You are NOT an editor! How to Get Students to Edit & Revise Their Own Work
The curse of the red ink pen is real. If you’re like me as a teacher, I know that when I am grading my students’ essays— online or on paper— I feel the pull to edit every single mistake that I see on the page. I feel the need to edit every single comma error or sentence error as well as provide comments about the content of the writing.
I think this stems from our teacher desire to see our students succeed and produce a publishable piece of writing. But here is what I have learned during my teacher career:
If YOU are doing the editing and revision, the student will NOT learn.
Oftentimes, I will see students click through a Google document to accept all the changes that have been made. There are very few occasions when a student may ask why something has been marked. They mostly just accept whatever has been edited or revised and move on. They don’t tend to stop and reflect and, most importantly, learn what they did wrong and how to correct it in the future.
This is where we as teachers need to fight the urge to be our students’ editors.
We need to put the red ink pen down, or just simply STOP editing all the mistakes in a student’s essay. That does not mean that we can’t provide some valuable feedback. But too much feedback is overwhelming; too little is also equally as ineffective. We need to know how to give the right kind of feedback, the right amount of feedback, and the right tools to enable students to become their own editors.
Here are three strategies to enable your students to become their own editors and learn from their own mistakes.
Strategy #1: Use mentor sentences with a revision application
Mentor sentences are an excellent tool to model writing skills ranging from grammar to literary/ rhetorical devices and style. I’ve written more about getting started with mentor sentences in secondary ELA here if you are looking for more guidance on how to use this strategy in your classes.
But specifically using this strategy to encourage student writers to edit and revise their own work means that mentor sentence work cannot stop at simply crafting new sentences. It means also applying the skills from the mentor sentence to the revision process.
Connecting mentor sentence work to writing is key to helping students transfer skills from one context to the other.
Here’s how to do it:
First, students need to work with a mentor sentence by making observations and writing their own original sentences modeled after the mentor text.
Second, students need to go back to a piece of writing and apply the skills from the mentor sentence to their own writing. This works best if students keep their writing work in a writing portfolio (either online or in the classroom). That way, they can go back and select an essay (new or old) and apply the mentor sentence skills to it.
Third, students need to apply the skill(s) from the mentor sentence to the piece of writing. If the mentor sentence focuses on a grammar rule, then students can go back and EDIT a piece of writing for this grammar rule. If the mentor sentence focuses on a literary device, students can go back to an essay draft and add that device into a sentence of the essay for impact. The same goes for a stylistic device as well.
Fourth, students need to reflect back on what they changed or added to their writing after completing this revision task. This part is KEY because it will help students learn and apply new skills through articulating the purpose behind the revisions. When students are required to do this kind of articulation, it clarifies their understanding of the targeted writing skill(s).
Note that teaching writing skills in isolation from the writing process does not work. Mentor sentences need to be attached to writing revision.
If you are needing a bundle of mentor sentences that have revisions tasks build into them, check these out from Bespoke ELA:
Strategy #2: provide a writer’s toolbox of resources
Another strategy that works is to provide students with a library of resources that they can go to when they have a question about a specific writing skill. I like to call this a “Writer’s Toolbox,” which is a folder that I give to my students. As they complete step-by-step mini-lessons during writing workshop, they add skills notes and handouts to it.
Building this library of resources puts the responsibility back onto the student to seek out information as questions arise during the writing process. For example, after students have completed a writing mini-lesson on topic sentences and gone back to revise a piece of writing, I give them a topic sentence handout of rules along with student examples to put into their “Writer’s Toolboxes.” That way, they can refer back to the topic sentences handout if/when the need arises.
This toolbox helps immensely when I do put a comment on a student essay because I will write something like, “Please check the topic sentence handout to change this topic sentence.” This kind of feedback is more meaningful to a student because it puts the responsibility back onto the student to figure out A) what is wrong with the topic sentence and B) how to correct it. This also changes my role from editor to “writing guide.”
If you are interested in a ready-to-use bundle of handouts for your students’ writers’ toolboxes, then check out this bundle of 25 Essential Handouts for Writing Workshop in Secondary ELA.
Many of these handouts contain examples and writing samples for students and teachers to use as reference guides, and they have many uses. Consider "shining" handouts on the screen to use as bell-ringer mini-lesson activities, or break the class into peer conference groups and give them one of the lessons to apply to a piece of writing.
strategy #3: train students how to provide useful peer feedback
As English teachers, we ask our students to edit and revise their peers' essays. However, students do not always know how to give constructive feedback. It's important that students are able to give constructive feedback about targeted writing skills while also maintaining the dignity of the writer. In order to do this, students need to know how to give effective and constructive feedback on academic essays in a supportive and encouraging manner.
In order to do this, I like to have students write their feedback in the form of actionable items. These actionable items put the work back onto the student, and they also require the writer to do the thinking and not the peer revisor. Here are a few ways to word peer feedback as actionable items:
Recheck the blending of this quote.
Does this topic sentence summarize the whole paragraph?
Check if this comma needs to go here.
Can you be more specific in this sentence?
Using the actionable method requires the student to do the work on figuring out how to make the changes.
When the student does the thinking, learning follows.
But, what if students don’t know what kind of actionable comments to give? That’s where “Comment Cards” can come into play. "Comment Cards" are divided according to targeted writing skills and give students a menu of options for giving constructive criticism in the form of actionable items. You can either create this menu of options yourself as the teacher or have your students create the menu in small groups or as a whole class. In fact, the more students are involved in the process of generating feedback comments, the more they will understand how and when to use them.
I have created a bundle of “Comment Cards” that are ready to use for writing workshop. You can find Comment Cards for Academic Essay Writing to Help Students Give Quality Feedback by clicking here.
Students are also allowed to add their own comments to these cards in order to give themselves a bank of high-quality comment options. The Comment Cards are presented in two formats. The first format presents the comments clustered with their "sister" skills such as evidence and commentary. Following these pairings, each individual targeted writing skill is printed on a page of its own. You can decide how you want to give them to students as part of your writing workshop. Nonetheless, using comment cards can help turn student writers into their own editors.
Do you struggle with editing your students’ writing? If so, leave us a comment. We’d love to hear from you!
About the Author
Meredith is the founder and creator of TeachWriting.org and Bespoke ELA. She has taught high school English for 14+ years in Dallas, Chicago, and New York City and holds a M.A. in Literature from Northwestern University. She has always had a connection to the written word-- through songwriting, screenplay writing, and essay writing-- and she enjoys the process of teaching students how to express their ideas. Meredith enjoys life with her sweet daughter and Yorkie.