In a similar vein, I’ve started to use audio feedback to respond to a good chunk of my students’ work, recording my voice on the assignment on Canvas and walking my students through my response to their writing as I’m reading it.

By responding to my students with my learning objectives and rubric in front of me and focusing only on higher order issues or patterns of error (mistakes that appear consistently rather than sporadically), I can much better signal to my student the skills and knowledge that they should focus on developing within the context of each assignment. I’ve since moved to providing many fewer comments and focusing on the learning objectives that I’ve developed for each assignment. When I commented on every spliced comma and each disagreeable verb alongside major thematic or organizational issues, I failed to indicate to my students what my priorities were and what theirs should’ve been.

Since then, with the advice of some good teaching mentors, I’ve come to understand that most of that feedback was ineffective because it wasn’t responsive to my student’s needs or my own priorities. I was overwhelmed with the labor, my students were overwhelmed with the commentary, and I burned through a lot of green flair pens. I spent hours and hours with drafts and even quizzes, returning work that was covered in comments from top to bottom. In my first semester of teaching, one of my biggest challenges was the temptation to respond to everything in all of the work my students produced. I’ve pulled together some “hacks” for saving time and sanity as you work through stacks of student work. While developing effective strategies for providing students with good feedback – comments that they can leverage to improve their future learning – takes time and experience, there are ways to make the process of responding to student work less onerous. Responding to student work requires an inordinate amount of time, particularly when you are teaching a new assignment or course, and it can be especially frustrating when students don’t take advantage of feedback to improve their own learning. You can find him on Twitter at or on his website at .įor many graduate instructors, grading and providing feedback are major headaches. candidate in English Literature at the University of Iowa where he has taught in the Department of Rhetoric and currently advises graduate students on career and fellowship development.

Apphack ed