Trying New Things

Nov 26, 2018

Good teachers are always prowling about for ways to better communicate their material. Since I try hard to be a good teacher, I constantly revise my course syllabi, assignments, and lesson plans. On occasion, I’ve gotten up in the middle of the night to write down an idea I had about a course. During the semester that I teach a class, I also keep an open notebook in OneNote to document issues I’m having with assignment design or to make note of a lesson that went over really well or a reading that students react strongly to. As part of this, I actively solicit feedback from my students to track their engagement with the course content, and I communicate that feedback’s value by letting them know when I’ve made a change based on previous student’s feedback.

Live Grading / In Person Feedback

For example, this semester, I tried livegrading for the first time. Livegrading is when students come to my office, and I read through the paper with them, stopping to point things out as I go, and then I show them how I use the rubric and assign their grade, offering feedback on what to focus on for next time and other ways to improve. I tried this for a couple of reasons:

1. Since I teach many sections of composition in the fall, I often feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of reading and grading I have to do once papers are due. I easily fall behind grading their work since it takes me about 10-20 minutes per paper to give good written feedback.
2. I had my doubts as to whether students were really benefiting from my written feedback and thought in-person feedback could help me communicate better.
3. My office is in the attic of a building students don’t always go in, so I have been trying to find ways to get students to talk to me face to face without cancelling another week’s worth of classes to hold conferences. A livegrade would help address this issue as well.

I have been teaching composition since 2008, so the biggest thing holding me back from offering live grading was that I would have difficulty with defensive students and that I would not be able to communicate well on the fly (this is something I’m always concerned with, actually– I am an effective speaker only if I prepare).

 

 

So how did it go? I think it went really well. Out of 50 students, 43 came to my office within two weeks for a live grade. It was an incredibly busy time for in-person meetings as I was also meeting with my advisees about mid-term grades and schedules, and students were also beginning work on their research projects and were coming in to discuss those as well. So those two weeks, I was exhausted and some things fell through the cracks. However, students were generally receptive to feedback and several communicated that they were glad I did it because it helped them understand things they hadn’t understood before. I DID have a couple of students who were defensive and hard to communicate with or who cried about their grade, which is always sad for me to see, but even that is a growing experience for both of us.

What’s Next?

As I said earlier, good teachers are always looking for what works, so moving forward, I plan to make the following adjustments.

1. Offer live grading for most shorter papers (anything under 4 pages) or projects over the next few semesters and see how it goes.
2. Require live grading for the first paper of the composition course I’ll teach again next fall and offer it for the second.
3. When I plan due dates, adjust my schedule around things like midterms or when I expect to be meeting with more students for other things.