Remember our talk about rubrics and being very clear in an assignment what the goals of the assignment are?
The purposes of using rubrics and being very clear about an assignment's goals are for your benefit as well as for students' benefit.
When you make clear to students the goals of an assignment, you are helping them understand what it is they are to learn. This not only helps them focus clearly on what matters in an assignment, but helps you help them develop the metalanguage that is necessary for reflection on learning and hence necessary for learning itself. When students cannot only demonstrate that they can (for example) do a rhetorical analysis of a speech but can also state what the qualities of a solid analysis are, then they can choose awarely to use the tools of rhetorical analysis in the future. Also, when you state very clearly the goals of an assignment -- and tie your responses and grading to those goals -- you are being fair to students: you are letting them know that you will not base their grade on something they didn't know they were supposed to attend to.
When you make clear to students the goals of an assignment, then how well they achieved those goals is all you need comment on. Really.
You can stick to commenting on what is in your rubric, what you specified in the assignment. You can use the rubric to figure out grades, as we discussed back in Orientation, if you are grading individual assignments: each column in a rubric has a numeric equivalent, and you average out the numbers to get the grade. (Students here at Tech, as you may have noticed, often like numerically determined grades.)
And when you use rubrics, you can use a filled-out set to focus on attending to the class's learning. By looking across the patterns of rubric feedback, you can ask: Was most of the class able to learn what you hoped? To what depth? What do you need to continue to emphasize? What can you depend on them knowing, following an assignment, to carry into the next assignment?
Responding to student work is hard, but it does get easier over time as you develop the habits and phrases that work for you. One way to learn what works is to ask people in your classes to write responses to your feedback. Ask them how they interpret your feedback, and what they see (based on your feedback) they need to focus on in upcoming assignments (or in a revision). Asking them to write such reflective responses helps *them* think about what they need to do in their own learning but also helps *you* learn how students are understanding and benefitting from your hard work.
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just another thought about feedback
"One way to learn what works is to ask people in your classes to write responses to your feedback."
I really like this idea and I might try it when I hand back their next paper. Generally, I discuss a lot with my students to see what they "get" from my comments. Until now, I have the feeling it worked pretty well. However, your remark made me think about how different they would feel if they could write responses to my comments. What I mean is that maybe they would feel more free and more inclined to say what they really think, since I would not be standing in front of them....this is just a thought...but now, I really want to try it!
Another thing I like to do is to have them give feedback to each other; I think it is a good way to make them realize how important feedback is and, at the same time, how hard it can be too to give constructive feedback.
This is why, today I had my students work together in groups on their second draft for their argumentative paper. At the end of the session, I asked them if the feedback they had gotten helped them or not... it was funny to listen to what some of them had to say.. some were actually pretty happy with the feedback, whereas some others underlined the fact that "just telling me that I need to capitalize this or that word is not going to help me to write my paper".
So I'd say that listening to them and observing them is always a good way for me to improve my teaching. I teach but I also learn so much...and I love this! And now that I know them better (and that they know me better too), there is more room in my class for humor; I mean, I can use humor and still having them take the class seriously...and I have to confess, this makes me very happy and of course, it makes my teaching easier and funnier too.
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