When I first started teaching, I blocked out hours and hours for giving feedback. I felt negligent if I wasn’t commenting on things in enough detail. My feedback generally functioned as a justification for the grade that I was giving. All of this meant that I wrote way, way, way too many comments, and grading completely bummed me out.

Over the years, I’ve learned from people like the Writing Studies scholar Bill Hart-Davidson that a lot of teacher feedback, depending on how it’s deployed, doesn’t even make much of a meaningful difference in improving student writing outcomes. Why, then, was I spending so(ooooooo) much time doing it, especially when it was making me miserable?!

I haven’t figured out The Solution™️ or anything. Giving feedback still takes me time. Sometimes I still write too much and can’t get out of my own way. But a few shifts in how I’m spending that time have significantly made me hate it less. I think they’ve also made feedback more effective and comprehensible to students.

Here’s what’s changed.

I changed my grading system.

Inspired by the work of people like Peter Elbow and Jane Danielewicz, Asao Inoue, and several people in my PhD program at The Graduate Center, I started grading writing with a grading contract about 10 years ago. Grading contracts can look differently depending on the context, but my contract is labor-based, and this means that grades are determined by how much work students do that meets minimum requirements. Anyone who looks at the work should be able to agree that they have or haven’t met them (e.g. you either wrote 500 words or you didn’t; you either answered all of the questions on the peer review worksheet or you didn’t.) Assessments of essay “quality” remain separate from the student’s grade.

Working with contracts (or what I now call “grading agreements”) has been a journey. My first contract design was….bad. It was long, confusing, and haunted by the point system that had preceded it. It read like a condescending Terms of Service agreement (sorry, former students!)

I still change my contract a little bit every year, but I think it’s much clearer now. While I still have a point system to deal with the ambiguities of what happens when a student never comes to class but does all of the work, or always comes to class but never turns anything in, this version fits on a post-it note: come to class, do the homework, and do the process-oriented major assignments.

Using a contract grading system means that my feedback no longer functions as a justification for a grade. I don’t feel like I need to explain their grade to them. This means that I get almost no grade pushback: students know exactly how to earn an A in the class, and when they don’t, they generally accept that it was because they didn’t do something that they were supposed to do. My slow, gradual shift to this system has allowed for so many other possibilities.

We read (only and exclusively) to write.

What we read and how we read it are much more directly connected to my feedback approach than in the past. I used to assign readings to fill class time and to, nebulously, “do class discussions.” While I hope to choose readings that my students want to discuss, these days, my purpose in assigning any reading in my 110 is almost never to discuss the content.

Instead, we read so that we can talk about writing choices. In everything we read, we look for claims and how evidence is incorporated. We look for a thesis statement, or its equivalent, and how this changes in different kinds of writing. We look at transitions, word choices, and calls to action. We think A LOT about rhetorical choices based on audience and purpose. We reverse outline the heck out of just about everything. We do rhetorical analysis. We think about source use and how it changes based on the field or genre.

This means that we read (way, way) less. I assign about two major texts per unit that we spend several class periods analyzing thoroughly. We just keep coming back to them and taking them apart again and again and again.

Reading in this way helps us to build a vocabulary and a process for talking about writing. When students can recognize claims and evidence in a course reading, it becomes easier for them to do it in their drafts. When I can show them what a “so what” statement looks like, they can point one out in their peer’s draft. I can ask them to try out a particular technique from something that we saw someone else do. And reading in this way allows us to talk about edits in terms of choices for the audience rather than in terms of what “every” paper should “always” include. This helps me to give better, more understandable feedback that students can apply.

I make students do more of the heavy lifting.

Many students had learned from their previous schooling experiences, as I had learned from mine, that me telling them what was “wrong” with their work and giving them a grade was my job as a writing teacher.

In this passive arrangement, students waited for me to tell them “what I wanted” for them to “fix.” The assumption was that their writing was broken, and it was my job to diagnose it and prescribe it medicine. Especially within more community-based assignments where I wasn’t the audience, this meant that I was sometimes missing their point completely or taking over their project in ways that didn’t make sense for their goals.

These days, I ask students to take on more of the responsibility in guiding me toward what would be useful at a particular stage of the drafting process by requiring students to annotate their drafts with specific questions for me, setting up student-led conferences, and helping students to prepare for them.

All students get very quick, immediate feedback about what did and didn’t meet requirements (and I do mean quick: they get a ✅ emoji if it met requirements, a ⚠️ if it needs to be revised, and a ❌ if it is no longer eligible for revision), but I don’t respond to their comments unless they meet with me. Feedback happens during conferences.

