Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Philosophy of Grading & Response

A Story About Feedback...

       There are only a few instances I remember where the kind of feedback I received from my professors really aided me in my learning process and helped me improve. From those instances I remember phrases like "You articulate this beautifully but have you thought about...,"This is a small thing but could you explain more on...," "Very succinct, I would include..." All of these feedback phrases have something in common, which is that they praise, but they also suggest places where I can improve or make somethings clear. I believe that it is this kind of feedback that will allow me to grow as a learner. 

      The worst kind of feedback that I did receive was "This is a mish mash of everything." Not only did this feedback hurt me as a scholar and a learner, but it also did not provide me with clear instructions or suggestion on how to improve. I remember reading these words seven years ago and thinking that I am a complete FAILURE. I did not approach that professor because I felt that he has already made up his mind about me, and that I was a LOOSER. It is instances like these that define A student's progress. With the constructive feedback I received, I felt that I was welcome to talk further with my professors on how to make things clearer or better. 


What I Learned from My Past Experiences....

    From these stories, I can only think of how such a small thing like feedback can either push you forward or let you stay where you are and not improve.TOXIC grading practices like giving zeros, not accepting late work, and factoring behavior into grades DO NOT WORK anymore.I think the previous examples from my experience with feedback made me promise to be a better instructor for the students I will be teaching in the future.  The readings we did about grading and feedback these couple of weeks specifically have made me reevaluate the ways that I will grade and give feedback. 


Some of the Prolific Ideas from the Readings About Response and Grading That I Came Across and Which I will Try to Apply When I Start to Teach...

      In "Grading student's Writing,"  Steven Wilhoit establishes a difference between response and grading. Grades offer students final marks, and response shows students the points of strength and weakness that they need to work on in the future (100). I believe that for any feedback to be accurate, students should be able to receive both a grade and a response by the time they get their assignments back. Wilhoit identifies three types of grading; holistic, atmistic,a and portfolio (103). Although holistic grading allows teachers to look for the bigger picture in student papers, especially after deciding what an A,B,C,D paper looks like, it does not provide specific feedback to students (103). Portfolio grading allows students to focus on skills rather than grades and it encourages students to revise their papers (103-104). I feel that as a teacher, I will definitely need to use some kind of holistic and portfolio evaluation methods. Although Willhoit discourages new TA's from embracing the portfolio grading system, I believe that as new TA's we can allow students to complete portfolios of three assignments out of 4 for example. In that way we are encouraging revision and applying the portfolio method of grading. 
Are Grades ALWAYS a Good Thing for Students? Maybe Not....

     Wilhoit points our attention to Peter Elbow's suggestion about not putting grades on students papers and instead creating three different categories of (exceptional, adequate, inadequate) papers (108). Elbow explains that grades are not good for students by emphasizing several points like the fact that grading is subjective and therefore unreliable, that grading contributes little to student's growth as writers, grading has students only working to get a grade, grading makes teachers feel burdened because they have to be fair to every student in the grade they decide to give (qtd in Wilhoit 108). With Elbow's suggestions, students don't get grades, instead they have to keep trying until they pass or achieve a higher level in their writing. This approach is so tempting, and as a new TA, I might apply it to one of my assignments and not all of them. I think it will allow me some time to experience what both I as a teacher and what students really feel about grades. (I will defiantly talk more about this approach with my mentor). 
Read Your Student's Papers WITHOUT Bias....

   In "Responding to Student's Writing," Nancy Sommers emphasizes that as teachers, we have mainly been trained to "read and interpret literary texts for meaning" and that we as teachers have not been trained "to act upon the same set of assumptions in reading students texts as we follow in reading literary texts" (154). Sommers warns that this allows teachers to read students papers with biases, bringing in their own "preoccupation" and "preconceptions," looking for errors and fixing them without offering revision tasks pointing them to ways that they can make their papers more sophisticated (154). I'm inspired by the notion of "sabotage[ing] our students convictions that the drafts they have written are complete and coherent" (154). That is why commenting and feedback should be a way for student writers to improve and learn and not just receive feedback and not do anything with it. 

     Sommers argues that "as writers we need and want thoughtful commentary to show us when we have communicated our ideas and when not, raising questions from a reader's point of view that many not have occurred to us as writers" (148). It is only then can true learning happen. Putting myself in the student's shoes, I do not want to receive feedback telling me that everything I did in the paper is wrong. I want from the teacher to show me parts that I forgot to communicate to the readers or point to ideas that I can improve and make better. Sommers also emphasizes that it is important to make students think about readers and not just writers. Having the audience in mind will definitely help students better draft their writing and make clear statements. 


How Much Control Do We as Teachers Need Over Students Papers? 

