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Teaching English
Without Marking on Papers:
Enlightened Pedagogy
or
Irresponsible Cop-Out?
By Worth Weller
Continuing Lecturer, IPFW
Presented at the Area Deans Conference, IPFW, Feb. 21, 2003,
and at PEER, IPFW, Sept. 29 and 30, 2003
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The Problem: how to get students to make meaningful revisions to their
essays.
The Question: Is all that red ink really necessary? Or can sitting down
with three or four students at a time to talk about their papers for 30 minutes be
as effective or even more effective as marking on their papers?
The Case Against Marking On Papers:
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The practice of making detailed corrections encourages a “narrow,
perfunctory” response on the part of the student, who remains “focused on
what will give them a desired grade” rather than on assessing the value of
their own writing, reports Brian Huot (168).
Lil Brannon and C. H. Knoblauch write: “One consequence is often a
diminishing of students’ commitment to communicate ideas that they value
and even a diminishing of the incentive to write” (59).
Nancy Sommers reports that the students she interviewed stated that
marginal and end comments on their papers caused revising to become “a
guessing game for them” as they try to interpret what the teacher meant
and how to meet the teacher’s implied demands, and she worries that
teacher comments often “suggest to students that writing is just a matter
of following the rules” (“Responding” 153).
Reflecting on the above essay a decade and a half later, Sommers reports
her own frustration about trying to write meaningful remarks on student
papers: “What strikes me after all these years of teaching is the difficulty of
composing a humane, thoughtful, and inspiring comment” (“Afterword”
130).
Making useful comments may well be an impossible task, report Melanie
Sperling and Sarah Freedman, because of “the uncanny persistence in
students to misunderstand the written response they receive on their
papers” (344).
Even direct dialog with the teacher about the written comments often fails
to clarify the issues for the student, find Jane Mathison Fife and Peggy
O’Neill (307).
Richard Haswell believes there can be a self-defeating nature to many
written comments: “Judgmental commentary unbalances the teacherstudent equilibrium in an authentic learning situation, that is, where the
student is doing most of the work,” writes Haswell (604).
The Case For Conferencing:
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Conferencing balances the heavy lifting load because it creates a dialog
about the student’s own text as opposed to the one-way conversation
about the teacher’s imagined perfect text that marginal comments and end
notes often tend to create.
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Most students, I have found, recognize their own writing weaknesses, and
a dialog about their own perceptions often steers them to new
understandings of effective writing practices.
Kenneth Bruffee identifies a rationale for face-to-face dialog about revision
when he describes the collaborative element of the generation and
transfer of knowledge: “Knowledge is the product of human beings in a
state of continual negotiation or conversation” (647).
Brannon and Knoblauch write about a “process of negotiation, where
writer and peers or writer and teacher. . . work together to consider, and if
possible to enhance, the relationship between intention and effect” (163).
They call for a dialog in which “attitudes are more important than methods”
(163) and in which the teacher’s role is to serve as a “sounding board”
(162) that helps the student narrow the gap between the student’s
intention and the effect of his writing.
The goal of the dialog is always to “make the writers think about what has
been said, not to tell the writer what to do” (163), and it is the role of the
teacher to set up the dialog in the form of a negotiation about revision
strategies.
“By negotiating those changes rather than dictating them, the teacher
returns control of the writing to the student,” they report (166), asserting
that these negotiations most ideally occur in face-to-face situations,
although they can be accomplished by reflective memos exchanged
between teacher and writer.
A Word Of Caution:
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Evangelicals of conferencing, myself included, need to remember that one
pedagogy does not fit all students.
In fact, conferencing pedagogy can sound an awful lot like just another
liberal, middle-class value, one that not only works well for the dominant
culture, but one that also can serve to deny students access to that
culture.
Brannon’s and Knoblauch’s negotiation of change and dialog of revision
and Bruffee’s conversational model of collaborative knowledge-making
may easily fail to meet all students’ needs, because some students may
benefit less from negotiating and more from direct intervention, particularly
when the teacher holds information that has been withheld from the
student in the past.
This approach is too non-directive for some students, and I generally have
one or two students in each section who comment in their journals, “You
didn’t fix my paper,” or others who skip their conference and instead slide
their paper under my office door with a note, “Would you please look this
over and tell me what you think?”
