Now that I am looking ahead towards next semester and teaching ENC 1102, I am thinking critically about how I will use commenting. After this class and having graded several rounds of papers, I have realized that only providing extensive feedback on final drafts does not help students. By the time they get their grades and my comments back for an essay, they are well on their way to considering the next essay, and they don’t care about the small comments I made on the previous. As was discussed in this class period and Nancy Sommers writes about, the goal of commenting on papers is to motivate students to revise. I think there is a disconnect when the comments are on a finished assignment. However, the issue remains that students will rely too heavily on a teachers feedback and ignore peer review.
Out of all of this rambling of ideas, I am trying to create a plan for the upcoming semester in order to experiment with a new way of grading and commenting. I think I will still give extensive comments on the rough and final drafts of the first essay. For the second and third essays, I think I will give one significant comment on the rough draft that gives them a direction, but rely more heavily on peer review. The final project I want to use in ENC 1102 next semester involves an annotated bibliography as the fourth “essay” and then a larger research paper for the fifth based on what they found in the annotated bib. For this sequence, I will hold conferences and give individualized feedback on their project and the most important ways their writing can improve. I will also have them turn in a proposal for this project where I will provide comments and feedback.
After the readings and discussion from this class, I am also considering the effectiveness and dangers of grading papers anonymously. I would be interested to know if anyone has done this before, and what the results would be. I am afraid that at times I am biased towards my students. Not because I prefer some over others, but because when a student continuously writes C papers shows an improvement, I give him a C+ even though the level of writing would not have been worth a C+ compared to other student papers. I can’t decide if this is a good thing or a dangerous trap.