[Paraphrasing Strategies: 10 Simple Techniques For Effective Paraphrasing In 5 Minutes Or Less Books
Hanne Rylaarsdam
For the better part of my first three years as a teacher, student papers acted as the chains that shackled me to my desk day after day. Like Tantalus, I could see the beach gleaming through a crack between the apartment buildings next to mine, but when I looked at the towers of student work in front of me, the sand and waves receded out of reach. Maybe tomorrow after I chop these essay stacks down I would tell myself once again.
Paraphrasing Strategies: 10 Simple Techniques For Effective Paraphrasing In 5 Minutes Or Less books
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Teachers can take countless approaches to Flash Feedback. The exact structures will depend on the discipline, students, and teacher, but the most efficient and effective Flash Feedback tends to share these four characteristics:
My students, like most people, tend to struggle with comma usage. My approach to helping them with commas used to be to circle and correct every comma error I found in every paper, but this never led to much progress and it took a tremendous amount of time.
Now I mainly use Targeted Response, which is where the teacher focuses an assignment and its feedback solely on 1 to 2 targeted learning goals. When it comes to commas, my students write a very short one-page paper about anything they want in any genre. It is called the Comma Paper, and its only criteria (and the only thing I give feedback to) is that they must include at least four correctly used examples of each type of comma we studied in class.
By keeping the scope of the paper and feedback focused and using the technology tools available, I can give specific, individual, and meaningful feedback in less than a minute per student, and the best part is that the deep focus on commas leads to more student growth in one short paper than a year of circling and correcting commas ever did!
Conferencing is one of the most celebrated pedagogical tools, and there is good reason for that. It is a rare one-on-one opportunity to offer individualized instruction and feedback, fix misconceptions, build relationships, and give students the opportunity to be heard by a caring adult. Like written feedback though, the logistics of conferences can be daunting in most classes. My classes meet for 210 minutes each week and average 32 students. This means doing a five minute conference with each student takes over 75 percent of the class time that week.
While larger conferences are sometimes worth this time investment for me, I can only do so many if I want to cover everything else I need to do. Enter the Micro-Conference, which is a conference that is done in a fraction of the time (generally 1 to 2 minutes) by being focused and carefully structured.
Like the Targeted Response, everything about these conferences is designed to maximize time efficiency. The students have already laid the groundwork and highlighted the paraphrased sections, allowing us to jump right in at a high level. Further, by focusing just on paraphrasing, a minute is not too short to go deep, answer questions, and figure out meaningful action steps forward for the student.
Wise Interventions is a practice that came out of Stanford and the University of Virginia, among others, and the idea behind it is that while shifting negative student mindsets, beliefs, and behaviors is often painstakingly slow, in the right circumstances it can also happen incredibly quickly. The key to these moments of rapid positive change is that if teachers can find the exact moments that fuel and perpetuate negative student beliefs/mindsets/behaviors and disrupt them, sometimes it can open students up to better alternatives in surprisingly little time.
By being focused and carefully structured, Flash Feedback allows us to make feedback a part of class that is as regular as the bells in the halls. It also allows us to teach many more personalized lessons each semester; gives us regular points of contact with students, which have been shown to improve performance and relationships; and best of all, can be done quickly, allowing teachers to break those shackles to student papers and take a day at the beach every once in a while.
The first part is that communicating to students the importance of commas is very important. They need to know that while commas might seem small, their importance is quite large and they will be judged on their comma usage by the world. The comma paper I describe in the post is actually central to that, as it comes at the end of quite a bit of instruction and practice and it gives me a platform to discuss how critical commas are.
The second part of my answer is that I now seek to approach each paper from the role of an interested reader, as opposed to a detached authority. The difference between those two is that a detached authority marks every error on every paper. His/her/their role is to be the arbiter of right and wrong and mark any errors. The problem with this is that the sheer number of issues on most student papers means that this approach takes a long time and it is hard to go deep on any given topic. Doing that is what led to my near-burnout I describe at the beginning of the piece. Further, because of the nature of learning, even the most committed students struggle to internalize more than a couple lessons in a lasting way, and the students who need it the most often stop engaging when they see twenty or thirty little corrections and comments, as a low grade is preferable to wading through that much ink, whether it is red or not.
