Handling the Paper Load:
Alternatives to “Homework” for
Writing Instructors
Hopkins, 1912:
Hopkins, 1912:
“Every year teachers
resign, break down,
perhaps become
permanently invalided,
having sacrificed
ambition, health, and in
not a few instances even
life, in the struggle to do
all the work expected of
them.”
Hopkins, 1912
“Can Good Composition Teaching
Be Done Under the Present
Conditions?”
• Yes, if we try to limit the time
spent in marathon grading
sessions
• No, if we continue to treat time
responding to student essays as a
“side job” or “homework”
Using Class Time for Response
• Newkirk: “Read the Papers in Class” (1979)
– Treat writing classes as writing laboratories
• D’Agostino: “Conference Class Sessions” (2005)
– “Response is instruction.”
– “Response time is instructional time.”
Instructors’ Labor Time:
A Common Model
Time Spent on:
20
20
Planning
Instructing
Responding
60
When Teaching Writing, Response
Time IS Instructional Time
Time Spent on:
20
Planning
Responding and
Instructing
80
Barbara Walvoord
“Making The Grading Process Fair, TimeEfficient, and Useful for Learning in Your
Classroom.”
Assessment as a Tool for Change: Faculty
Development Conference 2014
University of Wisconsin - Green Bay, WI
January 24th, 2014
Barbara Walvoord
“Making The Grading Process Fair, Time-Efficient,
and Useful for Learning in Your Classroom.”
 Cut down on the volume/number of formal, graded
assignments that you have to grade at home
 Increase the number of informal daily writing
assignments, to which you respond very briefly (and
sometimes not at all)
 Put lectures online (recordings on D2L)
 Suspend classes for a week and do 15 minute
conferences
 Bring sign-up sheet to class, allow students who can’t
meet any other time to sign up for time slots during
class time
Douglass Hesse
• “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Responding to
Student Writing.”
Douglass Hesse
• “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Responding to
Student Writing.”
Douglass Hesse
• “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Responding to
Student Writing.”
Douglass Hesse
• “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Responding to
Student Writing.”
Sideshadowing Teacher
Response
Nancy Welch (1998)
The Process:
Ask students to:
• Read through the first paragraph, considering the
following questions, and write back to yourself in
the margins of your paper:
– What questions or hesitations did you have as you
wrote?
– What were you thinking or feeling as you wrote?
– Where did you leave out ideas or information? Why
did you leave them out?
– What lines or phrases don't seem relevant? Why?
Questions from the PowerPoint Presentation: "Sideshadowing: Engaging the Student Through the
Sideshadowing Response to Writing" by Jill Moyer Sunday, Waynesburg University.
ftp://classes.waynesburg.edu
Students also Write an
“End Comment”:
• After you have written back to yourself in the
margins of each paragraph, read over all you
have written.
– What does this new material tell you about your
writing?
– How can you revise taking this the marginal text
into consideration?
• While teacher comments
“foreshadow” what a text should or
must become…
• Student comments “sideshadow”
what a text could or might become.
• Welch uses Bakhtin to theorize
sideshadowing as a “centrifugal,
diversifying force.”
• It makes the student and teacher focus
on the “here and now” of the text rather
than what the teacher wants it to be in
the future.
Sideshadowing Alters Our Time Use:
• Sideshadowing takes some class time to introduce
as a concept and about one class meeting per
paper for students to complete the process.
• But it takes less time for the teacher to make his or
her way into a text and discover what the student
wants to address.
• The “work of locating the draft within a field of
possibilities is no longer up to [the teacher]
alone.”
Works Cited
• D’Agostino, Karen N. “Conference Class Sessions:
Reducing Paper Load While Supporting Student
Revision through Effective In-Class Response.”
More Ways to Handle the Paper Load, on Paper
and Online. Urbana: NCTE, 2005.
• Newkirk, Tom. “Read the Papers in Class.” How to
Handle the Paper Load. Urbana: NCTE, 1979.
• Welch, Nancy. “Sideshadowing Teacher
Response.” College English. 60.4 (1998). 374-95.