From Editing to Teaching: Expand Your Commenting Strategies

Grading assesses how students have performed; effective commenting improves how they will perform. When providing feedback on English papers it’s easy to fall back on a narrow range of commenting strategies or to simply use the strategies your own instructors used. Or you might fall into the trap of just editing your students’ papers instead of using your comments to teach them how to be better writers. 

You’ll better meet your students’ needs if you can draw on a wide array of commenting strategies. This brief workshop will do the following:

• Outline best practices for providing feedback on student papers.
• Present and give you an opportunity to practice a variety of commenting strategies.

After the workshop you’ll have a greater variety of commenting tools in your toolkit and you’ll have a better idea of how to use them to improve your students’ writing. Bring a pen or pencil, as you’ll be working with student texts.

If you are attending, please email Bruce Dadey (badadey@uwaterloo.ca), simply stating “I’m attending the commenting workshop."

Open to: All English graduate students, whether you are teaching this term or not

Facilitator: Bruce Dadey