Krista Sarraf: hi everybody today's workshop focuses on revision plans helping students to manage feedback i'm Dr. Krista Speicher Sarraf, and i'm the SpeakWrite specialist for the Eberly college of arts and sciences at West Virginia university.
Krista Sarraf: So in this workshop i'm going to share with you a useful tool for any class and any discipline: a revision plan.
Krista Sarraf: Revision plans get to the heart of what it means to teach writing; they model professional writing practices for students and promote students metacognition and transfer of learning.
Krista Sarraf: In this workshop, I will briefly present on revision plans which I first discovered as an academic writer myself and now i've used them to teach many students. It's an activity that just helps them to work through feedback.
Krista Sarraf: So, then, I do have a couple of activities that you can that you can try with your students. We're not going to do the breakout rooms, since this is not a live recording. If you're interested in having this workshop delivered to your department, please get in touch with us at SpeakWrite.
Krista Sarraf: Okay, so we can all probably relate to this scenario. It's Saturday night and you've just wrapped up a several hour greeting session, complete with beautiful written comments on student drafts. Time to relax your work here is done right.
Krista Sarraf: Well, not so fast. Composing written comments on student drafts is an excellent practice, and we do it with the hopes that students read and use our feedback to revise.
Krista Sarraf: You likely already have thought about how to encourage students to read and apply your feedback and so you might pause the video and just think of some different ideas.
Krista Sarraf: Some might include asking students to write a reflection, where they reflect on the feedback that you gave them and how they'll use it.
Krista Sarraf: You might ask students to send you an email summarizing the feedback and how they're going to use it.
Krista Sarraf: You might also, if you're going to leave some comments on student papers, you might also acknowledge that it's best to then grade the revised version and compare it to the draft so that you can see if students used your comments. You can also withhold A grade until a paper is revised.
Krista Sarraf: So those are all options and what i'm going to share is just another option of a revision plan.
Krista Sarraf: And so it's applicable for any course in any discipline and I also appreciate that it just mimics what professional academic writers do.
Krista Sarraf: And so now i'd like you to imagine another scenario.
Krista Sarraf: Again it's Saturday night and you've just received revise and resubmit decision on a manuscript. Against your better judgment you open the PDF attached to the editors email and find
Krista Sarraf: A 10 page letter from reviewer 2, and it's always reviewer two who gives the tough feedback. So what do you do?
Krista Sarraf: So it's likely that you come up with some sort of a plan to revise. As I became more practiced in academic publishing I recognized my own need to have a strategy to manage reviewer feedback and so that's how I started to use these revision plans.
Krista Sarraf: But I also use revision plans as an inclusive pedagogy that teaches disciplinary writing and ensures students don't flounder with feedback.
Krista Sarraf: what's really important about revision plans for us as faculty trying to teach students how to write in our disciplines is that revision plans help us to marry professional, academic, and student writing practices.
Krista Sarraf: We can model for our students, how we as professional academic writers revise, which also helps students to reflect on their own academic writing, develop disciplinary writing skills, and engage in metacognition, which can lead to transfer of learning.
Krista Sarraf: So what is the revision plan? Here it is. Notice that it's just a table, and it has four columns and the student will copy paste your feedback or feedback from peer review in the left hand column.
Krista Sarraf: The middle columns are really key for students to both reflect and move towards action and the far right column draws on Paul Sylvia's book "How to Write a Lot" based in the psychology of motivation, so I encourage students to set due dates and then reward themselves for completed revisions.
Krista Sarraf: So i've had success teaching revision plans in a range of courses with students at various levels from freshman to seniors and i've also
Krista Sarraf: found this to be a useful tool for reflecting on my own teaching practices, because whenever I have students create a revision plan, I can then also see if my feedback was clear, and sometimes I've realized i'm not giving clear enough feedback. They don't know what to make of it.
Krista Sarraf: So i've I want to share on the screen some different concerns and scholarship on the efficacy of revision plans.
