Stop Grading Essays with Amnesia
Habitual recreation spells habitual exhaustion.
Teachers spend hours grading and writing feedback; students spend seconds throwing it away.
The big picture. Grading writing and giving feedback is time consuming. Both tasks detour many. Spoken feedback is forgotten. Handwritten feedback is tossed. Rewriting the same comments year after year, essay after essay, spells burnout. But what about pre-typed feedback?
By the numbers. How long does grading take? What is one minute each for sixty essays? Two minutes each? Five minutes each? What if you had five minutes each for 100 essays? A family with small children?
Instead. If you have to write it more than twice, create a template. Predictable mistakes become predictable feedback. Rather than write "Avoid run-ons" hundreds of times over the decades, write it once. Then hit print. Push your starting points forward and save mental energy. Remember: Spoken feedback is forgotten. Handwritten feedback is tossed. But printed feedback can be reprinted.
Why it matters. Consider other workflows: Time and mental energy are not infinite. Mindsets become methods. Writing comments from scratch means identifying the mistake, recalling feedback, and writing it out, many times per essay. Mental energy declines rapidly. Habitual recreation spells habitual exhaustion.
Comment archives. Michael Clay Thompson's Opus 40 provides a framework for fast, individualized feedback. Decades ago he created a digital comment archive where he copy-pastes specific comments in letters to his students. This framework can be applied many ways. Here's an example of his style, a formula with an example (mine):
Mistake or action name. Write two to three concise sentences describing the task and how it can be revised.
Strengthen your thesis: Your thesis statement has weak, vague, or unclear wording. A thesis should be specific and provable. Focus your wording to make it more concrete.
Creating the sheet. Where do you start? Begin with the most time-consuming and most frustrating tasks (80-20 Rule), then spiral to more specific tasks.
1. Read through responses with a notebook in hand. List common mistakes.
2. Rank mistakes by frequency and/or frustration. What do you hate repeating?
3. Draft 2-3 sentence comments describing the problem and revisions.
4. Create task-specific feedback either embedded in the prompt or as a free floating sheet.
Style guide. Aim for one solid page of comments, front and back. Give comments condensed fonts and bullet points. Group comments under headers, arranged by either grading workflow or task-part: overall deductions, introductions, thesis statements, body and evidence, and so on.
In practice. Meet with students and circle what needs revised. When students return to their seats, typed feedback complements oral feedback. If they forget what you said, the comment sheet becomes an individual task list to remind them. But never hand it out like a bill. Comment sheets without spoken feedback accomplish little.
Go deeper. Moving past habitual recreation frees your attention towards pattern recognition. And make no mistake: Patterns exist.
Watch for related constellations. Some mistakes occur together in sets. Isolated mistakes happen, but many are correlated and predictable.
Watch for constellations by ability level. Truism: Mistakes differ by ability level. But observe mistakes only. Being prescriptive means being the fool.
Watch constellations evolve. As the year progresses some mistakes become other mistakes. Sets change with students across the year.
Recap. Stop grading with amnesia. If feedback is not predictable, you are not paying attention. Comment sheets are not and cannot be exhaustive, but they save mental effort regardless. Flip the script and make this common weakness a strength.
Future posts will feature comments you can steal tomorrow.
Update! Check out some the posts which came after in this series:
