Student responsibility for learning

I discovered an uncomfortable theme in the readings I assigned my graduate English students for next week, Wendy Bishop’s “Helping Peer Writing Groups Succeed”; Nancy Sommers’ “Responding to Student Writing”; and Lynn Bloom’s “Why I (Used to) Hate to Give Grades”: the over-inflated importance of teachers.

I don’t mean that Bishop, Sommers or Bloom considers teachers a Supreme Being, which might be kind of nice. Instead, they deem the teacher She Who Is Ultimately Responsible for Everyone Learning What They Need to Know, making the teacher culpable for students’ failures.

Consider Sommers’ conclusion that “that the news from the classroom is not good. For the most part, teachers do not respond to student writing with the kind of thoughtful commentary” that makes students successful, engaged, thoughtful writers (358). Or Bloom’s doomsday prediction that “grades are big trouble because they undermine good teaching…[and] inhibit, even block, student discussion and response to the course material” (364). Even Bishop, who usually takes a sunny outlook on life, advises a torturous cycle of self-flagellation in which “a teacher who hopes to use peer writing groups in her classroom…plans for her class, trains group members, monitors and evaluates them, and, the next semester, begins the process again, refining and developing her talents as a group facilitator based on her own observations” (351).

Teachers need to be reflective about their response and evaluation practices, no question there. What bothers me about the attitude reflected in Bishop, Sommers and Bloom – an attitude propagated by student evaluations and high stakes testing – is that they place the onus for student learning entirely on teachers’ shoulders.

When I head towards my classroom on peer review days, should my mind buzz with “what ifs”: What if Jane doesn’t have a draft again? What if half the class doesn’t show up? What if two groups finish in ten minutes and two groups only talk about one member’s essay before they run out of time? When I sit down at my desk with a stack of student drafts, should I search myself to see if I’m appropriating this student’s text or reading that student’s work against some “ideal text” I want to read? Should I wonder, with each and every grade I assign, if this student has, to achieve her A, “relinquish[ed] ownership of [her] writing and with it commitment to [her] subject, engagement with its ideas and point of view, and a willingness to rewrite beyond the minimum” (364)?

Lately, my grad students have been very worried about student motivation, and I see their concerns as part and parcel of the same emphasis on teachers’ centrality to learning. How do we make writers want to revise? How do we interest students in writing assignments or assigned readings? How do we convince students of the value and purpose of writing? We’ve offered each other wonderful strategies, but I wonder if the real answer is simply that, if students are responsible for their own learning, they are also responsible for bringing to the classroom a desire to learn.

Sommers’ essentially accuses teachers of alienating students from writing and, it seems to me, from learning. “In the beginning of the process,” Sommers writes, with all the weighty intonation of a biblical cosmology, “there was the writer, her words, and her desire to communicate her ideas. But after the comments of the teacher are imposed on the first or second draft, the student’s attention dramatically shifts from ‘This is what I want to say’ to ‘This is what you the teacher are asking me to do’” (353). Isn’t this an overdramatization of the teacher’s role?

Personally, I’m a happier – and more effective – teacher the more Zen I become about the whole process. If I could write back to Sommers, I would say that rather than worrying myself sick over how “directive” or “non-directive” to be in commentary, I will enjoy reading students’ essays and then, after putting my pencil down, go for a long walk to consider what lessons I could present in the next unit to help them improve on their next piece. Rather than exhausting myself orchestrating successful peer reviews, I will tell students my idea of responsive as supportive, non-evaluative talk, then give them the responsibility of seeking the feedback they want – and do them the courtesy of assuming they ‘re capable of providing such feedback without my constant scrutiny or intervention. Rather than agonizing over grades, I will make my standards for good writing clear on the syllabus and in my rubrics and grade each writer accordingly.

My job is to know my subject, to present it passionately to students, to reflect on my practices, and to be responsive to the needs of each class and each student. It is the student’s responsibility to learn; it is the student’s responsibility to want to learn. In my classes, when students fail, I should ask myself if I failed them – and sometimes, on a particular assignment or activity, I have, and knowing that helps me do better next time. But many times, students fail for reasons that have nothing to do with me. The better able I am to accept that, the better able I am to do my job, because I’m not paralyzed by self-doubt, not riddled with self-blame. And, perhaps more importantly, the better placed I will be to show students that when they succeed, it is not because of me – it is because of them, because of their talents, efforts, and abilities.