The main way for students to improve their writing skills, is through consistent feedback implemented. However, the writing process can be complex for students. Therefore, it is important as educators we have an emotional consideration of our students feelings about their work when providing feedback. We want to motivate students through the writing process and mindset that writing will be a continuous process, with improvements.
With that being said, as an educator we need to put a conference tone in place at the start of the school year. We need the students to know we will be providing them not only positive feedback and achievements in their writing, but also constructive feedback to improve on.
Tips to Create a Positive Writing Conference:
- Stay on Topic – Not only for timing purposes, but more importantly the conversation is focused on the written text and not on anything else.
- Balance – For each positive comment, follow with a constructive comment, and repeat. I try to keep a 2:2 ratio for timing purposes. I also feel that small chunks to focus on help not to overwhelm students.
- Importance – Based on your grading rubric, focus on the most important 2 criticisms. Depending on your students, this could be topic sentences, citations, or indenting. Think about structure and organization, before going deeper into evidence and elaboration.
- Use Colors – Stay away from the red pen! Colored pencils are a great option or fun colored pens. I like to also have students mark their papers with me to find the error(s), so sharing a fun pen set allows students to feel comfortable while taking ownership. Also, my class follows a color coding strategy, so we match out colors. More specific details about implementing a color coding strategy can be found here. [It is honestly one of my favorite strategies!]
- Mindset – Change the tone of your criticism, to sound more like a question or a gentle suggestion. Remember, it is not always what we are say, it is how we say it.
How to Provide Students Efficient and Effective Writing Feedback:
Streamlining your writing instruction through modeling to your student feedback is very important. The visual teacher model, the academic language and the students written text against a rubric needs to be clear. However, this can feel very hard to both the student and the teacher. To simplify this hard process, we need to chunks our writing focuses into small groups with precise feedback.
After years of continuously modifying my writing block, not only for myself but for students, it was still overwhelming. Finally, I gathered all my conference notes, mini lessons and models and created a list. The purpose of creating this list was to give myself a reference guide when conferencing with students during writing. I wanted to be able to sort all my feedback into the categories we focus on during our model lessons and in student feedback.
Providing students positive and constructive feedback comments that not only correlates to the writing lesson model, but also the rubric and standards streamlined my writing conferences. After some time of using myself, I have created feedback comment cards for teachers to implement and feel the same relief, along with seeing the improvement in their own writing conferences.
Resource – Grading Essay Writing Feedback Comment Cards:
A few ways tips to implement this resource:
- Print and keep near you when grading writing.
- Save on your computer when grading digital writing.
- Keep copies in clear page protectors, laminated, on a ring/folder/binder.
Additionally, I use a sticky note to mark feedback comments on the cards that I am specifically teaching and modeling that week. It helps make the conference conversation current and relatable for students.
What is Included in this resource:
- POSITIVE & CONSTRUCTIVE Feedback Comments for INTRODUCTION PARAGRAPH.
- POSITIVE & CONSTRUCTIVE Feedback Comments for BODY PARAGRAPHS.
- POSITIVE & CONSTRUCTIVE Feedback Comments for TOPIC AND CONCLUDING SENTENCES OF BODY PARAGRAPHS.
- POSITIVE & CONSTRUCTIVE Feedback Comments for EVIDENCE AND COMMENTARY.
- POSITIVE & CONSTRUCTIVE Feedback Comments for ENDING PARAGRAPH.
- POSITIVE & CONSTRUCTIVE Feedback Comments for STYLE, WORD CHOICE, AND CONVENTIONS.
What is Included in Free Sample:
- POSITIVE & CONSTRUCTIVE Feedback Comments for TOPIC AND CONCLUDING SENTENCES OF BODY PARAGRAPHS.
- POSITIVE & CONSTRUCTIVE Feedback Comments for STYLE, WORD CHOICE, AND CONVENTIONS.
For more Writing Tips and resources click below:
- Blog Post: Implement a Paragraph Writing Rubric
- Blog Post: How to Teach Social Studies in your Essay Writing and Reading Block
- Free Resource: Paragraph Graphic Organizers
