✓ Develop an approach to facilitating critical feedback
✓ Develop an approach to facilitating critical feedback
My approach to facilitating critical feedback was based on an understanding that thoughtful and humane writing assessment motivates students. Therefore, I developed an approach to facilitating feedback based on combining praise with flexible suggestions — which is an approach I shared with fellow Writing Mentors and modeled through my mentoring practices.
As a student, I have been inspired by educators who use constructive feedback to support their students’ learning. I saw an opportunity to influence the academic growth of students as a Writing Mentor, and, for that reason, wanted to ensure that the feedback I provided students was courteous yet useful. My friendly and scholarly approach to mentoring paired well with my approach to providing feedback that was both considerate and meaningful. As Dr. Beach acknowledges in “Demonstrating Techniques for Assessing Writing,” the “ability to describe goals and strategies and to use those descriptions to judge […] drafts” is important (Beach). Within my mentoring practices, I made an effort to describe my perspective as a reader to help students effectively consider their audience. Specifically, the constructive feedback I provided students highlighted the positive rhetorical elements of their submissions and offered ways to enhance the clarity and rhetoric of their work. Ultimately, my knowledge about rhetoric — particularly, my understanding that rhetoric relies on the relationship between the speaker, the audience, and the message — helped me provide effective feedback. Meanwhile, my desire to motivate students influenced my decision to enable student success with feedback characterized by thoughtfulness and compassion.
When given the opportunity to describe my approach to facilitating feedback, I summarized how I attempted to provide effective and humane feedback. For example, I shared my approach with a fellow Writing Mentor in an online discussion assignment for ENG 484.
“Hi [fellow Writing Mentor] — I greatly appreciate the ideas you shared in your post and found myself nodding my head in agreement while reading about your tactics to ease apprehension in students. I like the trifecta (leading questions, flexible suggestions, repetitive validation) you present because it provides a framework for effective, yet humane feedback delivery. Although I do not always include leading questions in my feedback comments (sometimes I ask closing questions instead), I always provide flexible suggestions and repetitive validation via the “sandwich method.” For example, I begin my feedback comment by discussing the most striking, positive aspect of the student’s writing submission followed by a few flexible suggestions (as needed), and, finally, end on a note of praise, encouragement, or optimism. I think that being humane is at the heart of both of our approaches to providing students with feedback. Also, I like the comment you shared that you originally posted as an annotation on Perusall because it is insightful and speaks to the idea that dialogic feedback helps learners think for themselves, which is, of course, relevant in the real world.” — a response I wrote to a fellow Writing Mentor in the Writing Conferences Discussion (ENG 484)