Interviewer: I'm here today with Keally McBride. I'm actually not going to say much about her because she's going to introduce herself, but Keally, could you tell us a little bit before we get started about yourself and what kind of courses you teach? Really for the purposes of this, I know a lot of people at USF already know you, but for those who don't it's more about your courses, what's your background and really less about your research. We're just trying to get the pedagogical angle right now.
Keally: All right, I'm a professor in the politics department and I am one of our two political theorists. What that means is I read really difficult-to-understand texts mostly by dead white guys. It's always been a pedagogical challenge to get students engaged with those and also to have them really think about how do these ideas matter, what are the big pictures? My goal as a teacher has always been how to make political theory as a discipline come alive and seem applicable and even like a deeply personal pursuit for students. I teach the introduction to political theory. I teach upper division courses on things like justice, revolutions, I've taught the politics of war and peace, sometimes I teach courses on European politics, so I have a pretty large variety of classes that I teach.
Interviewer: That's really impressive. Well, thank you very much, but the main thing I wanted to talk with you about is the general arc of this. It's about students getting practice and feedback. I had heard that you use a relatively unique or maybe completely unique way of providing feedback to your students when they're doing writing assignments. Could you tell us about your color coding approach and why you went in that direction and a little bit about what it is and why it seems to be effective?
Keally: I don't want to take credit for this because before I came to USF, I was on a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. There I was attached to the Center for Contemporary writing. The director of the Center for Contemporary writing had developed the system. She was an editor actually in the business, as they say in New York. One of the things she said was, "Academics can't write and therefore they can't teach people how to write."
She had done a lot of research on writing pedagogy and the studies show that the students tend to look at the grade on the paper and then they don't even necessarily read all of those comments at the bottom of the paper. It's difficult because generally when students hand in writing assignments, they're done. You grade it and then give it back. For them, there's no real purpose in reading the comments that you've put on their paper, because what are they going to do about it? They've already gotten their grade.
The challenge is to figure out a way to have students be able to-- With this whole idea of practice and feedback, that what I tell my students is if you can revise one essay like 17 times until it's perfect, then that gives you so much practice that the next time you write an essay, it's a lot better. With the guidance of the writing instructor in University of Pennsylvania, she had developed a system where-- There's two problems. Students don't read comments and if you give too many comments in particular, they're less likely to read the comments that you put on their paper.
They get overwhelmed, too much feedback. The problem is how do you give enough feedback to students so they know how to revise their essays? How do you give them essay assignments that they will revise more than once and how can you give them feedback that's comprehensive without being overwhelming? Her idea was these color coding systems. I have five different color markers. When I get a draft of a student essay, I color every single sentence in the essay one of these five colors. Pink means perfect, excellent, really great. Orange means solid, but not terribly elegant.
Green means there's a grammatical error and they have to figure out what the grammatical error is because if you correct their grammatical error, 17 times in a row, they will still never learn what their grammatical error is.
Yellow means either I don't understand the sentence or I don't understand how this sentence is advancing your argument. Blue means diamond in the rough, which is, I think this is what you really wanted or what your papers should be. It's interesting how frequently the last sentence in a student essay ends up being colored blue, because of course, like all of us, they write for a while and then they figure out, "This is what I wanted to say." Those really great ideas get coded blue. Then students can pick up the paper.
First of all, they have an idea of for instance, if one paragraph is all yellow, then they know, "Oh, this paragraph isn't necessarily adding to my argument." They have an idea of what they need to do to revise. It also perversely enough, like we all like stickers and colors, students get really excited when they get new drafts with their paper back and they're holding them up to each other and they're like, "Look, look at all the pink on the front page." They can visually see what parts of their paper are working and what parts are not, and the different colors give them feedback on how they need to go about editing and revising.
Interviewer: Well, that is very interesting. What I didn't realize is I knew you did color coding, but I had no idea or I'd completely forgotten if I heard it, that you did it for every sentence. There's a few questions that come up with that. One is how hard and how time consuming is this for you to do. Then whatever your response to that is, is it worth-- I'm assuming, and I may be wrong that it takes some extra time. The follow-up question is, is it worth that extra time?
