Course evaluations provide teachers with feedback that generally focuses on what the teacher does. But with student self-assessment it becomes possible to focus more directly on the student. Knowing what our students have and have not learned often demands that we transform our own teaching and provides the grounding for such transformation. In this paper, I will discuss the ways student self-assessment has informed my own teaching in the University of Washington’s Interdisciplinary Writing Program—a program that links writing courses with courses in the disciplines (i.e., writing links). I will begin with brief discussions of my rationale for self-assessment and the method I have used, a writing portfolio organized by the student’s reflective essay. Then I will discuss some of the lessons my students’ portfolios have taught me. In these sections, I make liberal use of excerpts from the students’ own writing, because it is from their words I have learned how to become a more reflective teacher. Finally, I will draw some conclusions about what I have learned from student self-assessment.

In my writing links, I ask all students to turn in portfolios of six to twelve pieces they have written over the quarter. They organize their portfolios with an introductory essay that provides their rationale for selecting those pieces to represent their thinking, learning and writing in the course. I turned to this method of assessment in my writing courses when I discovered the power of students’ own insights into their writing. Students began to become reflective about their writing when I asked them to think about the disciplinary assumptions that shape the thinking, hence the writing about an issue in the linked course. In addition, their responses to self-assessment questions for individual essays often generated insights into issues—what we typically call "problems"—in their writing that provided us a meaningful basis for productive conversations about writing. I recognized the potential for learning in the reflections students articulated in these individual exercises about specific pieces, and I began to consider what we might gain from reflecting on the writing they had done in the course as a whole.

In asking students to create portfolios organized by reflective essays, I hoped to gain the opportunity to see inside their thinking, to learn how they think about writing and learning, how they see themselves as participants in the writing/thinking process in general and in a disciplinary discourse in particular, and how these perceptions develop or change over the course of the quarter. These meta-issues ground and inform what students write, but they often remain invisible because they are not consciously addressed by students in their writing. By asking students to make their understandings conscious and explicit, I hoped to gain insights into the way students learn in interaction with my pedagogy, and to make those insights available to both them and me as learners.

On the first day of the course, as I talk through the syllabus, I introduce students to the portfolio project which will synthesize the course. I explain that we will talk about the portfolio shortly after mid-quarter. I tell them that focusing on the writing tasks at hand will more than adequately prepare them for this project, and that it is crucial that they save everything they write in a folder. Although it is important for students to know about the portfolio project from the outset, I defer discussing the portfolio any further at this time because I do not want the portfolio to become an end product towards which students are self-consciously aiming their efforts for a grade. Instead, I want the portfolio to grow out of their attention to writing and its relation to learning.

In the second half of the quarter I provide students with a handout that explains the portfolio and tells them why I’m asking them to do it (see addendum "Planning Your Portfolio"). Because the writing courses I teach are each linked with a specific course in a particular discipline, I tailor the handout to the characteristics of the particular subject matter and disciplinary focus of that course. Even though we think all quarter about the issues I lay out as criteria for the reflective essay, I find it important to make these criteria as explicit as I can because a full essay devoted to such issues is still a new beast to most students.

To prepare students for this project I ask them frequently throughout the quarter to answer questions about their writing, to reflect on each other’s writing, and to characterize their own writing and writing processes in terms of what they see others doing. In addition, I design writing assignments that ask students to think not only about the issue, but about the disciplinary assumptions that shape the thinking, hence writing about the issue. Over the course of the quarter, students who may never have focused on such questions become adept at articulating their perceptions.

What students say about the relation between thinking and writing in their reflective essays has changed the way I teach. In the following sections I will describe how I have come to focus on creating more opportunities for students to learn from themselves and each other, to benefit from the powerfully generative potential of short writing exercises, and to actively integrate and employ their understandings to enhance their performance.

One thing I have learned again and again from reading students’ reflective essays is that they can learn from themselves. For example, one student in a geography writing link wrote the following:

Although she had long been familiar with this issue, having grown up quite near a reservation and with a parent who was a teacher on the reservation, Zoe first used writing about the social and economic concepts she was learning in the linked geography course to think critically about the reservation in this writing link. As a result, she made her own assumptions available to examination. In looking back at her own writing, Zoe learned that she had changed her understanding of Native Americans living on reservations. She also learned how her understanding had changed and that this change had come about through writing.

Another student, who was in a writing course linked with a course on the literary tradition of India, also talks about learning from herself, in this case focusing on a more specific issue:

When she recognizes how important it is to define terms clearly in setting up a focused argument, Erica reveals that she is attending to a reader’s needs and responses. When she then revises the paragraph to define the terms clearly, she enhances her writing skills.

