my own observations about responding to student work, from a non-composition class

For the past 13 years, I have taught (at least once a year) HU2645, Introduction to Visual Communication. The class always goes well: people are there because they want to take the class, and the work of class is always fun, with lots of production and lots of people ooh-ing and ah-ing over what each other has made.

Because I have taught the class so much, and because I know it will go well, I am comfortable with using it as a little bit of a laboratory for tweaking different aspects of class in different semesters. So, for example, when I first taught the class, I would ask students to put together, two times over the semester, notebooks of their work, with annotations of the work; I would spend anywhere from an hour to an hour-and-a-half responding in incredible detail to each notebook, the equivalent of responding to every grammar error in a written paper as well as to larger, global issues. Eventually that became untenable; I simply did not have that kind of time -- when I was a grad student or afterwards.

I started keeping the daily homework of people in class, and then responding to it every 2-3 weeks with observations about global issues that I could see because I had a number of their pieces to compare. The time required was much less.

I felt guilty about it: students had commented on how much they liked the thick and detailed responses they got to their notebooks. But no one complains about the feedback they get now (except for the times I let those 2-3 weeks stretch beyond 2-3 weeks, sigh) -- and the work students produce is, ta-da, even better than when I would spend huge amounts of time responding.

They have always gotten huge amounts of feedback *in class*, from each other and from me. (Just about every class is shaped around all of us looking at each other's work and making responses based on guidelines taken from readings and observations.) So that is clearly a factor in the quality of the work they make.

But what I learned from all this is that focused, short comments from me were actually more useful to them than longer, detailed comments. Although they probably felt warm and fuzzy because of the length of my comments (meaning: "She cares about *me*!"?), the focused global comments -- to my observational eye -- seemed to keep them more focused on the approaches to their work that were most useful to them in making aware progress.

So I figure out other ways to keep class warm and fuzzy (lots and lots of positive spoken-aloud comments throughout class, and so on) and students aware that I am thinking about each one of them (pulling them aside at various times individually to make comments) -- but I sure am happy that I can see how effective it is to keep my out-of-class commenting time short and focused. I do like having time to breathe, sometimes.

How do you test out similar approaches in your classes?