In Elbow’s text, he advocates for an “evaluation free
zone” like freewriting for 10 minutes that is private or writing that is shared
but not graded. I see my teaching mentor doing something similar in the class I
am interning for and I find the students engage in writing enthusiastically. I
am considering this as something to go in my own class. How do you all feel
about encouraging students to write without fear of judgement or grades but for
the sake of exercising the act of writing in the class? Do you think that it
has any value? If so, is it risk taking? Is it positive? Negative use of class
time? Thoughts?
Daiker argues that students who receive praise in lieu
of comments about what all they did wrong on their papers significantly improve
their writing. Do you feel like you are a negative commenter or a positive
guider? Have you had experiences with professors who only comment negatively?
What about positively? And did the way they respond to your work make you work
harder or not care because you did not feel you could improve?
Kristy,
ReplyDeleteTo answer your second question, one of my favorite professors I ever had (I took 4 classes with him total), used to drown my essays in red ink with critique. And a lot of that critique was negative. However, I think it really depends where you as a professor are coming from with your students in a situation like this because I really appreciated the feedback he gave me. It made me want to work harder on my next paper because I knew he was so rigorous. Also, he did not take off many points for grammar mistakes, so while he may point them out to students, he was not necessarily docking students too much. It was a good balance.
I on the other hand though, am much more of a positive guider. I love giving students praise because I want them to be exited about their writing. Too many of them hate writing assignments, so I feel that if the praise is genuine and deserved then we should not hold that back from our students.