The Language of Feedback

Recently, while giving feedback on my AP Language students’ rough drafts, I found myself writing and deleting comments over and over again. I agonized over every word. Should I write “I wonder” or “I’m confused” at the beginning of my comments so my students would recognize this was my personal opinion as a reader and that implementing the feedback was not mandatory? I tried to write thought-provoking questions and then realized I was actually writing leading questions—questions I wanted a specific response to—and, therefore, I was placing myself in a position of authority over my students and their writing. I wanted so desperately to keep my students in the driver’s seat of their writing experience and to avoid backseat driving that I became paralyzed by indecision. It ended up taking far longer than usual to give feedback to my twenty-five AP students.

Peter Elbow likewise struggled with giving feedback: “During my first years as a teacher, my head would swim, and I’d become completely baffled as I tried to think of useful things to say about my student papers” (Writing Without Teachers 117). In an almost exact enactment of my experience, Elbow says, “After some years, it began to happen that I would find myself in the middle of writing a comment and begin to wonder whether it could really be trusted, whether it was really useful” (118). It is reassuring to know that I am not alone in the struggle to give feedback that is meaningful to my students.

Upon reflection, I have come to realize that I do not recall ever being taught how to give feedback, only that it was a key step in the writing process. Teachers whom Nancy Sommers interviewed for an article echoed this same realization. Sommers explains that while the teachers were educated on creating writing assignments and evaluating student writing, “responding to student writing was rarely stressed,” and they were rarely trained in “the process of reading a student text for meaning or in offering commentary to motivate revision” (“Responding to Student Writing” 154).

If both Elbow and I have experienced frustration, as well as the teachers in Sommers’ article, there would appear to be a greater need to understand how to respond well to student writing. It also incites questions about responding to student writing, such as what language is the most effective when giving feedback. What words and phrases should I use when responding to student writing? In this paper, I will explore why feedback is important, the scholarship around effective feedback practices, and some of the continuing issues scholars have found with teacher feedback. I will conclude by exploring how using the language of coaching can remedy some of the current problems with feedback and propose concrete, practical language suggestions that teachers can use when responding to student writing.

Why Feedback Matters

Elbow may have said it best when he wrote, “Writing comments is a dubious and difficult enterprise” (“About”). It’s also time-consuming. So, so time-consuming. In fact, responding to student writing takes up the majority of composition teachers’ time (Sommers, “Responding to Student Writing” 148). So, why do teachers continue in the practice, hour after hour and year after year? Because “there is no learning without feedback” (Jackson 175). Researchers Hattie and Timperley found that feedback had an “average effect size of 0.79 (twice the average effect) . . . [which] fell in the top 5 to 10 highest influences on achievement” (83). The ultimate goal is for students to grow and develop as writers, and this is not a feasible endeavor without the feedback of a reader.

Responding to student writing also shows “respect for writers” because teachers are showing an “interest in what [students] are trying to do,” and the feedback from teachers “influences significantly the quality of the writing experience of students” (Jackson 177). Sommers reinforces the concept of students needing a reader and an audience. She asserts that students have a challenging time envisioning a reader’s response, and, therefore, teachers “comment on student writing to dramatize the presence of a reader, to help our students to become that questioning reader themselves” (“Responding to Student Writing” 148). In sum, the reason for giving feedback is to show students that their writing matters by reminding them they have an audience.

From these sources, it can be inferred that the type of feedback teachers give matters. Therefore, despite the enormous amount of time it takes, teachers give feedback because it works and because they believe that students benefit from having an audience read and respond, which increases students’ capacity for growth as writers.

Effective Feedback Practices

If feedback is so important and vital, the next question is, how do teachers participate in this process? Because it takes so much time, it is worth doing in a way that benefits us as teachers and, of course, our students as learners.

