We’ve started group presentations in 388V, which means groups of UTAs are facilitating the online discussion and leading the in-person seminar each week. Group topics range from facilitating peer review to creating inclusive classrooms to teaching professional writing and more.
Last week in my section, the topic was Responding to Student Writing.The group chose an excellent set of readings:
- Maxine Hairston, Working with Advanced Writers
- Harvard Writing Project, Responding to Student Writing
- Nancy Sommers, Responding to Student Writing
UTAs reviewed higher-order and lower-order concerns and practiced applying margin and end comments to a sample text. They shared previous experiences of receiving feedback on their own writing and considered Hairston’s arguments about why students are reluctant to take risks in their writing. UTAs discussed why students don’t always apply our feedback and what we can do about it, and they spent a good amount of time discussing instructor expectations, clear feedback, and “writing for the assignment” versus writing for transfer.
At the end, I asked UTAs to take out a piece of paper and reflect on what they’ve learned and what lingering questions they may have. I found some common themes in their responses to the latter concerning sentence-level questions, self-doubt, professor expectations, and student expectations. Here are some examples of each:
Sentence-level questions:
I still feel unsure about how deep to go into a student’s writing. If the piece is overall well written, should we then comment on lower-order concerns?
Self-doubt:
I am always worried about telling a student something wrong and then getting penalized for it. I think part of this may because I am still unsure of my abilities. Knowing how to be confident and also how to ask for a professor’s help would be a good idea.
Instructor expectations:
I’m worried I’ll give them all this feedback and they’ll still get a bad grade
Student expectations:
I’m not entirely sure how I can help confused students who are so rooted in their own idea of what good writing is that they aren’t seeking advice.
I often worry about whether my own expectations will arise while I’m reading that we didn’t prepare students for—how much can we expect them to know or be able to do without explicitly saying it?
These are all important questions. The last two will likely be familiar, as I think they’re common for anyone who teaches writing. Others are more specific to UTAs’ individual contexts, e.g., their understanding of what is expected of them, and their relationships with each of their instructors.
We discussed these issues for a few minutes last night, though I quickly found myself saying what I always do: talk to your instructors. I (and Justin) can and do discuss general principles and practices in 388V, but we don’t have the answers to questions about working with you and your students. Only you do.
To that end, I encourage all of you to check in with your UTAs, even at this later stage of the semester. If responding to student writing or helping students with their drafts is part of your UTA’s responsibilities, make sure that they’re genuinely comfortable doing so. You might conduct a “commenting-norming” exercise: print out two copies of an assignment submission, give one to your UTA, respond to the assignment individually, exchange copies, read each other’s comments, and then discuss similarities and differences. (You can do this electronically, of course; there are countless ways to conduct this UTA-instructor exercise).
Even if you’ve already done something like this, doing it again would go a long way to boosting your UTA’s confidence. And it would be fun: you could analyze each other’s comments and discuss which ones would/ would not be clear to students, discuss how much written feedback to provide without overwhelming students, and so forth.
I do this with my returning UTAs, too. It’s always nice to review expectations with UTAs, no matter how long they’ve been working with us.
Thank you for considering these ideas and this exercise. And thank you, as always, for all of the good work you are doing with your UTAs.