The primary task for Explorations leaders in assessing written work is to help your students become more at ease with expressing themselves analytically. The best way to do this is by helping them identify the most incisive, most persuasive sections in their papers.
Correcting punctuation, spelling, or even style errors, while important, are secondary concerns. This does not mean that you should condone sloppy work; neither should you ignore a pattern of recurring difficulties in a given student’s papers.
With this in mind, here are three ways to deal with evaluating the papers you receive. You should plan on trying all of them during the semester.
- Read each paper yourselves and then hold individual conferences during which you discuss ways to further develop good ideas.
- Assign each student a partner and have the two of them exchange papers and help each other identify the ideas worth developing.
- Have students work in small groups of three or four. Have them critique each other’s papers and help the writer find the best points to develop.
These evaluating sessions should produce, for every student, at least one element to build on in future papers. Whether or not this ever happens is less important than the fact that you are getting students to think developmentally, to see learning as a growth process rather than a series of separate tasks bearing little relationship to one another.