Keally: In the beginning it does take a lot of extra time, but you get a lot of practice and it becomes faster. What I have found is that actually at this point for me, it's faster for me to grade papers with this system than it is to write all the comments at the end, which is what I used to do and all the comments along the way, like, "Can you clarify this idea?" This needs more development." It's actually quite fast to have the five markers sitting there on your desk next to you, and to color code it quickly.
The payoff, I think is pretty clear for me. Every year I hear from students who graduated four or five years ago saying, "Thank goodness that you did that because I have no problem writing my papers now. I know how to edit them. I know how to spot what my main idea is and develop it. If you hadn't done that, I'd really be struggling in grad school or my new job or working for this Congress person."
The other thing is I have students who take my introduction to political theory class where I use this method and then they take other classes with me and they invariably are disappointed when I give them their seminar papers back and I haven't color coded it. Like, "Wait, no, I wanted you to do that for me again." What I point out is they're not handing in multiple drafts, so there's not any point in doing that, but the students themselves tell me that it gives them a really clear idea of how to make their writing better. Every single semester, the difference between the first papers they hand and the last papers is so dramatic that the path is really clear.
Interviewer: This is bringing up even more questions. This is really exciting to hear about it. I think one of the questions I have that I would imagine some faculty might have when they hear about this is doesn't it become too simplistic. Let me give you a case study. The case study would be, I'm going to color code a sentence green because there was a grammar error in it, but it was also like a great idea in there. My tendency is to go with blue, but there was a grammar-- When you have those things where there's dual ways that you could legitimately color it, there's some-- Obviously you have to simplify, you're not using both colors, but what kind of conflicts does that cause in you?
Keally: I'm a bit of a grammar Nazi. I tell all of my students that green trumps everything else, however, in special occasions, if it really is just a phenomenally smart sentence and they've just forgotten their period or something like that, I will code it a different color and write in the margins "but you forgot your period." or something like that. The categories are ambiguous enough that it actually is relatively flexible. When I code something yellow, sometimes it's yellow because they've missed a few words in the sentence and the sentence itself isn't clear. Sometimes it's yellow because they haven't made it clear how, for instance, this point relates to their larger argument. I continually enforce it on them that they have to figure out why it's yellow and they do.
Interviewer: I forget the typical research terminology for this. I think the term for what you're doing in general, not the color coding in specific, is what's often called strategic feedback rather than I can't remember the term it's literal feedback or something like that. The idea behind strategic feedback is not to give them everything because you can be overwhelmed, but also to give them feedback in a way where they have to actively engage in what it means. That's really the key component and this seems like a really effective way to get there.
It's exciting to hear about. Some of these are going to seem like silly questions Keally. One of the things that might come up, because when you think about color coding is you have these five colors. Actually, what are the tools that you use? Do you use a particular brand? How do you approach that? If I wanted to do that tomorrow, what do I go out and buy?
Keally: You can go to the drug store. They have packs of six different color highlighters. I know Professor Ron Sundstrom picked up this method and he added that sixth color. For him, what he says is he uses purple, which is the standard six color that comes in this pack, to say incorrect interpretation of the text. Depending on your discipline in your field and the things that matter to you, you can always develop your own system. This system, because I've been using it for almost 10 years, is familiar to me and therefore easy to employ.
You can go to any store and buy a pack of markers and it should last you all semester. They don't dry out [laughs] and they cost about $5.99.
Interviewer: Another thing I wanted to ask you about is I know you're using this in the course where you have students, they have the opportunity to rewrite. Can you take us a little bit through how that course is set up in terms of the rewrites, how many papers, for each paper, how many rewrites, just so people have a sense of what's really the scope of what's going on in terms of the writing assignments?
Keally: Sure. What I do in this class, because I want them to be able to articulate arguments in really concise, clear fashion, is I give them three paragraph templates. They have different styles of essays that they write like a straw man essay where the second paragraph is a straw argument and then they overturn it. I give them three paragraph essays. They do four of them a semester.
Actually, all four of the essays they do peer review in class and the students write outlines of each other's arguments because everyone has the same rhetorical structure, so they can tell whether or not their straw man argument made sense or if it conformed to that template. Then they hand in a draft to me, which I color code, then I give it back to them and then I give them another week to revise it and then they hand it back to me. Automatically, they've already done three different drafts of the paper. I let students revise as many times as they want until the end of the semester.
