Tag: student feedback

Read-Around Groups: Low-Stakes and High-Impact Writing in First-Year Composition

Post author By caitlincholmes
Post date November 13, 2014

By Caitlin Holmes

Since Dr. José Bowen visited Mason in September 2014, I have been working to implement more of his suggestions for teaching practice into my class. I wrote previously about utilizing one such suggestion: a combination of reading, writing in response, and discussion to understand the rhetorical nature of APA style. More recently, I have experimented with another approach to improving student writing in a low-stakes environment that requires students to show the higher-order thinking skills that Dr. Bowen emphasized: read-around groups. During his workshop at Mason, Bowen reminded us that students respond well to uncertainty, failure, and experimentation, and read-around groups (or RAGs, as they are also known) certainly allow for those conditions to emerge in a productive way.

Tags composition, education, pedagogy, Peer Review, Revision, student feedback, Teaching, Teaching Strategies, WAC, WID, Writing Across the Curriculum, writing education, writing feedback, Writing in the Disciplines

Evaluating Writing Teaching Writing

Responding to Student Writing/Writers

Post author By caitedungan
Post date October 20, 2014

Teaching and Learning in Higher Ed. highlights some of the best practices from Nancy Sommers’ new book, Responding to Student Writers. One of the most helpful insights is the ability to recognize that our comments to students may be contradictory, misleading, or vague, and that the real purpose of offering feedback to students is to “teach one lesson at a time.”

“We should ‘ask ourselves: What single lesson do I want to convey to students through comments? And how will I teach this lesson?'”

Tags College Composition, Feedback, higher education, student feedback, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing in the Disciplines, writing pedagogy