    Richard Straub in "The Concept of Control in Teacher Response: Defining the Varieties of "Directive" and "Facilitative" Commentary,"  states that critics like Nancy Sommers and Lil Brannon and C.H Knobluch have set the basis of the theory of response and grading, "Beyond calling on us to write out our comments in full statements, make them "text-specific," and focus on different concerns at different stages of drafting, they urged us to be careful about the amount of control we exert over students when we read and comment on their writing" (223). Since the nature of the classroom is defined by the student teacher relationship, which is always seen as hierarchical, by making comments and responding to student's writing, the teacher's comments are evaluative and directive (247). Therefore, the major question isn't about teachers exerting control or not over student's writing, it is about "when and to what extent we as individual teachers exert control over student writing through our comments" (247). According to Straub, teachers should not appropriate student's texts "by overlooking their purposes for writing and emphasizing our purposes for commenting" (223). I also like the notion of comments as facilitative rather than asking students directly to do something about their papers (Straub 233). As Straub does not really give teachers the best response style, he advocates for response styles that are "middle ground," responses that are sometimes "directive" and sometimes "facilitative" (247). 

 I see myself giving "middle ground" response to students all the time, especially that I am a student myself and think about what would be most beneficial for both the student's writing and process.

Do Rubrics Aid or Hinder Teachers When Grading and Responding to Student's Writing?


Valerie Balester states that rubrics "oversimplify and standardize writing" therefore they do not allow for equal evaluation for other students population like students of color or ever international students (63). She introduces three types of grading rubrics; acculturationism, accomidationism, and multiculturalism (65). According to Balester the acculturationism rubric aims at encouraging the use of Standard English in academic writing and in school (66). Accomidationism rubric is similar to the acculturationism rubric, however it allows for more freedom when it comes to using "home" languages and code switching as a bridge to teaching edited American English (67). A distinguishing characteristic of multiculturalism rubrics is that it acknowledges "the value of language diversity and the equal stature of all language varieties" (71). Balester confesses that rubrics are imperfect instruments, however, she states that they can be improved especially for writing instructions (74). 

 In the future, I would like to use rubrics that are attentive to all student populations and not just a particular set of students. By doing so, I know that I can be fair in my treatment of students grades. 

 Do Grading Contracts Work? 

Asao B. Inoue uses grading contracts in order to solve three grading problems; the deception of grades, how grades create false hierarchies, and how students want to pursue grades only (79). After examining Frenso States grading contract approach, Inoue concludes that "grading technologies with quality biases tend to oppress many students, but especially poorer students and students of color" (94). Although one of the contract's aim is to limit teacher power over student's writing and revising, they are harmful to diverse students in the university because the contract simply justifies grades "by the amount of work done" (83).

 Although grading contracts are very tempting, I think that developing one on my own wouldn't be fair to the students. I would envision having one ready and asking students to comment and even make changes on the contract before having them sign it. This is a great way to get students involved in the classroom as whole and in the grading criteria.

 How to Incorporate Feedback in the Composition Classroom...

 In "What Kinds of Practice and Feedback Enhance Learning?" the authors emphasize that "goal-directed practice must be coordinated with targeted feedback in order to promote the greatest learning gains" (Ambrose et al 137). Here feedback is defined as "information given to students about their performances that guides future behavior" (Ambrose et al 125). Some of the strategies addressing the need for targeted feedback in this chapter are so insightful. Some of the strategies that the authors point to are for example looking for patterns of errors in students work, privatizing feedback, balancing strength and weaknesses in the feedback, designing frequent opportunities to give feedback, providing feedback at the group level, incorporating peer feedback, requiring student to reflect on how they used peer feedback in their works. I think that in the future, I would like to utilize some of these strategies in my classes, as they seem very student-centered and this is what I was my class to be like. 