They'll put together their best essays in a portfolio and submit it. I have them choose which essays that they thought were most-- have them curate their portfolio according to their strongest to their weakest essay. They have to use that sense of judgment too.
Interviewer: Nice. I can start to see how this works even more efficiently. It seems the way you're describing this, your focus is not on long papers, but it's on clarity of thought, essentially.
Keally: Yes.
Interviewer: It allows you by focusing on shorter papers that have displaced high degree of clarity, it really gives them great practice and feedback. This may not happen, but I'm almost wondering if by the end of the semester, when they're doing peer feedback, if some of them don't start mimicking you and color coding their peers papers.
Keally: [chuckles] They ask if they can. What I say is it takes many years of practice and a PhD to wield markers properly.
Interviewer: [laughs] [unintelligible 00:15:33].
Keally: With every paper, the peer review gets more and more substantial. The students understand the structure and are able to say, ÒI think that sentence really belongs in your first paragraph.Ó They're able to start to identify what makes a strong and clear argument quite effectively.
Interviewer: This is a little off tangent, but I want to ask you this, since we are talking about practice and feedback anyway. With these papers who or even maybe with their final portfolio when you're curating the papers, do you use any rubric in the class? If so, if not, why or why not?
Keally: Yes, I give them a rubric. I try and separate actually the color coding system from the final grade. Frequently, when students revise essays, I don't put a grade on them in between because I want them to just be thinking about the writing. My rubric explains what I'm looking for in a paper like originality of thought, concise use of language, taking intellectual risks. There are also things like, no grammatical errors. I make it clear how following the color coding will help them arrive at an A paper but I do use rubrics.
I use the color coding system probably more frequently within the classroom and then as a reminder, when I pass back the final version of a draft. I say, this is why you've got this grade.
Interviewer: You're telling me something on all these. This actually seems hugely important. Now, I'm going to forget the rubrics for just a moment and it makes a lot of sense what you're saying. I guess I just assumed when you turned back their papers, they got the color coding, but there was some points or something. It's very interesting that you don't do that because they have to focus all their energy in terms of the meaning of their writing and what the feedbackÕs like. I like that idea.
I would imagine, though, at the beginning of a semester, students getting back a paper that doesn't have explicit points makes them a little nervous. Why am I wrong about that and if I am right about it, what do you do to help them get over those initial fears? I realized as the semester unfolds and they get used to how you teach, they'll become comfortable with it. I'm thinking at that very beginning of the semester where they might be a little nervous or anxiety prone, they're given very clear feedback for their writing, but no explicit grade feedback.
Keally: I should be really clear. When they do peer review, they don't get a grade, they're just responding to each other. They hand in a rough draft and a color code it and don't put a grade on it and give it back. Then they have to revise it in the next week and I color code it. I put what I call a provisional grade on it, which is if you handed in this paper in your final portfolio, this is the grade I would give it.
Generally, what I emphasize though is that, their fate still is open and it's up to them how many times they want to revise this, what grade they want to go for. I will give them the support for them to improve their writing until they're satisfied with the product.
Interviewer: That's fantastic. I love the system you have in place.
Keally: Thanks.
Interviewer: I think that's all the questions I have right now. Obviously, what I'm doing is asking the best questions I can in the moment, but there might be other aspects of your whole practice and feedback cycle that I haven't touched upon or I haven't asked any questions about, but still are really important for students improving their own work. If there are any other things, can you tell us about it now?
Keally: CanÕt think of anything [laughs].
Interviewer: That was silence on that one. Keally, thank you very much. I know I've heard parenthetically about the color coding system a few different times and now it's really fun to learn about it, about how it works. I'm actually sitting in KeallyÕs office looking at some papers that are-- Some have yet to be color coded, but others are color coded. It makes a whole lot of sense to me how this works now and it's actually pretty beautiful the way it works. I may try to do this a bit next semester.
Keally: Cool.
Interviewer: Thank you so much for the generosity of your time.
Keally: Sure. My pleasure.
[00:20:33] [END OF AUDIO]


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