As a result of this kind of feedback, I build more and more opportunities for self-reflection into my courses to promote students’ facility at the double role of critically reading and writing. I do this with short writing exercises, by asking students to respond to their own writing more frequently, by creating assignments that provide for individual choice and build on one another over time, and by increasingly approaching my conferences with students over drafts with questions designed to assist students in discovering the shape of their thinking. Whereas I used to be the source of most of the feedback on student writing, now I increasingly ask students to reflect on their work. This amounts to individualizing my approach to students.

Students’ portfolios and reflective essays have also taught me that they learn from each other and want to contribute to each other. They want to be useful. And what I find is that learning from one another and learning from themselves are mutually reinforcing. One student made the following comments about reading his classmates’ drafts:

Derek demonstrates that he values his effort to step into another writer’s perspective as a way of learning about his own writing. He shows how this shift gives him valuable practice as a reader, practice that he can employ in reading his own work—in effect, becoming a "fresh" reader of his own writing.

Another student focuses on the reciprocal nature of this process:

As she explains the value of being both writer and critic, Christina articulates the care that I find most students take as they respond to one another. They want to be critical in positive ways because that is what they want back. Thus, provided focused opportunities to take the role of both writer and reader, students mutually create the positive grounds for critical discussion.

The next example is representative of students’ desire to contribute to one another in meaningful ways and to take an active, responsible role in promoting each other’s learning:

Two things are important to me here. First, Priya wants to substantively affect her fellow students’ work. She wants to heighten the stakes in their dialogue to their mutual benefit. And secondly, Priya reveals that because together they are faced with responding to an essay assignment, students share an understanding of their writing situation that teachers do not. For me, this means creating meaningful opportunities for students to work with each other, and creating an environment in which they are motivated to produce for one another. Whereas I have always had students look at one another’s first drafts, I now ask them to work with each other at the problem-definition stage, and I ask them to read and respond critically to one another’s revised essays. Students find this last step particularly illuminating because they follow one other person’s work from inception to completion, playing an active—respectfully and critically responsive—role throughout. No amount of general talk and examples from outside the class on my part could approach the gains they report in their reflective essays.

Reflective essays also teach me that short, focused but flexible exercises can have large and lasting consequences. It is not uncommon for students to identify a single, short in-class writing exercise as the center of their work for the entire quarter. For example, in a writing course linked with an environmental geography course, I asked students to summarize and respond critically to newspaper articles on environmental issues. Identifying the role such an assignment played in his discovery of an issue and then a topic for a larger paper, a student says:

While he recognizes that he might have picked another article which could have oriented his research differently, Lawler also expresses the relative freedom he had in finding a topic of interest for a major part of the course. Most importantly, Lawler’s comments on this exercise suggest that he did not come to the larger essay assignment cold. He was in charge of the project from the beginning because he had already chosen to read about and write about something that interested him, and had begun writing about it in an ungraded context where writing functioned as a tool for exploration.

Similarly, in a writing course linked with a course on the literature of India, I asked students to select a short quote from a 550 page epic that interested them and to prepare to write about why it was an important passage for understanding the entire epic. One student had the following to say about this short, in-class exercise:

Shasta identifies the crucial but often unrecognized role of "preliminary" thinking in the development of an articulated argument. Capturing that exploratory thinking on paper made it available to her as a resource for developing the longer essay.

Both of these students taught me that small, very focused writing exercises, free of the pressure of the BIG PAPER, can provide an exploratory environment that helps students find their topic, and that given the opportunity, students will find ways of making sense of what they are studying that work for them. In some cases those short exercises are so unthreatening that a big idea literally sneaks up on a student. When this happens, students get excited because they’ve discovered something they want to pursue in a way that is not forced. Instead, they’ve mapped their own thinking.

In response to these student insights I increasingly see short writing assignments not as peripheral or subordinate to larger ones, but as potentially crucial focal points for generating much larger ideas and preparing students for more extended writing. In fact, I increasingly view the larger project as a kind of spill-over. The big idea is really in the little exercise. This means that I spend more time thinking about the relation of short exercises to larger ones, and to course goals in general, and that I try to design short assignments that provide latitude for student exploration and experimentation with ideas. Again, this means individualizing my teaching to make way for the students, but at the same time thinking about how these little pieces relate to and develop each other.

Perhaps most important, students’ reflective essays reveal that there is a distinct difference between understanding and performance and that performance—the dimension we grade—often lags behind understanding—the dimension students retain as their education. One student in a writing course on geography wrote:

While Dan’s comments may sound contradictory, I would argue that what he has rather poignantly pinpointed is the fact that his understanding of an issue exceeds his ability to express it in writing, in effect to stage it as a performance. The struggle apparent in his written performance—the unclarity—conveys that he is trying to express his understanding.

