Pick a Model And Go With It

This week’s focus on assessing student writing could not come at a better time as I prepare to receive final drafts on my student’s first essays this Friday. Evaluating student writing (and heaven forbid, assigning grades) is one of the most anxiety-inducing aspects of starting to teach. Reading articles or hearing panels on this topic in the past has always left me feeling like there is an endless conundrum between what freshman composition teachers would like to do with assessment and what institutions require. Mainly, teachers would like to provide detailed feedback using grids and scales and extensive suggestions using anything but a red pen but are instead forced to assign final, single course grades to each student without the opportunity for further explanation.  As a student, I feel the bitter reality of this conundrum too. I have spent countless semesters of my life stressing about grades, attempting to keep my “perfect” GPA, all to have my hopes dashed by two A minuses in painting (PAINTING?!! People, I implore you).  As a result of this conundrum , it seems composition teachers and composition and rhetoric theorists have devised any numbers of negotiations that get closer to promoting the optimal environment and development of writing skill in their classrooms.  In A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers (2001), one of the first books I read that directly addresses teachers responding to student writing, Erika Lindemann encourages an approach similar to best practices for tutors in most writing centers. She encourages teachers to look at higher order concerns (HOCs), focusing on the main purpose for the writing assignment itself. She then encourages teachers to use suggestions and questions rather than authoritative mandates in their comments. This is all well and good, but of course students still know that you, as teacher, hold the key to whether they pass or fail English 1000 and even what their eventual GPA will be in four years (one word: painting).

So, the authors we have read in preparation for our discussion this week want to suggest much more radical approaches to the way teachers assess student writing.  I started my reading with Asao B. Inoue’s (2005) “Community-based Assessment Pedagogy,” which is a rather jaw-dropping defense of a completely different model of the composition classroom and negotiating grades. This completely student-led approach assumes a social constructivist position in requiring students to literally negotiate the criteria for their own assignments and the rubrics they will use in order to asses one another’s writing. The goal, as Inoue articulates, is not only for students to “learn to assess themselves, taking active learning stances in the classroom” but also to be able to take a step back and “theorize” about how “assessment and writing work in their own practices” (209). Thus, the beauty of Inoue’s community-based assessment pedagogy is that it accomplishes a number of pedagogical tasks at once, including the obvious politically inspired purpose of revealing hegemonic structures of authority. I kept asking myself how, exactly, such a system could possibly work, and Inoue anticipated most of my reservations throughout.  The questions that remain include the following: What do you do with students who are very vocally opposed to the entire class structure from the beginning? What do you with extremely shy students? What do you do about assessing other elements of the class like participation, attendance, positing on blogs or posting the multiple drafts of writing each student is assessing on time? Finally, what does Inoue do with minority positions? The answer to my first question may be the particular course that Inoue uses this model for in this article.  A 300 level English course (Writing and Rhetorical Conventions) is not exactly the same as a 100 level required composition course.

My final reservation about “minority positions” is somewhat addressed in Peter Elbow’s response to Inoue in Assessing Writing (2006; part of our optional reading). I read Elbow’s response because, frankly, I was extremely compelled to give Inoue’s model a try (and also because I can’t resist a good comp/rhet debate: Bitzer, Vatz, and Consigny; Bartholamae and Elbow, Geisler vs. Gunn and Lundberg etc.). He argues the following:

Despite Inoue's brilliant design and execution and the obviously deep learning we see students taking from his class, I have a serious reservation about how he designs his laboratory for studying value. The problem comes from a central premise that underlies the whole operation: he insists on a single unified set of criteria for judging all writing in the course – a single picture of effective writing. Even final course grades derive from this corporate agreement. When he makes the class vote and agree on a single standard of effective writing and stick to it for all evaluation, he seems to be saying, ‘This is a picture of how valuing works in our culture or our institutions. You may not like it, but that is how power is deployed: it flows from group agreements.’

What students are really agreeing on is conventions rather than value. As an answer, Elbow suggests that Inoue’s process be adapted so that students would be allowed to produce their own individual (or smaller subsets) of criteria for what constitutes “good writing.” Thrown into this hybrid system is Elbow’s notion of the unilateral grading contract.  As if Inoue’s system isn’t difficult enough, Peter Elbow wants to further complicate the matter. At this point in my three-week teaching career, his model seems unattainable.

Though the type of contract grading Elbow and Danielewicz (2009) propose in “A Unilateral Grading Contract to Improve Learning and Teaching” seems more realistic, it is obviously too late to implement this contract at this point in the semester. I agree with Elbow that teachers a lot of times use this kind of standard in grading anyway and such a contract just explicitly places the power in the student’s hands. For example, in my course, I can see that students will probably earn a B average if they simply do all the assignments (following guidelines for the major writing assignments) and attend class. Yet, I still wonder what Elbow or Danielewicz do with students who do not quite make all the requirements but are still “good” writers.  I would think that almost as many students would fall into this category and the “exceptional student” category as in a regular classroom, requiring just as much care in teacher’s deliberating over grades. Of course, I could be wrong, as Elbow seems to indicate.

So, on the most practical level, I am left with Elbow’s “Good Enough Evaluation” (2010), which aligns largely with the way I was intending on evaluating this first stack of papers but also provides the very useful tip of creating rubric sheets that list three ranges of scores on each individual assessment criteria:  strong, okay, and weak (or the more stodgy excellent, satisfactory, or poor). This simple scale seems like it would be easy for students to interpret and also easy to translate into some sort of points range to calculate a final grade for the paper.  However, I am open to the class’s critiques of this system and the suggestions of you all as much more experienced teachers.

To end this blog on a very scary note: I am tempted (dare I say, committed), to actually trying a bit of Inoue’s community-based assessment as part of the exploratory essay assignment for Unit 2. The formal writing assignment I have designed for this unit involves an annotated bibliography and then a brief exploratory essay that proposes a question that perplexes the student and walks the reader through his or her process of research with a final reflection on how this research has influenced the direction for the next paper in the sequence (the argument essay).  I am considering allowing each class to devise its own criteria for what constitutes an appropriate “source” for this assignment. The class would then draft a rubric for how one might assess the sources each student provides, and finally, score their peer’s performance on this one portion during peer review. Does this sound like a disaster?