One of the most obvious and often repeated pieces of advice is to comment on drafts or formative writing assignments rather than wait for the final submission (Sommers, “Responding to Student Writing” 149; Jackson 187). Brannon and Knoblauch take this concept a step further. They believe that the best feedback and communication occurs when the hierarchy placing the teacher at the top is “flattened.” They assert that assignments that require multiple drafts are the best option because multiple drafts “provide an opportunity for dialogue about how effectively the writer’s choices have enabled the communication of intentions” (162). This dialogue enables the students and teachers to work together and communicate throughout the entire writing process. It creates a partnership between the teacher and student, who work together to help the student succeed.

There are myriad other suggestions about how teachers should engage in responding to student writing. Johnson’s suggestions range from practical to theoretical, including not reading every paper (Johnson 9), using targeted feedback by focusing on a specific skill (12), avoiding over-editing and over-commenting on students’ papers (19–20), using technology such as feedback comment banks to streamline the process (23), and being in the right mindset (31). These ideas are centered around finding ways to help teachers avoid burnout while still taking the time to give students the meaningful responses they deserve.

Elbow is another scholar who offers practical advice for responding to student writing. He recommends that teachers be clear about the criteria, read the whole piece before responding, and write comments on a separate piece of paper in order to stay in the reader mindset rather than editor mode. Elbow believes “there is no right or best way to respond to student writing” (“About Responding”); he is trying to help teachers navigate the process the best they can while finding what works for them as individuals.

While Johnson and Elbow focus more on the big picture of giving feedback, Straub’s recommendations delve into the type of comments teachers leave. He recommends that teachers “[focus] on only two or three concerns in a given set of comments. Instead of dealing with ideas, development, focus, sentence structure, and usage—all in the same response, deal only with ideas and development or, say, with ideas, development, and focus” (40). Straub recognizes that teachers cannot (and should not) comment on every concern because this is when students may tend to get overwhelmed. Instead, he recommends narrowing in on what seems most important.

The majority of advice offered focuses on the teacher’s thought process and making things easier for the teacher. Brooke K. Horvath offers further advice that shifts the focus from the teachers’ perspective to the student’s experience at the receiving end. She asserts that putting feedback “in sequence according to a hierarchy of concerns reduces the likelihood that a student will confuse revising with editing or proofreading, and allows her to work toward better prose via a series of manageable tasks, attainable goals” (245). Because suggestions aimed at teachers are often focused on efficiency (which is important), teachers may tend to be focused inward when giving feedback; Horvath suggests being student-focused and keeping their perspective in mind, an idea that will be further explored later in this paper.

It is important to note that written feedback is also not the only option. Horvath suggests that teachers also use “conferences, class discussion, small group work and written peer-evaluation, tutors in writing labs, computers, and other strategies” (249) for students to receive as many opportunities as possible to get feedback on their work. Conferences are a popular suggestion among scholars and writing instructors alike. Sommers encourages using conferences because they “provide an opportunity for one-on-one instruction and allow us to get to know our students better” and because they allow “students to get to know us better as teachers.” She also argues that writing conferences can save teachers time by allowing teachers to ask questions of their students and, therefore, offer up clearer explanations rather than “spending twenty minutes writing a comment about a murky draft that might sound like a series of contingencies” (Responding to Student Writers 30). Jackson also recommends using conferences and offers some practical advice to make the time with students meaningful: “Use conferences to get students to describe their rhetorical goals, . . . judge how the current text achieves those rhetorical goals, and then select appropriate revision strategies that will lead to improvement in the text” (Jackson 184).

In summary, there is a multitude of feedback principles for teachers to lean on that will ensure they are both using their time efficiently and that the comments they leave are meaningful and useful to students: give feedback throughout the writing process and not only on the final product, find an efficient system that works for you, and find a way of commenting that allows the student to be efficient with their revisions. Additionally, it is important to keep in mind that written feedback is not the only option available to teachers.

Problems With Feedback

Despite all the research about effective ways to respond to student writing, there are still many issues with teachers’ responses to student writing. Teachers are still struggling to give meaningful feedback, and students are still struggling to implement that feedback (Knoblauch and Brannon 1). While teachers are (probably) doing the best they can, their efforts at giving students meaningful comments that move the writing forward are falling short. Two primary reasons identified in the research are that teachers take over students’ writing with their comments, and the language teachers use in their responses confuses students.

