It’s enough to drive you insane. You provide students with
copious notes on their rough drafts and essays. They make some revisions, but
ugh…it takes for-EV-er to work through them.
I worked out a strategy that helped me formatively assess
essays so that it not only saved me time, but it also put the “workload”
on the student. Don’t sit there and mark up the whole paper! Have the student
systematically work through revisions!
The general method is to assess in terms of existence
of a category (Is there a thesis?) to evaluating the quality of the writing
in that category (How effective is the conclusion?) Whatever issue you find that is at the “top” of the
prioritization of categories is what the student will work on.
I’ve created this INTERACTIVE TOOL to help you train your brain to prioritize writing issues. Think of it like…an
interactive flowchart.
Yes, there will be a lot of back and forth between you and
the student as you wait for him/her to submit a revision. Consider, though, that the review of each essay will most likely
move from 15-30 minutes per essay to about 2 minutes per because you’re only identifying and focusing on the most pressing
issue. The more you work with the strategy and get used to the
prioritization of categories, the faster you’ll get. That “back and forth” is
also they key to helping students write more effectively.
You’ll notice, once you’re working with it, that you don’t
deal with any grammar, mechanics, or usage errors (lower-order concerns) until
AFTER the student’s higher-order concerns are in-place. Here’s why:
Students
tend to find errors when they go back to revise other things.
Of course, that’s not always the case, but
generally speaking, students will “see” things once they’ve had a respite from
working on the writing. Thus, you will
have given them more opportunities to correct those issues on their own. It also takes a little bit of the stress away from
writing, allowing them an opportunity to focus on their thinking before dealing
with issues of correctness.
