I was honestly a little shocked by how time consuming it is to respond to student work. I attempted to respond to student letters and their Warriors Don't Cry Blackboard posts all at once. I learned quickly that this was not an efficient way to do this.
I did manage to get through all the Blackboard posts. It took me approximately 10 minutes per student to read and respond. I also had the extra step of emailing students my comments because I knew they wouldn't be checking the discussion board again for my comments. What I learned is you have to respond to Blackboard posts pretty immediately for them to be useful. Students need a response to their writing always. This means a ton of reading and writing for me as an instructor. At least I'll know in the future now how to estimate how much time I'll need to respond to Blackboard posts. It's kind of a critical juncture between when students respond informally to a text on Blackboard and when they draft their formal paper. It's important to give them some individual guidance on how to go from Blackboard post to draft. I have noticed that this is incredibly challenging to many students and might need to be explicitly taught to some groups of students.
I only got through half the letters after several weeks. I felt bad that I couldn't get through more of them quicker. Somehow as an instructor you need to find a way to respond to everything almost immediately. I've learned I can't let work pile up. I know that students will respect me less if I don't respond promptly and as a result their work will be negatively affected. These letter responses took me approximately 15 minutes a piece which really adds up. I think that this was such a slow task for several reasons. First, I took notes on student letters in a spreadsheet so I could easily look back at student data for potential whole class lessons or writing conference teaching points. I also think this will help me brainstorm groupings in class. Plus I think I want to keep informal profiles of key information and observations about students. This might be too ambitious, but I find that writing narrative assessments on my teenage students at my Saturday job really helps me understand student needs and what to teach much better. Another reason this took so much time was because I really wanted to write the honest and encouraging letters that each student deserves. This builds trust with the students and trust is essential for the writing classroom. However, I'm struggling with the opposing needs of needing to be thorough in my responses, but also feeling that I need to be responding quickly. I have chosen to prioritize more thorough and slower work. I think that has paid off because two of the fourteen students I have written to have personally come up to me and thanked me for my letters. I think it's worth it. In the future though, I need to plan to go into teacher hibernation mode and just write responses to student letters constantly the first weekend after I receive them.
It's discouraging that it doesn't seem possible to make responding to student work faster. However, it does seem to get easier. I have been getting a better sense of the kinds of things I want to say and how I want to put them. In many ways responding to student work is like learning a new genre of writing and I need to study how it is structured further. In future blog posts, I will analyze Professor Gleason's comments and my comments and work towards a checklist or comment bank I can use on student letters and on informal responses students write on Blackboard.
I did manage to get through all the Blackboard posts. It took me approximately 10 minutes per student to read and respond. I also had the extra step of emailing students my comments because I knew they wouldn't be checking the discussion board again for my comments. What I learned is you have to respond to Blackboard posts pretty immediately for them to be useful. Students need a response to their writing always. This means a ton of reading and writing for me as an instructor. At least I'll know in the future now how to estimate how much time I'll need to respond to Blackboard posts. It's kind of a critical juncture between when students respond informally to a text on Blackboard and when they draft their formal paper. It's important to give them some individual guidance on how to go from Blackboard post to draft. I have noticed that this is incredibly challenging to many students and might need to be explicitly taught to some groups of students.
I only got through half the letters after several weeks. I felt bad that I couldn't get through more of them quicker. Somehow as an instructor you need to find a way to respond to everything almost immediately. I've learned I can't let work pile up. I know that students will respect me less if I don't respond promptly and as a result their work will be negatively affected. These letter responses took me approximately 15 minutes a piece which really adds up. I think that this was such a slow task for several reasons. First, I took notes on student letters in a spreadsheet so I could easily look back at student data for potential whole class lessons or writing conference teaching points. I also think this will help me brainstorm groupings in class. Plus I think I want to keep informal profiles of key information and observations about students. This might be too ambitious, but I find that writing narrative assessments on my teenage students at my Saturday job really helps me understand student needs and what to teach much better. Another reason this took so much time was because I really wanted to write the honest and encouraging letters that each student deserves. This builds trust with the students and trust is essential for the writing classroom. However, I'm struggling with the opposing needs of needing to be thorough in my responses, but also feeling that I need to be responding quickly. I have chosen to prioritize more thorough and slower work. I think that has paid off because two of the fourteen students I have written to have personally come up to me and thanked me for my letters. I think it's worth it. In the future though, I need to plan to go into teacher hibernation mode and just write responses to student letters constantly the first weekend after I receive them.
It's discouraging that it doesn't seem possible to make responding to student work faster. However, it does seem to get easier. I have been getting a better sense of the kinds of things I want to say and how I want to put them. In many ways responding to student work is like learning a new genre of writing and I need to study how it is structured further. In future blog posts, I will analyze Professor Gleason's comments and my comments and work towards a checklist or comment bank I can use on student letters and on informal responses students write on Blackboard.
Laura,
ReplyDeleteAs time goes on , you will get a sense of how you want to respond to student writers and how you want to respond to students' drafts. I would argue that responding to student writing is an art. It is something you learn only by doing it and by talking with others (orally and by reading scholarship) about how they respond.
The practice of responding to student writers is important and there are different ways to respond. But no matter how a teacher chooses to respond, responding to student writing is a labor-intensive practice. And for that reason, class size matters.
Here is a link to a position statement re: class size for college writing classes that enroll a significant number of second language writers:
http://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/secondlangwriting
And here is what is said about class size:
Class Size
Since working with second language writers often requires additional feedback and conference time with the instructor, enrollments in mainstream classes with a substantial number of second language writers should be reduced to a maximum of 20 students per class. In classes made up exclusively of second language writers, enrollments should be limited to a maximum of 15 students per class.
Our class size of 28 is out of sync with writing class sizes across the United States.
Here is a link to a survey or class sizes for college writing classes:
http://comppile.org/profresources/classsize.htm
Here is a link to the ADE Guidelines for Class Size:
https://www.ade.mla.org/Resources/Policy-Statements/ADE-Guidelines-for-Class-Size-and-Workload-for-College-and-University-Teachers-of-English-A-Statement-of-Policy
And here is a quoted passage from the ADE guidelines:
I. NUMBER OF STUDENTS IN WRITING COURSES
Recommendation: College English teachers should not teach more than three sections of composition per term. The number of students in each section should be fifteen or fewer, with no more than twenty students in any case. Class size should be no more than fifteen in developmental (remedial) courses. No English faculty member should teach more than sixty writing students a term; if students are developmental, the maximum should be forty-five.
The number of writing courses taught by one teacher is also a factor: if I teach two writing courses with 28 students each, I will be teaching 56 writing students. And if I teach 3 writing courses with 28 students each, I will be teaching 84 students to write. And since there is limited time for every teacher, the number of writing students that the teacher is teaching really does matter.
--Barbara