When teachers, probably unknowingly or unwittingly, leave comments for students that put the teacher at the top of the hierarchy, students lose autonomy over their writing. Sommers found that “the teacher appropriates the text from the student by confusing the student’s purpose in writing the text with her own purpose in commenting,” which leaves the student making changes solely because the teacher said to rather than because the student deems them necessary (“Responding to Student Writing” 149). This means the student is no longer the one making the decisions—the teacher has taken over, and their comments can cause the student to lose sight of their original writing purpose.

Unfortunately, Brannon and Knoblauch found a similar issue in writing classrooms: “The reader [meaning the teacher] assumes primary control of the choices that writers make, feeling perfectly free to ‘correct’ those choices any time an apprentice deviates from the teacher-reader’s conception of what the developing text ‘ought’ to look like or ‘ought’ to be doing” (Brannon and Knoblauch 158). The problem with these types of comments is that a hierarchy is formed, with the all-knowing teacher at the top making all the decisions about the writing for the student. This puts the student in “the awkward position of having to accommodate, not only the personal intentions that guide their choice-making, but also the teacher-reader’s expectations about how the assignment should be completed” (Brannon and Knoblauch 158). These poor students! They are trying to balance their desires as a writer with the demands of their teacher, and when they do not align, it leaves the student to decide between their own ideas and those of their teacher, who is assigning their grade.

Another shortfall in teacher responses is in the language used. Sommers found that “more often than not, students are given contradictory messages.” For example, a student might be asked to condense a sentence while simultaneously being asked to be more specific (“Responding to Student Writing” 150). Additionally, Dohrer found that “students seemed to be perplexed by comments such as ‘awkward,’ ‘reword,’ or ‘rewrite.’ They had considerable difficulty determining what was wrong with the challenged sentences, the teachers’ comments having provided little information to help them” (52). Sommers goes on to argue that other issues with teacher responses are that “the comments are worded in such a way that it is difficult for students to know what is the most important problem in text” and that “the comments encourage students to believe that their first drafts are finished drafts, not invention drafts, and that all they need to do is polish their writing” (“Responding to Student Writing” 151). Potentially even worse, teachers may not use any language at all and instead resort to “bewildering hieroglyphics—dots, checkmarks, squiggly or straight lines” that would require students to use “a decoding ring to determine whether the check marks and squiggles are a good or bad thing” (Sommers, “Across the Drafts” 249). Ironically, it seems that while trying to clarify to students how to improve their writing, teachers can actually be unclear, leading students to leave comments unread or unused (250).

In the vast array of research on the ways teachers have fallen short in giving feedback, it is difficult to rank the worst moves made by teachers. One candidate, though, is Gee’s finding that students interpreted comments as a “personal indictment or as almost total disparagement of their skill” (212–213) when teachers used terms such as “clumsy, poorly written, or illogical” (212). It feels vital to remember that teachers can do real damage to students and their writing identity through the language we choose to use.

I am certain I have been the bulldozer teacher who came in with good intentions but unknowingly took over a student’s paper with my ideas about how to make it better, or left comments for students that were nearly impossible to decipher or act on due to lack of guidance. I have left comments that started with praise and moved into a “but” or “however.” I have also given directives: “I think this would be better if you . . . .” Reading the research has taught me that while my intentions may be good, I can still harm my students and their writing, as evidenced above.

Using Coaching Language

Despite the abovementioned issues, scholars agree that “commenting on student writing has always been, and remains, a valuable instructional activity” (Knoblauch and Brannon 6). While there are multiple solutions for improving the feedback instructors give to their students, when focusing on the language used, two particular principles stand out: keeping students in control of their writing and using inviting language that shifts our role from teacher to writing coach.

I would like to argue that using coaching language is one of the ways writing teachers can create a partnership with students, thereby keeping students in the driver’s seat of their writing process and eliminating some of the problems listed above.

