Sharing and Responding: My Turn

I had never really thought much about giving feedback to other’s writing. When we had to switch papers in school or if a friend asked me to look over their paper before handing it in, I always looked for grammatical errors and stated which areas I enjoyed, which areas I found vague, and which areas were generally weak. I never really thought about responding to people’s writing differently than this, as this was how teachers had always responded to my work.

Elbow and Belanoff call attention to this in “Sharing and Responding” when they state, “For if you simply ask someone to give you feedback or response to what you’ve written and don’t give any help or direction, they will probably just imitate the responses they remember getting from teachers,” (46).

After reading this text I realize that I have not been giving good feedback and that it is my responsibility as a reader and writer myself to acknowledge this and do better. While I was not fully aware of all the different ways to respond, I did always feel like I could be doing better. I felt like I was not being as helpful as I could be. Now that I have eleven ways to respond to writing I feel more prepared for Tuesday’s class when we read each other’s writing history papers, and for helping my future students with their writing.

I definitely will use this in my classroom however I will not be the only one in my classroom using this. While I as the teacher will be using this to help my students become better writers, I feel like this would be especially helpful if I teach my students these techniques as well, instead of just letting them guess their way through responses like I used to.

 I can develop lessons where students bring in their rough drafts like we will be doing Tuesday, but instead of just letting them switch with the person next to them (like I did in high school), the lesson will involve learning these different ways to respond to writing and then responding to each other’s writing. This way they become more involved as readers but also better writers. Perhaps I would even put them in groups of four instead of pairs so that way they got more feedback from different readers.

Overall, this text was very insightful. It taught me how to be a better reader and responder and is something that I will want to bring into my classroom!