Things That Work: Using Student Papers in Class

Parts Are Better Than Wholes
While I liked the pedagogical idea of using student papers in class, truth be told, I was not able to implement the theory successfully in my classroom for several years when I first started teaching. I always used student papers (usually on Final Draft day), but was never entirely happy with the results. First, there was the problem of feelings. If I were teaching only one section, there was always the touchy subject of using a paper from someone in the class with the predictable sore feelings on the part of that student - no matter that I had asked the student's "permission," that I removed the student's name, that I underscored that this was a "typical" paper, that I tried to make sure that the classes' comments were "productive" and not savage, that I was vigilant about whose paper we considered, etc, etc. Let's be honest: it's dreadful to have your paper microscopically scrutinized by 21 peers, particularly when you are 18 and haven't been socialized into the humiliation of grad school.

But the larger problem I discovered was that I wasn't able to keep students interested beyond the first page-and-a-half or two pages; and certainly by the third student-paper of the semester, they were totally checked out. After much frustration and gnashing of teeth, it finally dawned on me that this was because I was trying to do too much by using an entire paper. After all, any given paper has dozens of "problems." While grading a paper, however, we all make "strategic" decisions about the 2 or 3 largest problems we want to focus the student's attention on for revision. But by using the entire paper in class, I found that rather than focusing attention on these handful of things, I was opening up a can of worms that I could not push back in easily. When students in the class picked up on perfectly legitimate but "minor" problems, I always found myself in a difficult position: do I tell them that the problem wasn't "relevant" just yet or do I agree to the fault being pointed out, but try to redirect students' attention? I usually opted for the latter. One could argue that this is indeed the purpose of using student papers - that over the course of the semester students learn the value of certain types of reading and writing over others, but I found that if I lost students early in the semester, I did not have the luxury of "the course of the semester." On evaluations, students frequently wrote that they did not see the "relevance" of reading someone else's paper and I did indeed note a certain smugness in the class amongst students whose work was weaker, but who did not recognize their own writing in this other paper.

After many hits and misses and talking to lots of other teachers, I finally came up with the following method which allows me to retain the pedagogical purpose of using student papers AND makes them a useful learning tool in actuality: I never use an entire student paper in class, but rather PARTS of several student papers. Here's how it works: As I am reading their papers (for the first paper, I do this as I am skimming over their Rough Drafts), I keep a mental list of a weakness that many students in the class are experiencing. This naturally differs as the semester progresses or in different levels of comp classes, but examples of "weaknesses" would be: not using the text in papers or not integrating the material they cite into their argument; having too many ideas in one paragraph; putting two authors together, but not actually using ("framing") them together; doing a simple compare-and-contrast rather than analysis, etc, etc. (As the list clearly demonstrates, the weaknesses are less "content related" and more "writing-task oriented" if we can make that distinction.) The important thing is that this be a difficulty that significant numbers of students are experiencing. After I have read all their papers, I quickly skim them for short examples of the problem I have decided I am going to focus on. I try to gather examples from about 4-5 different students' papers, and I make sure that each piece is an example of a slightly different version of the problem. For instance, one student may have no quotes in a paragraph at all, another may have simply thrown a quote in, another may have a quote but it's poorly selected for the point she's trying to make, another may have a quote that is well selected but her reading of it may be weak.

I photocopy each of these paragraphs only. On the day we are working on student papers, I introduce the "topic" or idea we will be focusing on, and we begin working on each paragraph. Because the reading is short, students don't get bored. After working on 2 or 3 of these paragraphs together as a class, I ask them to break down into small groups and fix the problem in the next example I have copied. This way, students get to "practice" what they have learned right away and they really get into it. Because I use several students' writing, no one student feels isolated and picked on and because I have chosen a weakness that many are experiencing, students see the exercise as "relevant" to them. Thus, the strategy allows me to focus the class much more and target certain areas for improvement rather than try to cover everything. Students "get it" much better and I have always seen a marked improvement in their subsequent papers on the issue we discussed.

--Priti Joshi