Editor's Choice: Valuing Diversity—Student-Teacher Relationships that Enhance Achievement

Community College Review, Summer, 2000 by Linda Olson Jacobson

* read student essays carefully and give the student a thorough and specific evaluation,

* use a clear evaluation system that is meaningful to the student,

* demystify the essay's basic structural requirements,

* encourage and consistently respond to students' questions,

* discuss the value of incorrect answers, and

* encourage students to help one another.

Some writing teachers believe that focusing on grammatical errors such as faulty sentence structure or misspelled words inhibits the flow of creative thought. I have observed, however, that once students recognize that many of their writing problems result from poorly learned grammatical skills rather than reflect their intelligence, their creativity actually improves. I suspect that this improvement takes place when the students can correctly attribute their writing problems to lack of basic information, rather than to an innate inability to think logically or creatively.

Students should be made aware of their writing strengths as well as their writing problems. If they are doing something well, they will want to retain this ability and hone it. Also, students who lack confidence in their writing ability find reassurance in knowing that they have positive skills to hold on to while they are analyzing and correcting weak areas.

To be effective, evaluations of developmental student essays must be thorough. Specific feedback helps students identify both strengths and weaknesses in their writing. For instance, if a student has a specific problem such as difficulty recognizing run-on sentences, the following procedure is helpful: highlight every run-on sentence he or she has written, write "run on" next to the sentence, and suggest a possible method of correction. After the paper is returned and the student has reviewed the comments, hold a "mini-conference" focusing on the written comments. Although this approach may seem time-consuming, it rarely becomes a daunting process. First of all, students in basic skills writing classes initially write very short, five-paragraph essays that can usually be evaluated well in about 10 minutes. Also, the first essay evaluation process takes the most time and effort because it models how the instructor will be working with each student individually. Once some of their major writing problems have been identified and correction methods have been explained, most of the students begin to use the specific information they have received to self-monitor their essays. After the second essay, the students are usually comfortable using the teacher only as a resource for brief suggestions and occasional proofreading assistance. Typically, less than 10% of students need intensive conferences at this time.

Individual conferences and thorough evaluation make it possible to clarify specific concepts that, for a particular student, may not have been clear from the text or general classroom discussion. The same process also provides an opportunity to give positive written and oral feedback to the student about the strengths of the essay, such as the use of creative word choices and colorful examples. When students engage in this type of process and receive specific information, they can focus on improvement and build on strengths.