As a teacher, it is easy to point fingers at students, parents, media, and technology in a vain attempt to pinpoint, “Why do students struggle with writing?” My response is to point the finger at myself to examine what I can improve upon to impact student writing. Lately, my focus has been on teacher feedback.
Process writing is traditionally taught as a recursive process that encompasses multiple steps: pre-writing, drafting, revision, editing, and publishing. Students progress through the writing steps fluidly for a variety of audiences and with a variety of purposes, often submitting multiple-draft essays multiple times. Perhaps one of the most time consuming steps from an instructional perspective is revision. However, revision is a necessary step to redirect students from creating (drafting) towards analysis (revision).
Often, the impetus for revision is teacher feedback, which is intended to communicate to students how to reach specific goals such as complex sentence structure, evidenced based writing, and effective word choice. In fact, quality teacher feedback carries with it the potential to support students’ writing progress over the course of a school year and to benefit students in noticeable and effective ways (Parr & Timperley, 2010; Early & Saidy, 2014).
Feedback is a dialogue during which teachers coach students into self-regulating their own writing process through the feedback choices that they make when responding to students’ written work.
The ultimate instructional goal of feedback is for students to recognize monitor their own performance, to self-correct effectively, and to develop into independent, competent writers.
References
Early, J. , & Saidy, C. (2014). Uncovering substance. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 58(3), 209-218.
Parr, J. , & Timperley, H. (2010). Feedback to writing, assessment for teaching and learning and student progress. Assessing Writing, 15(2), 68-85.