Setting all of this up takes a ton of work, especially in the first unit. But it’s work that feels more valuable to me because I’m teaching students a durable set of editing techniques that they can keep using after my class is over rather than to write “the way I want.”

Asking students to take on this work puts their project back in their hands and makes me their collaborator: especially because the grade comes from whether they wrote questions rather than my opinion about the paper’s quality. It also prevents me from the kind of stream-of-consciousness Google doc commenting bonanza that I used to do unto them between seventeen meetings and trying to eat my lunch. Ultimately, this approach ends up taking less time, because they’re doing the work of identifying what they want to know. I’m just responding.

I’ve shifted my expectations about the purpose of conferences.

The purpose of a conference, to me, is for students to think about their ideas out loud with another person rather than as time to get a list of things to change. They can also be great for building relationships.

After helping students to prep for conferences and having them practice identifying places in their draft or in the assignment requirements that they really want to discuss, I tell students that I’m going to ask them where they want to start when they arrive, and that they’re not allowed to say “wherever you want.” They need to point out specific places in the draft that would be helpful to have another pair of eyes. They practice this, first, during the peer review.

Usually, by the time they get to the conference, students have the preparation to focus on really specific goals and they come to the conference with really defined questions. I spend many conferences looking at their writing with them in the way that we look at all other writing in class: taking it apart with them, confirming what I’m seeing, asking questions, reverse outlining.

Occasionally, a student wants to use their conference time to talk about something unrelated to the class. Sometimes they don’t prepare. Sometimes they weren’t in class when we did all of that preparation. Sometimes they still say “wherever you want.” I’ve learned to be OK with this, because helping a struggling student to navigate the gauntlet of their first year in college does help them with the writing in the long term, even if it doesn’t improve the most immediate draft. I’ve found that when I approach conferences as a space that students lead, it increases their overall investment in the class.

I don’t give feedback on stuff I didn’t teach (unless students ask).

Sometimes students use sources incorrectly in the first essay that the write in English 110. However, using multiple sources in Assignment 1 is not the goal. We don’t talk about source use at all, and I don’t expect that all or most of my students will know how to do it by the end of September. So I don’t give feedback on it, unless that’s what a student wants.

I try to really focus on a certain set of skills in each unit, and to mostly give feedback on their achievement of those skills. If I didn’t teach something in Unit 1, I don’t expect students to know how to do it.

The exception: sometimes students ask me “hey, am I integrating this source correctly?” in an annotation. That student already had practice with sources in some other class, or they wouldn’t be asking me that question. I am happy to give feedback on sources in this case, because that student is ready for that information.

I will also flag source use for students if they’re doing something really egregious (e.g. copying and pasting a whole paragraph from Wikipedia) when this means that a student has failed to meet a requirement (e.g. use 500 of your own words).

But I’m still screwing some stuff up.

I am still not great at giving useful feedback on low-stakes work. I write too much (even positive stuff). It takes a long time to establish a mutual vocabulary that we can all use to talk about writing, and it takes time for students to get good at asking questions about their drafts. This means that, in the first third of the class — a part that is crucial to establishing good relationships and norms — I’m sometimes reverting to my old habits and overwhelming students with too much stuff. I tend to keep dumping too many ideas on them when they’re still in the early stages of drafting because I want them to know that I’m reading and paying attention to their work.

I’m trying to do better! In Unit 2, I’m planning to try out this method that I saw Fia Christina Borjeson and Carl Johan Carlsson present on at the 2023 Conference on College Composition and Communication in some of the low-stakes work.

Borjeson and Carlsson mark students’ work with a color coding system (which we’d want to adapt in case students are colorblind, but any code would do). For example, they mark all of students’ evidence (or attempt at evidence) in green. Then, during the class session, they give feedback to the whole class showing some specific examples from a model text of how evidence should be structured and incorporated. Everyone with a green highlight in their paper looks at the example that the instructors give. Then, they decide whether they need to make revisions. Students without green marks would know that they need to add evidence. Then, students make their own revisions, and with other members of the class, reflect on what they did and why they did it.

I like this, because it shows students that we’re reading what they write, while also turning the responsibility back over to them to figure out what is (or isn’t) going well in their draft. We’re not doing it for them. We’re simply communicating “here’s where I think you’re doing X — does yours look like this?” or “I don’t see where you’re doing X yet.”

Do you have a feedback method that is working well for you and that both saves you time and also maximizes student learning? Let us know about it in the comments!