College Writing | An Elon University Academic Blog

Anson, Chris. “In Our Own Voices: Using Recorded Commentary to Respond to Student Writing.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning 69 (Spring 1997): 105-13.

Bass, Randy. “The Scholarship of Teaching: What’s the Problem?” Inventio 1.1 (February 1999). Web. 7 March 2011. < http://doit.gmu.edu/archives/feb98/randybass.htm>.

Brookfield, Stephen D. and Stephen Preskill. Discussion as a way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005.

Edgington, Anthony. “Focus on the Now: Making Time for Reflection-in-Action during Teacher Response.” TETYC (May 2009): 380-91.

Hodges, Elizabeth. “Negotiating the Margins: Some Principles for Responding to Our Students’ Writing, Some Strategies for Helping Students Read Our Comments.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning 69 (Spring 1997): 77-89.

Nicol, David and Debra Macfarland-Dick. “Formative Assessment and Self-Regulated Learning: A Model and Seven Principles of Good Feedback Practice” Studies in Higher Education, 31.2 (2006): 199-218.

Sommers, Nancy, Carol Rutz, and Howard Tinberg. “Re-Visions: Rethinking Nancy Sommers’s ‘Responding to Student Writing,’ 1982.” College Composition and Communication 58. 2 (Dec. 2006): 246-66.

We give students extensive feedback about their writing during the semester. How can we elicit constructive feedback from students about our teaching?

The Center for Advancement of Teaching and Learning offers:

• Midterm student focus groups
• Classroom observations
• Videotaped analysis

The College Writing Program offers:

• Classroom observations
• One-on-one and small-group conversations about teaching writing
• Support for classroom visit partnerships

Faculty can:

• Give students extra prompts to complete with the Student Evaluation of Teaching forms. (Responses can be collected with the forms.)
• Ask a colleague to administer the evaluations and to frame the evaluations with a request for constructive feedback.
• Conduct Scholarship of Teaching and Learning projects focused on learning more about specific aspects of teaching/student learning.
• Collaborate with students on Student Voices projects.

“I rely on rubrics to help me more efficiently provide feedback on informal writing assignments. Being more efficient allows me to respond to students’ writing quickly. A carefully worded rubric can provide students with essential information about the expectations for and their performance on these informal assignments. Being able to provide general feedback by checking a box on the rubric not only saves me time, but allows me to focus my written comments on aspects of students’ writing that are unique to the individual. In other words, the rubric allows me to save time, but also allows me to provide better feedback. The Rubrics Tool in Blackboard Learn helps me create and distribute rubrics to the students.”

“A ‘bloody’ essay is one that has been graded, and as a result, may have quite a bit of red ink on it.  Red ink can be inserted electronically in several ways, which will be demonstrated in this document, but you must remember that lots of red ink doesn’t necessarily mean that you got a bad grade.  What it does mean is that I have lots to say to the writer (read: constructive comments). …These red comments include praise as well as ideas about improving problem areas, and sometimes even hyperlinks to helpful online resources.”