Why do I bother marking student writing when they barely even look at my comments?

Making Written Feed Forward Work.

Students need good feedback and feedforward in order to improve their writing. But are our written comments on students' writing actually a meaningful part of the teaching and learning process?  How can we ensure that students take our written comments on board to further their skills?

Too often I have spent a considerable amount of my precious time assessing student writing only to have them glance at their score/grade and then disregard the most valuable bit, my personalised 'feed-forward' comments. This frustrated me, for I felt that my written comments, if given due consideration by the learner should be almost as valuable as an individual teacher conference.

This year I really wanted to address this issue and ensure that all learners would acknowledge my feed forward and actually apply it to improve their writing skills.

So, here's what I've tried; I'll explain from the beginning of the process. Most writing has a success criteria (perhaps 3-4 main points / goals.)  The students think they develop this, the best-practice teaching textbook might call it 'co-construction', but let's face it, it's actually me who chooses the success criteria. I just allow the learners to believe that they have selected the key learning points. It makes them happy. I usually write the success criteria up on chart paper and refer to it throughout the process. Even after that I hang it on the classroom wall.

I make up a student / teacher assessment sheet based on the agreed success criteria. I insist that students assess their own writing before handing it in for teacher assessment. Sometimes this might be a peer assisted activity. Students MUST add a comment about their writing. Always. A typical assessment sheet might look like this:

Marking. This is the time consuming bit for me, but I figure that if I can be sure that my students will consider and learn from my written comments then the time spent marking is actually valuable, individualised, differentiated teaching time. I always try to include positive feedback and a 'next - steps' type feed forward comment. An interesting development that I have discovered is, that as the students became accustomed to this style of assessment they began writing their own really good feed - forward comment. It gives me a  'teacher - type - buzz' when I find myself writing, "I agree with your comment, you know what your next steps are to improve your poetic (or whatever) writing.  Continue to focus on......

The next step, I think, is the most important bit, when students receive some written comments from me I always use some class time to insist that they read and consider it. They use a highlighter and I ask them to highlight the 'next-steps' comment. At this point their finished writing and assessment might look a bit like this:

Finally,  (not really, for the process will surely never end!) when we begin our NEXT piece of writing (similar genre) I will have the students start by reflecting on their assessment and recording a personal goal based on their highlighted text from my written comment. This goal will be re-visited throughout the next writing lessons.

In this way I think I have ensured that my teacher written feed-forward comments contribute as a valuable part of the learning process. 

I'd be interested in reading your ideas or comments about this.