Krista Sarraf: So revision plans address this issue of you know, students don't read my feedback; they keep making the same mistakes. These plans improve student uptake of feedback.
Krista Sarraf: We also might sometimes be concerned the student papers don't show keep thinking and revision improves and deepen student writing and thinking.
Krista Sarraf: You also might wonder again if your comments are helpful and this improves your feedback practices and saves you time. And again when you want students to learn to write in your field it teaches disciplinary writing practices.
Krista Sarraf: So, to introduce revision plans in your classes, I suggest that you spend just 10 minutes in class introducing the activity.
Krista Sarraf: And this is the actual slide that I share with my students. You can start by telling the story of repeat receiving or revise and resubmit for a manuscript of your own and how you went about revising.
Krista Sarraf: Students will probably appreciate that you are candid with them about the academic publishing process.
Krista Sarraf: I also tell students that publishing can take 12 to 16 months and that much of that time is spent revising.
Krista Sarraf: Finally, it helps if you can tell a story of revision of a widely read texts like Harry Potter or texts that you've assigned in your class. In other words talking to students about how
Krista Sarraf: revision is very normal and the very best things that they read went through lots of revision is really key.
Krista Sarraf: If you're teaching online, you might simply create a module that briefly describes the revision plan concept,
Krista Sarraf: includes an attachment to review or feedback and your own revision plan as a model, and then ask students to create their revision plans.
Krista Sarraf: Students can upload revision plans to the discussion boards, submit them as homework, or submit them directly in the same document that contains the revised paper.
Krista Sarraf: After students come up with their chart, I recommend that you ask them to move their action item directly into the draft. Specifically tell them to localize their their plan. So, for instance, if they need to revise paragraph two, have them copy paste their plan comment to paragraph two.
Krista Sarraf: There is some research that shows that students are more likely to make revisions when the comments are localized.
Krista Sarraf: You then have lots of options in terms of how to add accountability to the revision plan.
Krista Sarraf: For instance, you can ask students to submit one as a homework assignment or submit one with a revised paper.
Krista Sarraf: If you have time in class you could do the revision plan as an activity on the same day that you post your comments on student drafts. This is really helpful because it ensures that students look at your comments.
Krista Sarraf: You could even create revision plans with students, one on one during conferences or office hours, when you have meetings with students.
Krista Sarraf: I also use revision plans to reduce the number of clicks when I grade, because I collect and grade online so
Krista Sarraf: I have a link to a document on this screen that shows how I do this, but essentially I just have students copy paste the revision plan as the first page of their revised draft, so I can look at it all at once.
Krista Sarraf: You can also include the revision plan on your grading rubric so here's an example of how you might do that, you can see here that i've included points related to revision.
Krista Sarraf: In SpeakWrite, we also use the acronym PACT which stands for purpose, audience, conventions, and troubleshooting.
Krista Sarraf: So you could also integrate the revision plan in the troubleshooting part of the PACT rubric. now there's, not a single PACT rubric but here's an example of what what one might look like, and you can find more on the SpeakWrite website.
Krista Sarraf: Okay, so you might try making a revision plan on your own and the breakout rooms whenever we do this in a live workshop, I just have groups create revision plan so.
Krista Sarraf: You might look at a sample of a student paper feedback that you gave the student and then try to come up with a revision plan based on your feedback, so that you kind of see what it's like for students.
Krista Sarraf: And then you might think about was it easy to come up with the revision plan was there anything about the process that was frustrating.
Krista Sarraf: You might think about opportunities that you have to use revision plans with your students.
Krista Sarraf: And just other ways that you can encourage students to read and apply your comments. You might also think about some connections between different scholarship that I cited on the earlier slides and the activity of actually making the revision plan.
Krista Sarraf: Again revision plans are great in online classes, because they can be seamlessly integrated using Google documents. You can even respond to students Google documents directly and then use those revision plans for peer review.
Krista Sarraf: So thank you so much, and I hope this was useful to you. For more resources visit us at speakwrite.wvu.edu.