Marilyn Cooper and Cynthia Self point out that some students have
trouble accepting “the idea that there is no single right way of doing
something, no single right way of writing, no single right answer” (854).
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In other words, not all students are satisfied with conferences, and many
writers, warns Lisa Delpit, may need and deserve more “intervention” and
“direct instruction” (288) than some of the earlier advocates of
conferencing felt was appropriate.
My Own Approach:
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I have tried several formats for conferencing, settling at least for now on
30 minute sessions with the three or four students who make up a peer
review group. I used to do individual conferences, but they tended to be so
repetitious that it finally dawned on me students would benefit equally from
hearing comments about their peers’ papers.
Before our first peer review workshop, I do some training and present both
theory and a list of expectations for the students to model as they help
each other to revise. I find the peer review workshop smoothes the way for
group conferences by building a sense of trust among the students in the
group.
Students are required to come prepared for conference with a “writer’s
memo,” which articulates their successes and concerns with their paper. I
also ask the students to bring enough copies of their paper for each other
as well as for myself.
I generally do not read a student’s paper ahead of time.
I forgo chitchat and start the conference by asking a volunteer to start
telling me about his or her paper, what she feels are her good points, what
he feels still needs working on, and what she is concerned with. While a
student is talking I’m looking at the intro and thesis statement, examining
the focus of each paragraph, checking for transitions and well-integrated
quotes, and contemplating the depth of their thinking.
Students always say, of course, that they are not happy with their
conclusion, and often we will all turn to the student’s conclusion and I’ll
give a little mini-lecture about wrapping the conclusion back to the
beginning and sometimes trying to repeat certain keywords.
If I detect a pattern of surface error, I give a two-minute “mini-lecture” on
that issue.
I might draw a few circles on a student’s paper (in pencil) while I am
listening to highlight problem areas, and when I’m done I’ll quickly outline
the revisions that I expect to see when they turn their paper in with their
portfolio at the end of the semester.
My goal is to always let the student do most of the talking, although I admit
I often fail at that specific goal.
Why Conferencing Works:
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Conferencing is a successful composition pedagogy because it engages
students in a conversation that leads students to their own understanding
of revision strategies.
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In addition to Bruffee, Vygotsky and others who relate learning theory to
conversation, C H. Knoblauch points to Paulo Freire who offers “the
essential instructional stance in his concept of ‘problem-posing’ education
which aims not to make ‘deposits’ of information in passive student minds
(the ‘banking’ concept) but instead to pose questions for critical scrutiny
within a collaborative setting” (135).
Returning the conversation to the students—in this case by letting them
speak for their own papers—encourages learning, maintains Knoblauch,
because it allows students to “join freely in the processes of reading and
writing without subordinating themselves to entrenched ideas about their
proper place or function within the institution of ‘literacy’” (135).
Anecdotal Evidence:
When my students evaluate themselves at the end of the semester and
write about what has worked for them and why, their answers typically include
comments like these:
 “I got the most out of our conferences because it was a chance to sit
down, one on one, and get to the core of my writing. The good and
the bad.”
 “After the conferences I became much more confident in my writing
ability and skills.”
 “The biggest help to me was the peer group and the conferences….
The conferences were wonderful. This was the final time to find out
what you could do to improve.”
 “I think the part of the class that gave me the most confidence were
the conferences and the group discussions….. In high school I never
had that opportunity. It was to hand in a draft and receive a grade, no
discussion about it. This form of learning seems very inappropriate
now that I have experienced a class that is meant to create better
writers rather than to judge them.”
 “The teacher conferences were very helpful because I knew what you
were thinking about the essays before I turned them in. I feel that this
style of teaching, which is unlike any other I’ve had before, has made
me a stronger writer.”
 “The conferences were a great help to my writings. I really enjoyed
not seeing a bunch of red x’s all over my paper. It really helped me to
actually be able to talk about the problems in my paper.”
 “I could ask questions and express feelings about my writings.”
 “The one on one helped my confidence and reduced my stress.”
 “They allowed me to share what I thought.”
 “I thought that it gave me courage to work on revisions and other
papers.”
 “They gave me motivation/confidence as a writer.”
 “It works wonders and it really can let the student connect with the
teacher.”
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 “By talking about my essay, I answered my own questions.”
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