Colin Worthley
ENG 5020
November 23, 2015
In
“The Concept of Control in Teacher Response”, Richard Straub defines directive
and facilitative comments and how they can help shape students’ writing.
Directive comments give specific orders to correct local issues, while
facilitative comments act as a guide to help the student address global issues
that should be addressed. Straub presents comments made on the same piece of
writing (some directive, some facilitative) in order to illustrate how
effective each type can be.
Straub
is clearly in favor of facilitative comments. He cites Rebecca Rule with the
following rationale: “As [a] teacher, I must be careful not to take over-
because the minutes I do, the success (if there is one) becomes mine, not his-
and the learning is diminished.” This is a very powerful idea that I don’t
think many teachers realize. Is the assignment meant to be perfect in the
teacher’s eyes, or as perfect a paper as that student is capable of producing?
Overlooking
spelling and grammar mistakes in favor of issues with logic has come to be my
approach this year. As a result, I do feel that I can focus more on the
content, and then offer more useful feedback to the student. Unfortunately,
there are students who feel as though minimal comments on a paper means one of
two things: a) I didn’t really his/her paper, or b) the paper must be an A is
it doesn’t need many corrections.
Of
all the commentators, I think Gere was the most effective. Her comments were
guiding without being authoritarian. As constructive as Elbow’s comments were
(who wouldn’t like to receive a novel’s worth of feedback for each essay?), it
simply isn’t possible without teacher burnout. I would think the reliability of
such comments would begin to suffer after some time. Reliability, and its
bedmate validity, was the subject of the next article.
In
Kathleen Blake Yancey’s “Looking Back as We Look Forward” we were given an in
depth look at the history of writing assessment. She used the metaphor that
each new trend was a wave that fed into the next, without a clearly discernable
ending point between. The article follows how schools moved from
multiple-choice objective tests, to holistically scored essays, to the more
recent portfolio.
It
seemed that the article focused more on the reliability aspect of each “wave”.
The first wave measured using objective tests, which had the most favorable
conditions for consistency. The second wave measured using a single essay
response. Here, the focus was on getting reliability in scoring from different
readers and how individual goals affected scoring, resulting in the creation of
acceptable norms among scorers. In the third wave, the portfolio became
reliable because of the breadth it provided. Patterns of errors and logic
become evident and help create a voice or style for the writer. In a stand
alone essay things might be confused with poor writing, but in a portfolio they
are seen in a different light.
I
would think the portfolio would be the best indicator of growth in a writer. If
the instructor is looking to create better writers, there can be no easier way
to observe growth than in a timeline of important writings covering a period of
time. I’ve always thought that purely objective tests leave too much room for
good guessers. While the student would have to be an incredibly good guesser to
get a passing grade, the options are still limited; with four choices they
still have a 25% chance of getting it correct. It would be impossible to guess
and stumble through a portfolio assessment.
Questions
1. Knowing
yourself as a writer, what type of comments do you feel most helpful: directive
or facilitative?
2. Should
an instructor’s comments and suggestions be followed blindly? How much control
over the finished product should the instructor have?
3. Is
there still a place for objective tests in school?
4. Are
students required to take too many tests? Are their complaints valid or are
they unaccustomed to being challenged?
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