 A List I Created from the Previous Readings, with some influence from Keven Yee's Handout, that Reflects my Philosophy of Response and Grading...
  1. In his handout Kevin Yee starts with the amount of writing students are supposed to do. He suggests that students don't have to do a lot of writing. That is why he encourages teachers to make assignments short and even turn in assignments for group grade.
  2. It is always wise to share grading contracts with students, or to show them grading rubrics with assignments. In this way, students will know exactly what they are being graded on and what is expected of them.
  3. Grading doesn't have to come from the teacher alone. Students themselves can experience what grading is like when they have peer review sessions or have to do peer edit sheets. I think that peer review is a great way to decenter power relationships in the writing classroom too. 
  4. In order to avoid plagiarism, Yee asks teachers to not do the same assignments every semester, and to use Turnitin.com to check plagiarism. The other sources I've read say very little about this issue, and I think that it is appropriate to explain to students what plagiarism looks like in the very beginning of the semester, like explaining patch writing, which is a very common form of plagiarism in the writing classroom. 
  5. From Wilhoit's article, I beleive that it is very beneficial for both students and teachers to experience the use of portfolio and getting a chance to explore the concept of revision. 
  6. Assigning grades can be problematic sometimes to students consciousness of progress  Although Elbow's suggestion is tempting, I believe I can try this approach after a few years of teaching and not as a first year TA.
  7. Response and feedback is about communicating to the students that they should always consider their readers and audience in order to be better writers.
  8. Teachers should know exactly when and how to exert control over students writing, and teachers reading of students papers should be bias free.
  9. Giving equal facilitative and directive feedback is a very good philosophy of response. Teachers should watch out and not give extreme facilitative or directive feedback. 
  10.  Although rubrics can be simplistic they can be adjusted to suit more diverse learners. 
  11. Targeted feedback enhances students chances of learning, especially when it comes to writing.
  12. The way teacher asses Multimodal assignments is different from when they assess print texts. Madeleine Sorapure states that "rather than assessing individual modes in a multimodal work I suggest an assessment strategy that focuses on the effectiveness with which modes such as image, texts and sound are brought together or, literally, composed". Sorapure focuses mainly on metaphors and metonymy as a language that teachers can use to communicate with students about the effectiveness of their work.




Works Cited:

 Ambrose, Susan A, et al. How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. First Editions. San Francisco, CA, Jossey-Bass, 2010. 

Inoue, Asao B. "Grading Contracts: Assessing Their Effectiveness on Different Racial Formations." Race and Writing Assessment, edited by Asao B. Inoue and Mya Poe, 2012, pp.79.94. 
  • Sommers, Nancy. "Responding to Student Writing." College Composition and Communication, vol. 33, no. 2, 1982, pp. 148-156.
Sorapure, Madeline. “Between Modes: Assessing Student New Media Compositions.” Kairos 10.2 (Spring 2006): 1-15. Web. 12 May 2012.
  • STRAUB, R. "the Concept of Control in Teacher Response, Defining the Varieties of Directive and Facilitative Commentary." College Composition and Communication, vol. 47, no. 2, 1996, pp. 223-251.


 Wilhoit, Stephen."Grading Student's Writing."The Longman Teaching Assistants Handbook: A Guide For Graduate Instructors of Writing and Literature. Pearson Longman, 2008. 


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Saturday, November 4, 2017


Multimodality in the Classroom


    I have been afraid of using multimodal assignments in my classes, because I thought that they are hard to grade and that I needed to be technology literate in all the possible technologies that the students might use in a multimodal assignment. I never thought that I too can learn and experiment as the students are completing their multimodal assignments with the students. As Mickey Hess states, "faculty will want to spend some time creating their own multimodal texts as they design and finalize assignments (33). As I mentioned early in previous blogs, I come form a culture and teaching backgrounds that values lecture over having students or learner centered class. Multimodality will definitely add many dimension to teachers of writing. It bridges the gap between what can be educational and entertaining or creative in the class. Multimodality enhances students communication with teachers and each other in the classroom, as they will be using different multimodal modes to communicate their ideas. One major aspect that has encouraged me to use multimodal assignments is the new digital technology and how easily one can communicate and use these technology.

    From the resources we have read, I have found out that there are many ways teachers can integrate multimodality. In chapter 3, Mickey Hess, states that "teachers who compose the best assignments, then, don't outline a step-by-step procedure for students to follow; instead they create assignments that prompt writers to think in new ways" (29). Hess also makes an important recommendation, while pushing teachers to make what he calls as open-ended assignments, he urges teachers to consider three components; theory, structure and choice, and circulation. The teachers have to think about theory, not only the choice of including multimodal assignments, but also which "assignments are amenable to the affordances of different modalities" (30). The teachers should also consider structure and choice in the multimodal composition, where teachers should "leave plenty of room for c choices within a structure that outlines goals and objectives for students" (30). As for circulation, teachers should allow the students to think about authentic audience, or real world audiences and this adds to the agency of the assignment (30). The most important aspect o the multimodal composition process is the types of structures and types of choice. Hess gives great points for teachers to consider with regards to this issue. Hess asks teachers to allow students the choice of composition modalities, whether it is to use audio, video, print, or a mixture of these elements and consider collaborative work where students can become a "community of learners" (32). At the end of a multimodal assignment, Hess advises faculty to include a written reflection because "it encourages critical thinking and deepens the learning that multimodal assignments demand" (33). Reflection can be done by giving students different prompts to respond to at the end of the assignment. Other important aspects that Hess mentions are including multimodal assignments within the course and consider the time that teachers wants students to spend on the assignment in class or outside of class, as well as inviting experts to help students work better in a digital environment (36).