If the comma issues are minor and something like organization is the main problem, then I might wait on the commas and come to them on the next paper once the organization is better. I might even leave a note on the paper telling the student as much.
The general idea with this approach is to do what we do in our classes each day: Think about our students and figure out what they need today, what they need next week, and what they need a month from now, and then focus our attention on only a handful of learning objectives right now and go deep to ensure the students truly get them.
When I read the title, I thought this is a must read. I think feedback is so important for students, however this can be time consuming and teachers struggle with how they will find the time. I love how you broke is down to 3 top ideas to enhance quick feedback. Your idea targeted responses seems that it would really cut down on time. I love the idea with micro-conferences, as this seems to allow for all of the students to have a chance to really understand what is to be learned during the instruction. The wise intervention is helpful as I can see how beneficial it would be to start with a positive note of why these things in a paper were pointed out. It can encourage students to want to make these changes without feeling defeated.
It took me a bit longer to get it up, but here is my post talking about how I plan to approach the workshop from a distance this year. The short answer to your question after thinking on it is that I plan to use micro-conferencing even more this year, ideally 1-2x per week using various breakout functions on Zoom. This will take some time to do, but for reasons outlined in the post, I think these quick connections will be essential to keeping students engaged. To make that time, my class will also become much more flipped, with me doing a lot of screencast and hyperdoc lessons. Here is a post talking about it: -workshop-work-from-a-distance/
I am happy to report that my weekends and the vast majority of my evenings are my own, while my teaching is (I think) as good, if not better, than ever! My goal is to do no work on the weekends and be done by 4:30 each day, and I would say I am 90% able to accomplish this. At times (for example my last week where my kids were sick and I took a few days off) I fall a bit short, but even then, the amount of hours spent beyond the contractual hours can be counted on one hand with fingers to spare. That is part of how I can also find time to write, even as I carry a full load.
The key is to always think about the type of writing the students are doing and what response it requires. Here is a post that outlines this: -im-trying-to-do-more-with-less-part-2-the-new-pyramid-of-writing-priorities/ I also strive to read and/or respond to polish practice writing and targeted writing during class when they are reading and writing, with prep periods reserved for spill over work and lesson planning. This also allows students to often get feedback back the same day.
Ania, this certainly sounds like quite a difficult load to manage! I hope that other readers of this post who may have experienced similar situations might be able to offer some helpful insight or tips.
1. Students will turn in an assignment at the start of class.
2. They will work on something (drafting/stations/peer response/some other work) while I offer feedback.
3. Then they get the feedback back at the end of class and have ten minutes to apply it or do independent reading if everything was in good shape.
Another key is simply being really thoughtful about what you read, what you write, and how you frame lessons. Every minute of feedback at that scale is closing in on ten hours, so taking a few more minutes to be really thoughtful about your plan is critical.
Also, to second Margaret again, student self-assessment is something I have become a huge fan of since recording the podcast. Here is a post I wrote on it: -this-is-the-year-to-get-serious-about-student-self-assessment/
For some assignments, it makes sense to rely more on secondary sources than primary sources. If you are not analyzing a text or conducting your own field research, you will need to use secondary sources extensively.
Jorge, who is preparing his essay on low-carbohydrate diets, knew he did not have the time, resources, or experience needed to conduct original experimental research for his paper. Because he was relying on secondary sources to support his ideas, he made a point of citing sources that were not far removed from primary research.
In other cases, a writer may commit accidental plagiarism due to carelessness, haste, or misunderstanding. For instance, a writer may be unable to provide a complete, accurate citation because of neglecting to record bibliographical information. A writer may cut and paste a passage from a website into her paper and later forget where the material came from. A writer who procrastinates may rush through a draft, which easily leads to sloppy paraphrasing and inaccurate quotations. Any of these actions can create the appearance of plagiarism and lead to negative consequences.
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