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Responding to Creative Writing:
Students-as-Teachers and the Executive Summary

Wendy Bishop
Florida State University

When I teach introductory poetry courses, we write into and out of forms in order to generate ideas and text. My students produce many poems, more than I can respond to personally. Yet my students crave such a response on every draft, despite my careful use of small and large peer response groups. And, even if I could respond to every draft, I often find that my over-full, over-educated response can appear too critical, and overwhelm the exploratory impulse in student work. This situation is true of any introductory creative writing workshop, organized to explore a single genre or genres broadly. Students in these courses are learning to become better writers, but they also need to become better readers of professional and student texts. I believe they do this by learning to respond to their own work, carefully, making use of peer and teacher responses to take that work through revisions.

The response activities I share in this essay developed out of my own need to explore the arena of "response to creative writing" in general. Unlike teachers and researchers in composition, creative writers have, in general, spent much more time on canon formation (creating anthologies) and discussions of technique and craft (creating guides that develop rules and prescriptions) than they have on the equally important issues of response and evaluation. That doesn't surprise me, since responding to beginning texts is difficult, and evaluation of student writing is rarely a pleasurable activity for the dedicated writing teacher.

To address these concerns, I've asked creative writers to take a teacher's role vis-a-vis their texts, in order to:

1. highlight some of what these students already know about their texts,
2. gain insights into the drafting choices they are making intentionally, and
3. put myself into an ally's position, agreeing or disagreeing with or expanding upon what their already internalized self-as-teacher can tell them.

In addition, I've developed an executive summary and revision plan assignment to encourage students to take responsibility for workshop responses. This activity encourages them to make their revisions more mindfully.

Neither of these techniques is an instant panacea, turning beginners into expert practitioners. Still, considering response this way, as a dialogue, allows "learners" some of the free and unjudged space they need to risk real learning and allows me more time to become the student's teacher in the best sense of the word--one who offers invitations into the field.

Students-As-Teachers

"What do you mean?"

"Like you will? We don't know how you'll grade."

I don't try to explain but encourage them: "I'm not talking about grading, but reading. Pretend you're a teacher . Write on the text, to the student--you."

Having collected these self-responses while the group members continue to offer each other revision advice, I am in a better response space than I was in former semesters. I don't have to guess from the text what my students know or don't know about contemporary poetry. If they use or abuse techniques, I don't have to imagine that practice-equals-person; instead I hear students-as-teachers offering me insights into what they do know, whether it appears in the text or not.

In the left-hand margin of Jennifer's poem (Figure 1), you'll read her self-response. To the right of the poem, you'll find my written reactions: I respond to her responses and place an endnote just below the text.

Jennifer looks at repetition and has ideas for pruning the text. I am able to encourage this--agreeing with her impulse to cut--and tell her what I like. Then I find space to make two major suggestions. In doing this, I do not feel I am overwhelming her poem; rather, I am responding in the spirit of her own "change based" remarks. We are in a dialogue. Jennifer, who was new to writing poems, already had an internalized "teacher's voice" that she could call on to give her ideas for improving her work. She needed a method for accessing this voice. By responding to herself as a teacher, she found out what she already knew.

Matthew (see Figure 2) was an English major with a much stronger grounding in writing and poetry. In his case, asking him to be "teacher" revealed his investment in the text he had created. In fact, he wrote enough on his text, including an end comment, that my responses were thoroughly taken up with his. When I asked him to take our dialogue one step farther, writing me a note in response to my response, I learned that it would have done me little good to push for further revision of the poem draft since he felt it was "done," and he backed up this feeling with reasons that he was able to articulate. The handwritten comments are Matthew's own. I've noted my responses at the end of the poem, including an indication of the line I responded to.

When Matthew comments on "dark sweet oblivion" as neat image (a response I don't agree with--since I find it cliched), I respond to his self-response with: "Doesn't seem the same as the rest of the poem, tonally, though." In saying this, I change my response from judgment (cliched) to analysis (how the language differs in sections of the poem).

When Matthew comments "not really answered, no change" to the last three lines of the poem, I push against his apparent acceptance of those lines, and incorporate that push in a short end-note, my total response to his detailed self-analysis:

Figure 1: Jennifer's Poem
Figure 2: Matthew's poem

"Matthew,
Good observation. Pivotal for the revision of this poem. Are you going to follow your own suggestions? --Wendy"

Matthew's response to my response, for me, highlights the benefits of this student-as-teacher dialogue:

Well, I have made some changes (I'll submit a copy sometime soon). I agree "dark sweet oblivion" doesn't quite gel with the rest of the language of the piece, but I like it so much, I'm keeping it as is. I've made minor corrections (the asides make more sense as interior-monologue commentary). However my intention was for the questions to remain unanswered - the poem is at best a "temporary epiphany." It also is not the strongest piece I've ever written and it is not important enough to me to totally deconstruct it (which it would likely take to make it substantially better). So, after these current corrections are reviewed, I'm finished with it. (emphasis mine)

Reading our dialogue, I (re)learn lessons that are all too easy to ignore from my "teacher-position" in classroom. Matthew writes because he likes language, so telling him "dark sweet oblivion" is clich,d will be an ineffective act, uselessly challenging his taste and investment. Matthew also makes clear distinctions between his own stronger and weaker work and decides how much revision time is worth the effort. Matthew's remarks let me see that he had been involved to the point of making "corrections" but he knows "revision" will take more time than he's willing to give this poem. To push him would have been a poor use of my teaching time. In fact, he's shown me elements of his learning process that I would hope for from a serious course of study of poetry writing: He can estimate the worth of his own text and the usefulness of exploring further work on it. Together, we should proceed to other poems.

