Diary of a History TA: The Value of Feedback

   I’m never sure how to offer writing feedback to my students.

  I am fortunate to work at a school that has a seminar structure. It gives me a chance to model good answers and reinforce expectations. I use my seminars, the questions I ask my students, and the follow-up questions to their responses, as opportunities to show them how to answer complex historical questions well. And then I tell them that I am doing that. Students are very good at forgetting when they are learning skills unless they are told, explicitly, that they are being developed. (The reality is that we all are quite bad at this, but I am trying to talk about students here). Students are also good at disconnecting their in-class experience from their writing experience. Though I, as a teacher, imagine that the feedback I’m offering in seminars about their answers is being logged away somewhere in a general folder about how to effectively answer a question (in my class), it is likely that the folder is more specifically connected with answering questions effectively during seminars and there is no note to also see the folder on writing good answers.

            So good writing feedback must look different.

  I used to think that good writing feedback was long. A paragraph of exposition on how to improve in the future if, in the future, you find yourself somehow writing a similar paper. Heck, maybe you’d get two paragraphs if I really thought I would have to explain myself to you (make no mistake, my feedback is intended to explain the mark a student received so that I don’t have to respond to a large body of complaints). But this takes time. And the more I assist for teachers that are more interested in final products than writing processes, the more I realize that this feedback seems like a slap in the face in the end. The student responds, “what do you mean I got a C? I didn’t even know how to get an A, and you’re going to give me a C?” I wish that providing a marking rubric at the beginning of class were enough to solve this problem, but, sadly, telling a student to look at a rubric is efficient but ultimately useless if they have never been shown how to decipher what it means and apply it to their own writing.

  And, ultimately, that is my job. Decipher the arbitrary, confusing, and inconsistent codes locked in academic expectations and apply them to students in a high-stakes game of education. I’m getting anxious just thinking about it and I’m not even writing the darn paper. But after I’ve deciphered and applied my understanding of the rubric, I have to explain my understanding to each student. And that takes a lot of time; I guard my time carefully. Thankfully, I am fortunate to work at a school that also has office hours built into my contract. And I sit, very alone, in my office, for two hours a week, waiting for students to come and entertain me.

 This is when I give good feedback. To encourage students to come, I limit myself on written feedback. I’m discovering students barely read it more than once, and it is only a cursory glance to see if we found some of the flaws that they were hoping to get away with in their papers. So now students get nothing more than three short sentences. Usually I’m concerned about clarity. So I make my statements clear and declarative. Sometimes I’m concerned about style so I make my statements clear and declarative. Occasionally there is a concern arising from their conclusions. Writing short, clear, declarative feedback has drastically improved its quality.

And it has also had more students coming to my office hours to get more assistance on how to write a paper. They believe that I understand this arbitrary art of writing. Their grade is no longer a product of hocus pocus explained in a paragraph that sounds like an excuse rather than a explanation. It is reasonable. They can make sense of it. I don’t solve their writing problems for them. I point some of them out. At most, I point out a gentle number of three (though I often try to butter them into the feedback with a compliment or affirmation to start off). And, as a result, more students are coming to me for more than when I was writing long feedback that took up more of my time. And fewer are attempting to contest their marks.

I often sit alone in my office. But, earlier this semester I had a student come to me worried about her midterm. She didn’t do well. I asked her why she didn’t do well, and she restated my short sentences, and then went into more detail. I was impressed. I asked her how she structured her argument - this was a major issue. She looked confused. I asked, “How do you structure an essay?” “I don’t know. I’ve never had to think about that before. I’ve never had to write one before.” I should remind you that many of my students are coming from the People’s Republic of China, where the art of writing the essay is less frequently taught. I suspected this would be her answer.

I worked through her midterm with her and showed her what was good. There was a lot to it that was good - enough to muster a solid C-grade. I then showed her what pieces were missing that are essential to a better, essay-formatted response. An introduction, a thesis, a body, a conclusion. Argument. Evidence. Weaving narrative and analysis together carefully and precisely. A skill that even professional historians struggle with - that few master. She stayed for 30 minutes and we worked together. We played around with her answer and figured out how to make it a good B-grade answer based solely on structuring her work better. And then I gave her more feedback on how to make it an A-grade answer.

I don’t think she had ever previously received such dedicated feedback on her writing. I don’t think I ever received such dedicated feedback on my writing during my undergraduate degrees because I didn’t take advantage of office hours. But it came out of offering minimal feedback on a high-stakes assignment that she did poorly on. “You have a clear knowledge base of the content. There is not enough analysis of the information you present. As such, there is no clear or convincing thesis presented.” When it was handed back to her (and her classmates received theirs as well), I reminded them of my office hours. I want them to come visit me. I want to explain things to them. And I will do that during my office hours, when I’m sitting alone in my office waiting for somebody to come and seek assistance rather than taking time to write a paragraph that won’t satisfy them in the end.

 Ultimately, the vast majority of my students will not come to me for this assistance. They won’t realize that deep down there is a magic to writing well and that the wand can be theirs if they learn what they should be critical about in their own writing. I would hope that many of them go elsewhere for aid if they are not coming to me. There are many better writers than I in this world. They are everywhere in my department, and they can surely help my students out in better communicating ideas than I can. But for those who don’t seek out assistance, I assume they will be satisfied with the feedback I offer them - all three sentences of it. For those that do, I offer all of the knowledge and expertise I can in a way that is neither apologetic nor an exposition of a previous excuse. I am a Teaching Assistant, and I teach skills. Writing is important, and so I teach that. But I do that best through good, personal, face-to-face feedback.

What are your feedback strategies?