To see several suggestions of how to encourage revision, please begin with the first reading by Gottschalk and Hjortshoj entitled, “Assigning and Responding to Revision.”
Here’s a time-saving tip: When you have responded to student drafts, final essays need only a summative comment noting the success of the revision and the essay’s overall strengths and weaknesses.
Sweetland has developed several useful handouts including this one on how to encourage “substantive revision.” You can learn ways to develop a good revision plan for your students that helps them broaden their approach to rewriting and becomes a road map for the work ahead.
In addition to the feedback you offer on drafts, peer groups can also provide helpful feedback for one another through the drafting and revision stages. Students receive many benefits from successful peer review. The Sweetland Center for Writing explains:
Having students give feedback to one another on their papers can have many advantages: the students get opportunities to develop their ability to give constructive feedback, they receive advice on their drafts, they have a broader audience for their work than just a single instructor, and they see different approaches other students have taken in responding to an assignment.
Peer Review can also create more opportunities for providing feedback to your students in their ULWR. However, how you build Peer Review into assignments and then structure and use Peer Review groups is critical to their success for your students. Follow this link to the Sweetland Center for Writing’s page “Using Peer Review to Improve Student Writing.” You’ll find a general overview of Peer Review practices and several pdfs with guidelines for planning small group and whole-class Peer Review workshops, examples of peer critique handouts and commenting forms, and grading criteria. Please explore the models and types of Peer Review to consider how you might best utilize this practice with your students.
Low-Stakes writing is a valuable tool that you can use in a variety of ways– and for a variety of purposes. High-stakes writing, like major assignments, comprise a large portion of students’ grades and requires your careful reading and response. You do not need to collect and respond to low-stakes writing. You could use low-stakes writing exercises to help students generate ideas, think critically about course materials, and practice important skills, like constructively responding to peers’ writing. Low-stakes writing can also be used to provide scaffolding for high-stakes assignments.
The Sweetland handout Integrating Low-Stakes Writing into Large Classes highlights successful features of low-stakes writing to keep in mind:
- Low-stakes writing shouldn’t focus on the quality of the writing.
- Low-stakes writing should be assigned throughout the term.
- Low-stakes writing should require critical thinking.
- Low-stakes writing should focus on motivating students and fostering conversation and community.
- Low-stakes writing needs to be well integrated into the class.
We will address further how to use low-stakes writing in Module 5. For now, we encourage you to consider how these exercises could be an important part of the work you do with students in class.
Enhancing your students’ approach to how they read will improve the quality of their upper-level writing in the disciplines. As Sweetland’s handout Motivating Students to Read and Write in All Disciplines explains, “integrating reading and writing improves student learning in all disciplines because it requires students to become more actively engaged in what they are studying.” It also recommends that reading and writing activities should be carefully managed. Writing instructors can guide their students in how to better read upper-level course readings and learn from the particular disciplinary norms and expectations on display.
This handout provides several strategies to integrate reading and writing activities into your work with students through “Read-to-Learn” and “Write-to-Learn” exercises and practices that train students to “Read Like a Writer.”
All instructors can benefit from better understanding our students and how we might best support their learning and progress as readers and writers. This section provides insights into second language acquisition and how writing instructors can better help multilingual writers. Theresa Jiinling Tseng’s chapter Theoretical Perspectives on Learning a Second Language will help you “provide appropriate help at the right time.” She grounds instructors in the methods of second language acquisition and explains how this background knowledge can help you as you work with your students.
Many of you hold office hours or conferences for your students. One-on-one instruction is highly effective for students. In this section you’ll learn about some of the ways to maximize your time during office hours and conferences.
Beth Hedengren’s chapter on conferencing and office hours provides many useful pieces of advice. Here are some general principles to keep in mind:
- Always have students prepare for a meeting with you. You may have them prepare a draft, write some questions, or bring in their peer review materials.
- Set an agenda with your student. Get on the same page about what you’ll be doing and how long your meeting will last.
- Use open-ended questions to help students think through the choices they’re making in their work. Hedengren’s chapter has several sample questions you can use.
- Encourage students to work on their papers during their time with you. You can use invention or revision activities to help students capture their ideas.
- Teach skills and concepts when appropriate.
- Help students identify and build on the strengths in their work.
For more guidance on effective one-on-one pedagogy, we highly recommend you read this brief chapter: Hedengren, “One-on-One Writing Conferences (Office Hours)”
Write 200 words or more in response to the following prompt:
Which strategies described in this module do you think will be most helpful to you when working with students in (or outside) of the classroom? What about those strategies do you think will be most valuable for your students?
Write a reply to at least two other responses that fully engages with the issues and questions your peer presents. You might add another perspective, add another question, or contribute additional thoughts to your peer’s response.