Do We Have to Be in the Same Room?

Anne Bello is a PhD candidate in Rhet/Comp at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is currently the Technology Coordinator of the UMass Writing Program where she also teaches College and Basic Writing. She is also a former member of the Writing Program’s Resource Center.

In the “Teaching with Technology” practicum, one issue some instructors brought up is marking student work. If, say, a student hands in a paper copy of a homework assignment, the instructor can easily mark the assignment with a check and hand it back to the student. It’s clear to the student that the instructor has read and acknowledged the work – even if the instructor just glanced over the work to see if it was done. With submitting work online, this process can become murkier. If instructors don’t write extensive comments, students might not know for sure whether the instructor read their work or not.

Fortunately, there are ways to work around this situation. Moodle, for instance, has a number of features that make it easy to “mark” student work. One option is to set a grading scale for an assignment or create a custom grading scale to quickly mark submissions as received (or satisfactory or whatever scale you’d like to use). Choosing the Quick Feedback option can make this process even easier. Another option is to create a checklist. If you want to acknowledge student work, you can set up the checklist so you update it; if you want to put more responsibility on the students, you can set it up so that they update it. Moodle can update it automatically as well. Of course, there are always low-tech solutions. For instance, you can refer to what students wrote for homework in class, making it clear you read their work.

While teachers have many options for acknowledging student work, there are some larger issues at play. How much marking and responding to texts do we, as teachers, need to do to help students learn? Is it enough for students to do an assignment and learn from the experience, or are we obliged to respond in some way? How can we encourage students to value the work they do independent of our feedback? When I first started teaching, I thought I needed to respond to everything: drafts, homework, in-class writing, etc. I’m at a point now where I mostly just comment on drafts, though I still feel a need to mark most of the work my students do. When I taught College Writing, I had students submit every piece of writing they did in class or for homework as part of a portfolio. I didn’t grade or comment on most of it, but the completeness of the portfolio was part of the grade. Since I’ve started teaching Basic Writing, I’ve moved away from this method. While I have my students submit some in-class writing online (we’re in a computer lab), there are some activities they don’t submit at all. I wonder if the students value the work I don’t collect as much as the work I do mark, but to be honest, it’s a relief not to have to sort through it all. And the fact is there are some writing assignments I don’t value as much. As long as they serve their immediate purpose – giving students something to think about and say in a discussion, for example – that’s enough.

Another issue involved in all of this is the degree to which learning needs to be an exchange between teacher and student. The other day I was conferencing with a student, and he had one of those “aha” moments that make teaching feel so worthwhile. This student had been rather dismissive of the class, acting as if he already knew everything there is to know about writing. Through our discussion of his draft, he finally seemed to get that global revision meant more than just fixing errors. It was as if he suddenly realized, “Oh – this isn’t high school. College-level writing is a lot of work. College is a lot of work.” After the conference, I congratulated myself on helping this student reach a more complex understanding of writing. There’s been a lot of coverage in the press of massive open online courses (MOOCs), which are often held up as a new future for higher education. As I left my office, I thought, “Oh yeah, online learning? Let’s see you do what we just did here! There’s no way the Interwebs can replace me.”

Later, though, I thought about my other students. At some point over the past few weeks, most of them have probably realized, “College is not like high school.” For some, this realization might have come in my course or another class. For others, it may have come while they were talking with friends at the dining commons or working alone in the dorms. I just happened to be in the room when this particular student had his realization. I might have helped, but this student would have probably learned the same thing another way.

The incident reminded me of something my undergraduate advisor once told me: He thought the most important learning took place as a student was reading on her own, seeing connections and disjunctions between different ideas and her understanding of the world. A professor might only get a glimpse of that learning, he said. And that was okay.

His vision of teaching and learning is appealing to me, but it’s also hard to buy into completely. He saw the careful selection of readings as being an important element of his teaching, even though his effort might be less tangible to students than the comments he wrote on their drafts. He had tenure, and he also had years of experience giving him the confidence that his students would learn whether he put check marks on their papers or not. As a grad student with only a few years of teaching experience, it’s harder to feel so secure.

I’d be interested to know how other teachers feel about acknowledging work. What do you choose to respond to and why? What don’t you collect? I’m especially interested in what it’s like to teach an online course, when you’re never “in the room.” Do you get the same kind of sense of student learning that you do in a face-to-face teaching situation?