It is well established in the scholarship that flattening the hierarchy is an important part of the feedback process. Many scholars have emphasized this idea of allowing students complete control over their writing throughout the entire writing process. Brannon and Knoblauch argue, “The point is to return control of choice-making as soon as possible to the writer, while also creating a motive for making changes” (163). In the scholarship, this dynamic is often referred to as a partnership between the student and the teacher: “Feedback plays a leading role in undergraduate writing development when, but only when, students and teachers create a partnership through feedback” (Sommers, “Across the Drafts” 250). Thus, it could be argued that creating a partnership between student and teacher is a vital step in the feedback process. The students themselves also desire this relationship. Sommers found that almost 90% of her respondents would “urge faculty to give more specific comments” and that they want “the opportunity to engage with an instructor through feedback” (251).

One possibility to create this environment is to change how teachers view their classroom roles by putting language at the center. Synthesizing research from others, Strauss argues that teachers should “move beyond responding as evaluator, critic, or editor” and instead move toward the “more interactive roles of reader, sounding board, collaborator, facilitator, coach, guide, motivator, diagnostician, instructor, and mentor” (32). Too often, teachers use language that puts them in the role of writing critics or editors when reading student work, which can lead to the problems explicated earlier. Instead, teachers must shift their perspective and language in order to become partners, collaborators, or coach-like figures.

For the past eight years, I have been working as a coach and mentor for provisional teachers in my building. As part of this, I have read extensively about coaching practices and participated in many trainings. A large part of this training has been focused on the language to use when working with another teacher to keep them open, willing to share, and in control.

There are many different types of coaching, but the basic tenets are the same in each, and they are an important foundation for understanding the connection to responding to student writing. Kimsey-House et al. lay out a simple cornerstone of coaching: “The agenda comes from the client, not the coach” (5). They argue, “As coaches, when we assume resourcefulness and creativity, we become curious, open to possibilities, discovering with the coachee, not dictating. We expect to be amazed” (2). In an academic setting, the coach is the teacher, and the coachee is the student. Students are the ones who should be steering the revision process. Teachers are guides, but students are the ultimate decision-makers. Knight argues, “The mission of Cognitive Coaching is to produce self-directed persons with the cognitive capacity for high performance” (Instructional Coaching 11). One way to do this is to “learn to ask questions that encourage people to think about their actions” (10). This means that, as writing teachers, we need to ask questions about our students and their writing to provide opportunities for them to reflect on their choices, which could improve their writing ability.

By adapting the beliefs, language, and suggestions for coaches to classroom teachers, it is possible to offer a set of language guidelines for writing teachers that will facilitate the purposeful use of feedback in the classroom. Knight writes that “better conversations are more about asking than telling” and that “better conversations involve dialogue, and dialogue is made possible by good questions” (Better Conversations 52). For the purposes of this paper, we will replace words like “conversations” and “dialogue” with feedback.

Questions make up the foundation of a coaching relationship. Tony Stoltzfus claims, “Questions hold the power to cause us to think, create answers we believe in, and motivate us to act on our ideas.” He argues, “Questions also define relationships between people . . . when I’m asking for your ideas, I’m a peer. Questions honor you as a person and communicate your value as an equal” (13). In an educational context, Stoltzfus’s ideas hearken back to the concept of creating a partnership—asking questions positions teachers as partners with their students in the writing process. After all, our students know more about their writing than we do (15).

Knight has three suggestions for asking good questions: be curious, ask open, opinion questions, and be nonjudgmental (Better Conversations 92). Starting with curiosity, Knight says, “We shouldn’t ask questions to which we think we already know the answer. Rather, we should ask questions because we authentically want to hear what our [student] has to say” (93). A trap I get caught in is asking leading questions—ones I want my student to answer in a specific way, as I mentioned in my anecdote at the beginning. This is because I am approaching my students’ writing with a lack of curiosity. Instead of being interested in why students made the choices they made, I want them to do things the way I think is best. For example, I have asked questions like, “Don’t you think it would be clearer if you explained this more?” or “Could you elaborate more here?” While disguised as questions, both responses are actually directives—give more explanation. Putting it in question form makes me feel better about myself as a responder because I can trick myself into believing I am being curious. In reality, I am manipulating my students and leaving little room for them to make their own choices. Knight argues that showing curiosity is a sign of respect (93), which seems to be a step in the right direction for creating a partnership with students.

