing improvement. Each member also completed a research project focused on the above theme.
Specific Goals for the Spring 2014 Teaching Community on Creating Meaningful Feedback
1. Create opportunities for and implement instructor and student feedback that best supports student success
2. Provide written feedback on at least two student rough drafts that draws from what we’ve discussed and/or read in the teaching community
3. Pose, explore, and answer a research question focused on the teaching community theme
TC Participants:
There were six instructors, each focusing on a different English course ranging from English 70 to 100. We met for a total of 9 hours over the semester, each meeting set at 1.5 hours.
Participants included Julie Ashmore, Guy Brookshire, Dabney Lyons, Margaret Seelie, Michelle Doherty, and Stacey Miller.
Facilitator: Sara Toruno-Conley
TC Sessions:
We began the semester by reading a few chapters from A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers followed by The Discovery of Competence. Discussion of the chapters followed, and the subsequent meetings revolved around sharing our ideas and progress around the research project, which involved implementing new kinds of feedback (instructor or peer), assessing the feedback, and reporting out on the results. Each member was required to survey the students and make copies of some of their work to include in the project.
The Research Project Guidelines
Each member was responsible for doing a research project, which included the following:
1. Explanation of Project: This section should start by explaining the purpose and focus of your research project. It should then pose a particular question that you want to explore and explain how you plan to explore it. It can even give the hoped-for results. Remember, in faculty inquiry, the question should be able to be assessed but will probably not lead to one definitive answer.
2. Table of Contents
3. Methods of Investigation: This section should explain an action plan (or plans) you will implement this semester that will help you to explore the above question. Each lesson or action plan should include the following:
1.) a clear explanation of how it will be carried out and your rationale for doing it
2.) a clear explanation of how you will assess the results
3.) an approximate time when you will carry it out.
4. Results: This section should provide the actual assessment in terms of how well the methods of investigation worked, and the effect they had on students. This section will also include a sample of student work and the student feedback you gathered, as well as attempt to answer your original research question.
Note: To see completed projects, contact Sara Toruno-Conley in the English department.
Brief Summary of Teaching Community Projects
Michelle Doherty (English 100)
Michelle set out to answer the following research question: “Are writing students more motivated to read and apply teachers’ commentaries when there is a grade attached? Do they demonstrate greater improvement on revisions when rough drafts are assigned tentative letter grades alongside commentaries?” In doing so, she left comments on two different student rough drafts, one that was accompanied by a grade, and the other that was not.
Her methods of investigation included the following eight phases:
Phase 1: Students submit essay 1 rough drafts after which Michelle assigns a tentative grade accompanied by instructor comments for improvement.
Phase 2: Michelle administers an anonymous poll to find out the students’ “thoughts, experiences, and preferences in relation to the assignment of grades on rough draft.”
Phase 3: Michelle collects and assigns a final grade to the essay revisions.
Phase 4: Students submit essay 2 rough drafts and Michelle leaves instructor comments without a tentative grade.
Phase 5: A repeat of Phase 3 for essay 2 revisions.
Phases 6-7: Michelle analyses the results of student improvement from rough draft to final draft for both essay 1 and essay 2.
Phase 8: Michelle administers a final anonymous poll to find out students’ thoughts and reactions to the two different commenting strategies.
Results:
Michelle found there was a greater percentage increase on the essay 1 revision. However, she notes the numerous variables that stand in the way of accurately determining which method of commenting yielded better results as well as the very slight percentage increase between the essay 1 revision process and the essay 2 process (.56% gain for the first essay).
The student polls show that the majority of students prefer instructor comments to be accompanied by a grade.
In her closing remarks, Michelle states that to answer her first research question, she went to the student polls, in which students remark that they feel more motivated to improve when a grade is attached. As for the second question, she uses the percentage increases to reflect on an answer, stating “By the greater percentage increases for Essay 1, we may certainly assume students are more motivated to read and apply teachers’ commentaries when there is a grade attached, but this is not something we can truly asses without an exhaustive study of each student’s process…”
Margaret Seelie (English 100)
Margaret’s project focused on empowerment through “feedback loops”: “the ongoing conversations that are happening between the writer and reviewer, the writer and the instructor, and the writer and outside reviewers.” Her research questions were as follows: “How can I empower the students via the feedback loops? How can I empower the feedback loop to create a constant conversation around the student’s writing throughout the semester? Do the students want to be empowered?” And “How can this empowerment eventually lead the students to become strong self-editors of their own writing?” To help her answer these questions, she focused on various “Writing Cycles,” noting that “a typical writing cycle lasts about four weeks—from the moment the assignment is given to the end when the final draft and submission packet are turned in for grading.”
Margaret’s methods of investigation focused on four different Writing Cycles. For each Writing Cycle, the students become active agents in setting the guidelines and parameters for the various “feedback loops.” Here are a few examples:
Writing Cycle 1: Here, Margaret introduces “the students to feedback and establish[s] why it is an important part of writing.” The class set the parameters for the entire semester regarding how to talk “about each other’s writing.” They opted for the first “feedback loop” to revolve around “constructive feedback” instead of “criticism.” They then committed to the following for Feedback Loop 1: “2-3 positive in-text comments,” “2-3 constructive in-text comments (in the margins and between the lines),” “Note at end including: 1 positive comment and 2 goals for the next draft.”
