Keynote: Nancy Sommers, "Across the Drafts"
Nancy Sommers, Harvard University
Sosland Director of Expository Writing
"Across the Drafts" (essay forthcoming in December 2006 College Composition and Communication) reports on the value and role of response to student writing, and it will focus on the following (quoting from a draft of Dr. Sommers' forthcoming article):
The new perspective I bring to this topic today comes from the Harvard Study of Undergraduate Writing, which followed 400 students for four years to see college writing through their eyes. With the leisurely perspective of time, and with the collection of over 600 pounds of student writing, 500 hours of taped interviews, and countless mega-bytes of survey data, my fellow researchers and I have witnessed the wide range of comments which students receive, not just in one course or from one teacher, but over four years and across the disciplines. To see these comments through the eyes of college students is a kaleidoscopic experience: papers never returned; papers returned with bewildering hieroglyphics —dots, check marks, squiggly or straight lines; papers with responses that treat students like apprentice scholars, engaging with their ideas, seriously and thoughtfully. That students might benefit from a decoding ring to determine whether the check marks and squiggles are a good or bad thing will not surprise us. That students might find comments useful throughout the process--before and between drafts, not just at the end--will also not surprise us. But what did surprise us, though, is the role feedback plays in the complex story of why some students prosper as college writers while others lag.
posted by Nick Carbone @ 7:52 PM
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What I took from this workshop session?
At one point in her description of the Harvard study and its findings, which Nancy shared as a lead in to a workshop activity (described below), she noted (these are my notes, and apologies for not being clear on where summary and quoting merge; errors are mine):
Best student experiences with their writing happened when people cared and wanted to know what they would do differently in their revisions or were engaged in their ideas and responding to the ideas and what students are thinking. Without that kind of response, students feel they would not get help on their own thinking.
Students felt a sense of partnership when offered response to their ideas – somebody who connected with them. Somebody else knew them as a thinker,cared about them as thinker and why their ideas matter. Feedback on ideas established for them a learning/thinking connection.
So what kinds of comments can a teacher give to foster that connection was one question. The study also looked at how students worked with feedback, but for the workshop portion, we came back to the question of what kinds of feedback foster that connection.
The Workshop
Nancy had at each table a small packet. It consisted of: a writing assignment (analyze one of four speeches for its rhetorical features); a cover letter and unmarked essay from a student; a response from a someone named 'Felix' along with Felix's margin notes on the essay; a response an instructor, along with her margin comments on the essay.
We were asked to read the essay in small group work, consider individually what we would say on the paper as intstructors, and then to talk about how we think the student might respond to the responses from Felix and the instructor, what we're seeing in the responses, and what we think of those responses.
Some things I remember from the table reports (and I know some of this might not make a lot of sense if you don't have the items Nancy used for the exercise):
1. The ratio of praise to critique was not balanced. Each written summative comment (Felix's about a 1/3 page single spaced; the instructors a full page single spaced) had one or two brief senteces of praise, followed by the rest being critiques.
The praise was associated with a description of the essay's structure and was prefunctory, almost as if it were fulfilling the requirements of response 101 -- find something nice to say. So it was particularly constructive praise.
It made we recognize that praise is an opportunity for explanation. That is, the critiques were several sentences longer because they attempt to explain why there's a reservation and to offer questions for the writer to consider. The assumption in that practice is that what is deemed to be done well enough to praise is self evident. But is it? Wouldn't a student benefit from an explanation of why and how something worked well in a respondent's view?
2. None of the response examples explicitely acknowledged --let alone addressed-- anything in the author's coverletter. So a really good requirement -- asking the writer to say what the paper was doing, what he saw as its strengths and weakness -- becomes busy work because the work is acknowledged and built on.
3. The instructor's comment (I'm assuming from the tone and style that the longer commenter was an instructor) was too long. Overwhelming, and the barrage of questions, while meant to give the students things to think about, seemed to be a pummeling.
I know the tendency to do that because I do it often enough myself. I keep asking questions and variations on questions because I keep imagining that a new one is needed in case the one I just wrote doesn't help. I can't see the writer's response to the first question, so I ask more. But from a writer's perspective, I know that's got to be less than helpful.
4. Folk also realized that the need to write a long response indicated that the assignment could have had more structure and support.
I know this happens to me a lot as well. I give an assignment imagining what work I'll see from students based on it, and often the work I see is not what I had hoped for. And so I have to work extra hard, I feel, to remediate by saying more. But a lot of what I say ends up being stuff that could have been addressed by better or more detailed assignment design.
For example, in the sample essay Nancy shared, the student begins in media res as far as context goes. He knows the teacher and classmates are reading, and that they know the assignment, so there's no contextualizing at all why he's analyzing Bush's State the of the Union speech, no sense of purpose other than to do an analysis, no rhetorical situation present at all really.
The assignment guidelines merely said write an essay analyzing . . . etc. It didn't advise or require students to remember that they'd need to consider a reader who wasn't seeing the assignment, that the essay needed to be situated in a context (why would someone read such an anlaysis? how do you raise the issue for them? why does your analysis matter?).
So a lot of the response came because the those issues weren't addressed in the paper in anyway. Perhaps if the assignment had provided more guidance on situating the essay, the responses could have been shorter and more useful.
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