by Elyse Elyaman, History

This semester, I had the privilege of working as a Writing-Intensive Teaching Assistant for a professor who designed their course to follow a model that prioritized students’ agency and growth in writing. We did this primarily through a revise and resubmit approach to writing assignments. For all major pieces of writing in the course, students would submit their first attempt at the assignment with the expectation that it would be polished and demonstrate good effort. Students would then receive comprehensive feedback from the grader that addressed both big issues, like argumentation and organization, and smaller ones, like proper verb tense and passive voice. Students would then have an opportunity to work through the comments, both in class and at home, and resubmit the paper for a second round of grading that assessed how much their individual drafts improved from the first to the second. Along with this second submission, students would write a brief summary of the changes they made in the style of a cover letter. This whole process was meant to imitate the process of publishing in the field, which typically involves several rounds of editing.

I found that this approach to writing was beneficial to the students in a number of ways. First, it gave them an opportunity to experience writing as a conversation. Students had to defend why or why not they accepted the feedback from the grader in their cover letter, forcing them to think critically about their choices as a writer. Second, it allows the grader to assess students based on how they improved their own writing over time. While we still utilized numerical grading based on a rubric, this slightly modified approach to grading leaves room for a little more individualization of evaluation. Third, while the feedback was comprehensive in flagging issues, students ultimately had to figure out the best way to fix the problems, leaving room for them to develop their writing skills using their own intelligence and agency. Finally, several students themselves noted how beneficial this set up was, commenting that this was the most helpful and comprehensive feedback they had received on their writing in college.

I think one of the key things to the success of this approach was that we scheduled one class day after they received their initial feedback to work through the comments in class. These classes were also used as mini-writing workshops, where, based on common issues across papers, the instructor was able to address writing techniques ranging from formatting to comma splicing. While feedback was personalized, it also helps give the instructor a read on what students may be struggling with on a class-wide level.

While there was only one round of revision and resubmission per writing assignment, students can carry over the feedback from these assignments to the next assignment and hopefully do even better. Knowing that they have a tendency to write in passive voice based on the feedback from the first round of revisions should help them be more aware of it in future writing assignments. Struggling through having to re-organize a disjointed essay in the first round of revisions may encourage them to think more carefully about planning their next writing assignment. Overall, this course design was extremely effective in balancing the demands of quantifying grades with a growth mindset and individualized approach to feedback. While it may not always be feasible to incorporate this into a course, I think professors and instructors of record should consider using this approach in their classes whenever possible.