To keep us in a state of curiosity, Knight encourages using open, opinion questions. Knight distinguishes between “closed versus open questions and right-or-wrong versus opinion questions” (Better Conversations 94). Knight explains, “Open-ended questions start with Why and How? Close-ended questions start with Is? Do? And Can?” (95). Stoltzfus argues, however, that “‘why’ questions tend to make people clam up because they challenge motives.” He suggests replacing “why” with “what” instead (31). Citing Warren Berger, Knight also suggests using “Why, What If, and How” questions to elicit thoughtful responses. He also argues that opinion questions allow individuals to be “much more forthcoming” in their responses (95), which would allow students to maintain control over their choices in a writing classroom.

Knight’s final suggestion for asking good questions is to remain in a state of nonjudgement: “If we want [students] to engage in a conversation around questions, we need to ensure that they feel psychologically safe. This means that we do not judge them when they answer” (Better Conversations 97). Knight argues the best way to do this “is to assume that [students] are doing their best” (The Impact Cycle 80). While Knight’s instructional coaching model revolves around in-person coaching conversations (which would work well with a face-to-face writing conference), writing teachers can engage in a dialogue with their students through an exchange of feedback, allowing space for students’ responses. The ultimate goal is to help improve and develop our students as writers, not just improve a singular writing assignment.

Using the examples of my leading non-question-questions from above, I could change those to fit Knight’s requirements of being curious, open, and nonjudgmental. A better response could look something like, “What do you want this paragraph to be doing? How is the elaboration you’re using helping you accomplish that purpose?” This would hopefully cause the student to reflect on their choices and determine for themselves if they need more elaboration. In my experience, students are not always as purposeful in their writing choices as we would hope. Asking questions that cause students to pause and consider their choices could result in the same revisions as a directive, but it would hone students’ analysis and writing skills in the process. Regardless of the outcome, what the language of my questions hopefully conveys to students is that I believe in their ability to make appropriate revisions to their papers and that I support them in their writing process.

Language Matters: Practical Suggestions

To assist teachers in knowing what language to use when giving students feedback, I have written a list of sentence starters that could be used when giving written comments. These ideas are based on all the reading I have done, the coaching trainings I have attended, and my twelve years of experience in the secondary English classroom.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, there is no magic solution to making feedback meaningful for our students. It is still going to be difficult and very, very time-consuming. However, “if we believe that student learning is ongoing and incremental by nature, then providing effective feedback at every opportunity is the best way to encourage and promote learning” (Stern 38).

In the story from the beginning of this paper, when I gave my AP students feedback on their assignment, I recognized that the comments I was leaving were not helpful and that the questions I asked were leading, but I was uncertain how to fix it. Now, I know that one way to improve my feedback is by building a partnership and dialogue with my students through open, coaching-based language.

Moving forward, I would like to offer a few recommendations. First, the majority of the scholarship and research has focused on the comments that teachers use that do not impact student writing. I believe what would be more beneficial, especially at this stage in the scholarship, is a study that focuses on the language that is working to improve student writing. This would help teachers better understand what to write in order to help their students.

Second, it is important for teachers who implement this new type of coaching language to recognize that students are not used to receiving this type of feedback from teachers, and it may take time to see an impact. Students will feel uncertain of what to do with the feedback and how to use the comments to make revisions. It could be helpful to begin the year with a survey to collect information from students about past experiences with feedback and their approaches to the revision process. This can empower teachers as they begin to explicitly teach students a new way of receiving and implementing feedback.

And finally, as a secondary classroom teacher, I propose greater training and in-service professional development for writing teachers. The one course we (may) receive as undergraduates does not adequately prepare us to be effective commenters on student writing. Additionally, new scholarship is constantly being published about the impact of teacher actions on students, yet it never makes its way outside the university and into the hands of secondary and elementary teachers. This needs to be remedied.

Having teachers who view students as partners in the writing process and who, through the language of feedback, give them agency in their writing is a key factor in creating better writers. And that is the ultimate goal, after all.