     One other challenge that might face teachers in composing multimodal assignments is collaborating. While Hess prompts teachers to consider collaborative work on multimodal assignments by students, he acknowledges the challenges and set backs for such a choice. Anne Marie Pedersen and Carolyn Skinner identify THREE of these changeless. One is that students might find "that limitations of the technology prohibit working simultaneously" (44). For example, if a class has access to one video camera, then the teacher will need to "from larger teams of collaborates" or the teacher may ask students to have collaborative project logs (44). The second challenge is that some students may chose to work on some parts of the project but not others. While some students will do all the technological work, other in that group will learn very little about the technology used in the project. That is why teachers should ask students in a group to work on all aspects of the project, or even asks them to work on the part of the project that makes them feel uncomfortable. The third challenge is that students might "struggle to create a shared vision for the project" (45). That is why teachers again should insist that students not only complete the project but also have some successful discussions, analysis and understanding (45).                                              

      In Chapter 5, Daniel Keller gives a great short list of specialized terms that help students "practice using these terms as they engage in rhetorical analyses of multimodal texts" (53). Rhetoric teachers should introduce students to these terms in case they are using video, or audio analysis. Some of these terms are point of view, camera angle, soundscape, keynote, establishing shot, fade out and fade in , and affordance. I think this vocabulary will help students work in multimodal projects, if they have never been exposed to      these assignments, as these terms are springboards for their major multimodal projects. Connected to these key terms is the information that Ball Point provides to students about multimodality. I think that having students read this chapter before or along with presenting them with the assignment should be a great way to introduce them to these kinds of assignments.

Considering all of the above, and as a teacher who will be using multimodality more in her classrooms, I have come up with this important checklist for teachers that want to compose and take on any kind of multimodal assignment:

  1. Always emphasize the WHY, when first introducing students to multimodal assignments: Many students might not see the reason behind learning composition by using different modalities, they even might see it as a wast of time. That is why it should be a very wise move to tell students the reason behind multimodal assignments and what they will gain from learning them. I think that the most important reason is that it allows students to respond and connect to the real world, and not just the classroom. In the real world today, people use different forms of words and texts to argue for something, as seen in the wide usage of social media and news outlets. 
  2. While students have a variety of choices, it is always a good idea to conference with students or facilitate choice making by talking and discussing in class or whenever there are questions asked. By talking with the students, teachers can help students make the right choices at the right time. 
  3. It is alright if a teacher doesn't know a certain kind of technology. I believe that composing multimodal  assignments is a great way for teachers to learn about new technologies, as well as facilitate the learning of students about this new technology. This also reminds teachers to give students some key terms they can begin with, or start from if they have never done any similar assignments using video or audio composition. 
  4. Monitoring student group work is a successful way to make sure that all students have new learning opportunities. As Anne Marie Pedersen and Carolyn Skinner show in their analysis of group work, collaborative work can be a challenge for many students. Keeping a project blog will ensure that all students are doing something and that they are involved in the making of the project.  
  5. While the sources support not giving students certain instructions, I think that it is wise to give students a timeline, or have them write proposals for their multimodal projects, where they show when and where they will be doing their work, whether it is individually or collaboratively. 
  6. I think that having multimodal projects examples are also a good way to start talking about multimodal assignments. Teachers can use some examples from their previous students or examples that they have done themselves to show students the major components of multimodal assignments. The Ball Point chapter is great in giving students various examples about multimodality and the different technologies that they can use. 
  7. It is important to emphasize CREATIVITY while composing. Students must know that that this is not just an assignments that they will get grades for, but that it is an assignment that allows them to use their different fields, hobbies or interests and bring in the classroom.
  8. As for grading criteria, I think that students should be graded on both of their multimodal project and the written script accompanying it. In other words, the students should not be graded only for the multimodal project alone. There should ALWAYS be a written script. 
  9. Allowing multimodal assignments to be open ended is the best way to foster creativity and allow students to find their own voices.

Some example medias for multimodal assignment m:  
  1. Six word essay to be transformed into a   multimodal text 
  2. "This I believe" essay to be transformed into a multimodal text
  3.  infographics
  4.  podcasts visual or audio
  5.  using social media such as instagram or snapchat 
  6. collage
  7. poster
  8. movie
  9. youtube video
  10. painting


References:
Hess, Mickey. “Composing Multimodal Assignments.” Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007.


Skinner, Carolyn, & Anne Marie Pedersen. “Collaborating on Multimodal Projects.”  Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007. 

Keller, Daniel. “Thinking Rhetorically.”  Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007. 

Selfe, Cynthia L. Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007. 

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