by Matthew Gordon, History, ’18-19
As a TA, one of the primary ways I interact with my students is through my comments when grading their papers. For classes without a discussion section, this might be the only interaction with many students. Despite this fact, I had never given much thought to how to provide effective feedback until I became a WIP TA.
When I got my first TA assignment, some more experienced grad students taught me one very basic rule: only write enough feedback to justify the grade you gave. Any more than that was wasted effort. The other rule they taught we was to always couch any negative feedback in a “compliment sandwich” to take the sting away. Coupled with the heavy workload under which all grad students labor and the general lack of attention that research universities pay to teaching, this added up to a recipe for shamefully ineffective feedback. The lack of results I observed from my feedback only reinforced my impression that it was not really worth putting my effort into improving.
It took WIP to shake me out of this malaise. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that more feedback is not necessarily better feedback. In fact, too much feedback can overwhelm students and ultimately lead them to disengage (“Oh no, there is so much wrong with my paper! Why should I even bother if there is so much going wrong?”). This realization meant that I could, as the cliché goes, work smarter, not harder. Instead of providing an exhaustive inventory of strengths and weaknesses in their writing, I focused on the two or three most important things to work on. I looked for examples, both positive and negative, from the paper in question to illustrate the changes I wanted to see. This change in feedback strategy bore fruit; I was heartened over the course of the semester to see students incorporate my feedback and the positive results it had on their writing.
Instead of providing an exhaustive inventory of strengths and weaknesses in their writing, I focused on the two or three most important things to work on.
Of course, even the most effective feedback has its limits, and part of improving my feedback meant confronting those limits. Some students would write excellently no matter what I told them. Other were evidently would not put in the attention or effort necessary to make those changes (to paraphrase Tom Lehrer, education is like a sewer—what you get out of it depends on what you put into it). Regardless, no longer can I labor under the delusion that my feedback does not have real pedagogical value. I will carry the tools and strategies I learned as a WIP TA into my assignments as a conventional TA. Moreover, I will remember the difference I observed when I adopted these tools and strategies.