When we respond to poems in the context of a full class workshop, I move to the use of an executive summary since I believe students like Matthew do need to take the time to learn from revision. They can choose which poem to set aside sometimes, but the course is also designed to ask them to push onward with revision at other times.

Writer's Executive Summary and Revision Plan

To produce an executive summary and revision plan, I ask students to take peer responses home, to tabulate those responses, and to write an exploratory paragraph deciding how they plan to use (or ignore) workshop responses in their next draft. I've used this method in many variations--from compiling the responses myself, in order to learn what written comments really appeared on peer texts, to asking students to write executive summaries after small group work and revision plans before they left class, in order not to forget what groups suggested. Currently, I orchestrate a full-group response session in an introductory class in this way:

1. All writers submit a poem with their own most important questions about the poem typed at the bottom. Their questions guide the workshop response.
2. Class members purchase a copy of class poems at a local copy shop, read and annotate the poems, and return to class prepared to discuss the text.
3. The poet reads the poem and we listen.
4. The poet chooses the first respondent. After this, we use a rotating chair model--the last speaker recognizes the next speaker.
5. I do not comment on the poem, instead I make a running transcript of the workshop comments, always finding that just as I'm bursting to comment, another class member will bring up the point I want to make.
6. After our allotted time is over, we return annotated copies of the poem to the poet. I give the poet my workshop transcript.
7. The author takes these comments home, writes up a summary with tabulations (how many respondents said what, in general) and a revision plan.
8. I collect a copy of the executive summary and revision plan. If I wish, I can check off those class comments I most agree with and encourage the poet to follow particular parts of his or her revision plan.
9. The poet revises.
10. I see the revision in the final portfolio unless we have a small group response session devoted to looking at the changes the poet made.

Here is a sample of a revision plan. In this case, the class did not push the writer as far as it might have, but he chooses, through his self-analysis, to push himself. After tabulating responses, Jeff Matthews discusses revisions for his poem "The Wife of Bath."

The vast majority of class comments on "Wife of Bath" were very positive. Many classmates found my images vivid and commented that they could actually "see" the person I was portraying.

However, the class comments also directed my attention to several "trouble spots" in the poem. Several students had trouble with my use of "Mustang" in lines 5 and 8--they could not tell if I was referring to the horse or to the car. In my revised version, I make it plain that I am comparing the "wife" to the car. A few classmates also saw the word "beriddled" in line 6 as being awkward. I hope "awash" in the revised version flows more effectively. Finally punctuation was called for to clear up confusion between the lines. I followed the advice.

On the other hand, several students had problems with lines, that, in my mind, were not trouble spots. The narrator's point of view seemed unclear to some people. This problem surfaced in lines 1 and 10. In line 1 there was confusion as to whom the "my" was referring. The "my" was referring to the narrator who was creating a portrait of the "wife." Just because the narrator does not refer to himself again in the poem, it does not mean that "my" was a typo or that his point of view is not present in the rest of the poem. Finally, many classmates felt that the last line did not fit with the rest of the poem and that it should be dropped. While I admit that it does not seem akin in nature to the other lines, I believe that it is a great line, nonetheless, and I refuse to delete it.

Jeff, like many students writing revision plans, has actually jumped in and written the revision and is narrating both his plans and what he did and what he felt the results were. I don't mind when this happens, since planning and doing are so interwoven for most writers. And, as in Matthew Gandy's student- as-teacher response, shared above, Jeff has clearly indicated where he feels flexible and inflexible in the revision process. I find these discussions invaluable when a poet like Jeff comes for a conference about his poem. Instead of pushing on him to drop or change the last line, as I might have formerly, I can ask him to explore his investment in it--together we can talk about important issues like what--to this writer--constitutes a "great line" and why he feels his poems need to end with such a line even when the line "does not seem akin in nature to the other lines."

For me, broadening response options through student-as- teacher and executive summary activities, performs two invaluable acts. Each activity encourages writer autonomy, authority, and ownership of a text and each puts the writer and me into a profitable dialogue about writing. At the same time, I find responding to creative texts more pleasurable since I'm in the position of agreeing or disagreeing or further exploring writers' stated positions rather than having to create those positions for them. No longer do I have to "invent" each writer, a heavy duty, indeed, for the writing teacher. Instead, I help the writers revise their developing personas and processes. I'm guessing there are many more ways to respond creatively to creative writing, and I'm eager to spend time finding them, for, as my students become better readers, I become a better--and happier-- reader too.