Once I know that students recognize that their lack of clarity reveals their understanding, I can focus on their understanding in conferences to help them close the gap with a more polished performance. In other words, I can expect that students understand more about their subject and about writing than is apparent in the quality of their papers and use that difference to their benefit.

Another student’s comment illustrates how she can employ her understandings to develop her writing:

Serena’s is a powerful insight. For, having articulated that insight, she makes it more available to herself as a constructive tool. It may take time for Serena to write strong conclusions, but perhaps less time than it would if she had not explicitly addressed her awareness in writing. Serena has articulated the problem, and so the goal, and her efforts to achieve it, belong to her. She has thickened her own understanding and, therefore, enhanced her capacity to learn.

One final lesson my students’ portfolio assessments have taught me is the difference between hopeless confusion or sloppiness and earnest intellectual struggle. A student in the writing link to the course on Indian literature had this to say about her writing:

The essay Kim refers to was indeed garbled, if rich. But her meditation on it is complex and sophisticated, and her insights give instructive value to that essay, both for this student and for me. What I’ve learned is that when I ask them repeatedly to reflect on their writing, students can become very articulate about what is going on. Kim’s self-reflective critique easily exceeds the insights I—and most likely any other teacher—could offer her. After all, because students are in their own thinking, they have the potential to become consciously expert on the relationships between their thinking and their writing. And it is important for both student and teacher to recognize the power of this critical potential in the student.

Before I began getting this kind of insight from students into the reasons behind the confusions and problems in their writing, I used to assume that such difficulties were merely a result of lack of skill or even lack of rigor. What I now understand is that such problems often reflect valid and promising intellectual struggles that can be addressed and encouraged by bringing them into daylight. This means that when I respond to students’ writing, I increasingly focus on asking them to explain to me what they are thinking. I assume that what we are typically inclined to call surface troubles more usually reflect a white whale beneath. The issue for both the student and me becomes not just whether the writing is clear, but what the writer is thinking and how thinking and writing are related. Thinking in progress isn’t neat! In conversation we can often flesh out their understandings to the point where they see the difference between their understandings and their performances. They see how great their understandings are and become motivated to bring their performances closer to their understandings. They can also identify the new but as yet unresolved questions those understandings have generated, and that recognition helps them further clarify their thinking, hence their writing. In some cases in conferences, students talk—and I write what they say, literally word for word—until their performance actually does more closely resemble their understandings.

But even where a discrepancy between understanding and performance remains, and it almost always does for all writers, students’ reflective essays teach me what they have learned. Increasingly, I focus my teaching on what they can learn and how they learn, more than on what they can perform, because I know that understanding will last long after the curtain falls and the lights go out on performance. By creating frequent writing opportunities that build on one another and ask for reflection throughout the quarter I attempt to provide students a resource for looking back to learn. My goals for their learning come from their own insights: that they learn from themselves, that they learn from each other, that they discover and explore ideas through bits of writing that can be integrated and transformed into larger arguments, and that understandings made conscious can become more effectively articulated in what we know as the performance of writing. In their reflection, then, students teach me what and how to teach.

Toward the end of the quarter you will create a portfolio of your work to represent you as a writer participating in the discipline of geography. Everything you write this quarter is eligible for inclusion in your portfolio. This includes the three major essays, journal entries, peer reviews, other in-class or overnight writing assignments, and additional journal entries you generate from your own questions and reflections on writing and/or concepts and issues in development geography.

Because the portfolio is intended to be consciously and carefully selective, you should choose from 6 to 12 pieces of your writing. You can include more, but be sure you can explain why more pieces need to be included and why other pieces don’t represent you in the way these additional pieces do.

Then write a reflective essay which creates your portfolio by integrating the pieces in the collection into a whole. Explain what the collection as a whole means to you and how this portfolio reflects you as a writer. You are the subject of this essay. Give attention to yourself as a writer in general and to writing in geography in particular. Discuss how you think your writing and thinking skills are related and how they may have developed or changed over the course of the quarter. Use your own writing as evidence for the arguments you want to make; discuss the meaning and value of each piece of writing selected, and the relation of the pieces to one another.

Because this essay creates and explains your portfolio, it tells me how to read and evaluate your portfolio. So what you tell me the portfolio means and how seriously you take it will directly guide my evaluation and grading. (This is not the place for b.s., arguments you don’t believe, or flattery.) In reviewing your portfolio I will look for the following: