Essay Response Program

Mary Gilliland Senior Lecturer and Director, The Walk-In Service

A paper presented at the CCCC Conference, Phoenix, 1997

Excerpts

Students don't ask the same questions of professors and of teaching assistants that they do of tutors, because tutoring is more of peer relation. Tutors, for example, frequently hear of student fears, and sometimes see their tears. When they consult with an undergrad tutor, instructors are exposed to the perspective of an intelligent student who, two to three years previously was enrolled in a seminar like the one the instructor is teaching. In the case of a grad student tutor, instructors generally work with a student who has previously taught such a writing course, and may indeed be teaching another one at the time of the consultation.

I ask for a brief report of the consultation. Frequently mentioned is the value of finding that instructor and tutor share many of the same concerns about student writing. Instructors have appreciated validation of the clarity and effectiveness with which they are responding to student writing. Discussion helps to clarify instructors' deliberations about whether particular problems are rhetorical or conceptual, and also to direct or redirect their attention to the ideas that a paper is trying to express regardless of inadequate or even nightmare prose. Instructors have appreciated tutors' suggestions about tone; these range from encouraging the instructor to continue being encouraging to making sure comments are a little more forcefully stated.

In some consultations, the initial discussion of the effectiveness of comments on the particular set of papers turns into a general discussion of teaching. One consultation that centered on teaching aims resulted in the instructor's planning to reverse her course design the following semester. Her comments during the first half of the semester had focused on the sentence level and transitions between paragraphs. Next time the course was taught, she planned to postpone this focus until later in the semester, saying, "I really needed this input because I hadn't realized the extent to which I was concentrating on structural issues at the expense...of getting students to look a little more closely at ideas."

Tutors have offered observations about balance in essay response: balance between comments about content and structure, between attention to argument and to style, between praise and critique. They have sometimes reviewed with instructors techniques for emphasizing higher order concerns such as thesis and argument. They have also mentioned helping instructors with a particularly weak paper from the class, prioritizing points on which to comment and also raising the possibility that for lack of time or ability the student hadn't done the reading upon which the paper was based. In a case of an instructor's disappointment over the generally poorer quality of papers written in response to a particular assignment, tutor and instructor examined the assignment itself.

I value reflective teaching, and what I see as the primary benefit to all involved in the Essay Response Consultation program is an increased sense of naturalness and confidence in simply being oneself on the job, an important reminder of the benefits of the conversational element of our work. Participants in this program have come to value collaborative learning among instructional staff. Writing instructors come closer to the goals of having clearer conversations with their students on paper and becoming more approachable in individual conferences. After an analytic conversation with a tutor who has a wide-ranging and diverse experience of first-year university students, they are better able to incorporate a "first-year orientation" into the viewpoint from which they evaluate student writing, and to play a role in the development of writing that is more Socratic than didactic. Consulting with tutors can also help instructors to shift their vision into the near-to-far-and-back-again perspective with which tutors are encouraged to work: of course to help improve the piece of writing on hand, but more than that to help the individual on hand become a better writer.

Instructors' Responses to the Essay Response Consultation

Her comments confirmed some of my own concerns about the student writing.

He suggested to me that I could comment a little more on what was good about the good essays: organization, use of evidence, originality of thought.

This discussion helped me tremendously. The tutor taught me the importance of setting guidelines for my students...helped me clarify just exactly what I expected. This small step made me put my whole course into perspective--I felt more secure and more confident knowing that I wanted something specific from my students. I came to the session in a grading slump, disillusioned about my ability to teach. After the session I became a speed grader--actually excited about grading. The tutor helped me prioritize what issues to focus on and how I might direct their writing for the next assignment.

I found particularly interesting that I tend to be more specific in my comments on the very best and very worst essays; the middle-range essays elicit vague adjectives from me, like "good," and not many examples. Obviously, I want to be more specific in my observations on all student essays, but until the tutor pointed it out, I hadn't realized how much my comments varied depending on essay quality.

I found both consultations immensely valuable...I would suggest your program to all writing teachers.

It's the first week of class, and your first semester teaching. You've taken the Teaching Writing course but still wonder whether you are communicating your concerns about students' writing in ways they find accessible and helpful. What can you do? The Walk-In Service can make the first weeks of First-year Writing Seminars more productive and effective for both students and instructors.