Writing Cycle 3: Margaret adds more brainstorming to this writing cycle, “including an outline workshop” in response to students’ feedback about having trouble choosing a topic. This Feedback Loop was “mostly discussion based” and “the aim was to give the students an opportunity to talk through their ideas and organization to see if it made sense.”
Results
In addition to providing individual results for each writing cycle, Margaret concludes with an overall instructor reflection addressing some of her original research questions. She concludes by referring to the overall student feedback given, evaluating the use of “writing cycles” to empower the students. She quotes two very different student responses: “Seelie needs to learn how to teach students rather than relying on the students to come up with everything” versus “What I like the most about the way my professor teaches is that she gives us options.” She ends by saying she has not found an ultimate answer to her research questions, but that the student feedback “tells [her] that every student notices a difference in the way they were taught, regardless of weather they liked it or not.”
Dabney Lyons (English 90)
Dabney focused on “Students’ Perceptions of Peer Review” in order to answer the following research questions: “How do students perceive peer review? What do students want to get out of peer review? What kinds of activities do students think help them to reach those goals?” To help her answer these questions, she put three action plans into place that would “catalog the successes (and misses) of incorporating students’ peer-to-peer feedback.”
Methods of Investigation:
Action Plan 1: Dabney elicits information from students to determine what kind of peer-review (the kind of feedback) they want and to understand their perceptions of peer-review. To gather this information, she gives students a survey containing the following questions: “What kind of feedback do you want to get during peer review? Why do you want it?” “Did you get the kind of feedback you wanted? How useful do you think it is?”
Action Plan 2: Students create their own peer-review questions for Essay 4. Dabney has the students get into small groups “to come up with the kinds of questions they wanted to focus on for their review of Essay 4.”
Action Plan 3: Students help Dabney create grading criteria for Essay 4 based on their peer-review questions.
Results:
To answer her first question, Dabney reports that she is surprised to find that students have positive or neutral opinions of peer-review. She was expecting negative student views because of past experiences with students not coming to class on peer-review days. In regards to her second questions, she says she’s also surprised to find that “fewer students reported interest in having their grammar corrected during Peer Review sessions.” And for her last question, she says she isn’t surprised to find that students liked the student-driven activities of creating their own feedback questions and helping to develop the rubric, saying these activities gave them more confidence.
Stacey Miller (English 70)
Stacey chose to focus on trying to get students to see the “value” of feedback and the revision process. More specifically, she asked the following research questions: “How does instructor feedback encourage or discourage revision? What types of instructor feedback are more likely to encourage a high quality of revision?” To help her answer these questions, she focused on giving different kinds of feedback on Essay 1 versus Essay 2.
Methods of Investigation:
For essay 1, Stacey chose to follow Peter Elbow’s breakdown for revision practice as she gave feedback on the drafts. The purpose of this kind of feedback was to focus less on the “easier-to-fix errors such as spelling and mechanics,” and to “form a dialogue in [her] feedback.” She wanted this kind of feedback to ask the students to “re-see and re-think the purpose of their writing choices.” This kind of feedback was meant to be extensive.
For essay 2, Stacey took a different approach, giving less extensive feedback (limiting the feedback “by almost half”). She also implemented a numbering system: numbering major areas of revision on the draft “from global to word level.”
Results:
Stacey’s data shows that more students (83%) opted to revise their essays for essay 1 than for essay 2 (only 34% revised). Furthermore, she notes, “Half of those students [from the 83%] chose to make Level 2 global revisions.” Stacey refers to Level 2 revisions as those that improved the essay and therefore, the grade. After analyzing the student surveys, Stacey states, “Student responses […] affirm the idea that the end of the essay is not the end of the learning. […] If nothing else, this project illuminates the desire for students to interact with their text with their instructor if the feedback encourages interaction.”
Julie Ashmore (English 90)
Julie set out to research how well various types of feedback help student learning since she notes “there does not seem to be that one method of giving feedback that trumps the others”. Her research question was as follows: “How does using multiple types of feedback in concert facilitate student learning?” To answer this question, she implemented three different methods of investigation.
Methods of Investigation:
1. Revision Learning Lab 1: Julie had students use the computer lab to revise their essays based on “balanced, targeted feedback” she had given them on essay 1. For each essay, she had left comments on “2-3 strengths and 2-3 weaknesses” and limited her comments “to the topics [they had] discussed and practiced in class.”
2. Guided Peer Reviews and Student-Teacher Conferencing: For essay 2, she gave students a survey to see how they viewed the use of peer-review and conferences as part of the feedback process.
3. Revision Learning Lab 2: This learning lab focused on “Finding and Fixing Sentence Combining Errors” for essay 2.