June 13, 2025

Linking Northern and Central NJ, Bronx, Manhattan, Westchester and CT

The Teacher as Coach, Not Judge

Editor’s Note: This article—along with three student pieces that appeared in the last three Jewish Link columnswas recently featured in a student-focused issue of HaYidion, a journal published by Prizmah: The Center for Jewish Day Schools. We are reprinting it here with Prizmah’s permission so it can reach an even wider audience.

One of the universities to which a number of SAR students apply asks that students submit a graded essay, with teacher comments, as part of the application process. Students often ask me which essay they should use, and I become hyper-aware, in those moments, of how few comments are on the graded essays I return to students. In fact, grading final essays is one of the least labor-intensive parts of my job as a high school English teacher. That fact often surprises people, who have heard that paper grading is generally among a teacher’s most onerous tasks.

But, in the nearly 30 years that I have taught writing, I have increasingly lessened my focus on final drafts; by the time I see students’ final submissions, I have likely already read and commented on the essay in progress at least two or three times.

In all of my classes, I assign a due date for each essay and a draft deadline. I emphasize that the draft deadline, while optional, is the more important of the two. I encourage students to share any writing they have with me at any point that they feel stuck or unsure; as long as we haven’t yet hit the draft deadline, I’ll look at brainstorming, outlines, half-formed paragraphs, or complete drafts, offering students extensive feedback on both their content and their writing process.

At first, students are generally hesitant to share their drafts; it’s especially anxiety-provoking to send something to a teacher that the student knows is a disorganized, poorly-written mess. Therefore, early in the school year, around half of each class shares drafts with me, and even those drafts may be highly polished. But, as the school year continues, more and more students employ the draft option, and by the end of the year, more than 90% of students share their drafts with me for every assignment. Often those drafts are partial or in process, allowing students to grow more as they work towards increasingly sophisticated final versions.

On these drafts, I offer process suggestions—like color coding to organize ideas or free writing to explore a thought in more depth—as well as explanations of grammatical errors, questions to prompt further thinking, and written dialogue with students about their ideas. I point out when a great insight is too deeply buried in a paragraph and should be moved to the topic sentence and when students rely too heavily on plot summary rather than offering their readers more analysis. I also help students notice patterns in their own writing, whether that’s an overreliance on certain sentence structures or diction choices, a repeated grammatical error, or assumptions about readers’ knowledge that should be articulated more clearly.

A big part of my rationale for commenting so extensively on drafts is my desire to shift the teacher-student relationship from that of a judge “sentencing” students to a particular grade by providing pronouncements on finished student work to one of a coach guiding a team of players. I explain this model to both students and their parents at the beginning of the year and return to it periodically. Unlike a judge, a coach wants every student to succeed and sees the students’ success as essential to the whole team’s, or class’, success. Using this analogy allows me to share with students why messy drafts are the best ones to share: I can offer them the most help when they’re still practicing and scrimmaging, and they will learn the most about writing in both its content and process when they work through their ideas with a coach. Like a coach, I want everyone to win at this game, so being with them during practice—the writing itself—in addition to showing up for the games—the final draft—is most likely to ensure success.

As the year goes on, I offer less handholding, and my comments shift from fully describing certain writing techniques to referring to them in shorthand: “Don’t bury the lede!” or “Remember the appositive rule.” By February or March, students who needed certain issues explained to them in detail in September can recognize their own writing tics and adjust their work accordingly with just a few words of guidance. Many of them begin to identify issues when sharing the draft, writing things like, “Can you check to make sure my topic sentences are strong? I focused on avoiding ‘fluffy openings,’ but just want to make sure that’s coming through clearly.” That kind of self-reflection wouldn’t have been possible earlier in the year.

Many of the writers with whom I’ve worked return to school months or years later to tell me that they “hear my voice in their head” while writing. At first, I found that comment a bit creepy and worried that I may be insinuating myself too deeply into their processes. But, over time, I’ve come to relish that frequent remark, realizing that these writers have internalized the writing techniques we practiced. The fact that those critiques arise in my voice isn’t important; what matters is that these writers are no longer as dependent on an outside reader and can revise their work using the knowledge and practices they honed in a year or two of intensive drafting.

Just as a coach might repeatedly remind players to lift their back elbow in the batter’s box or concentrate on their breathing during a long-distance race until those practices become second nature, commenting at length on student drafts provides writers with a toolbox from which they can draw for the rest of their writerly lives. Comments on a final draft simply don’t have the same impact. Even though I regularly create a “feedback loop” after returning graded essays, asking students to respond to my comments in writing to ensure they’ve been read and understood, the kind of detailed practice that goes into multiple drafts has a long-lasting impact that final draft comments cannot have. In a drafting process, students are forced to enact the changes themselves rather than just reading about them and hoping for the best on the next assignment. In this way, students learn to do the things they’re being taught without having to figure out independently how to transfer comments from one essay to a future essay, a much more difficult skill.

This process has an additional benefit, especially in the age of AI: it significantly lessens plagiarism. When students know that we are on the same team, they feel supported in their writing efforts and more willing to try. When they know they can reach out to me for pragmatic advice if they are stuck at any stage of the process, they don’t feel the desperation that often prompts writers to look for shortcuts. When they have a draft—or even a partial draft—written days before the final draft is due, they never encounter the last-minute panic elicited by the blank page. And, of course, when I have seen their work in multiple iterations, watching it grow and change as they incorporate new skills and deeper thinking, I know each essay so well that plagiarized or AI-composed work in a final draft becomes immediately obvious.

Most importantly, students care more when teachers show that they care more. As Rebecca Moore Howard explains in her 2001 The Chronicle of Higher Education article “Forget About Policing Plagiarism. Just Teach”—“We beg our students to cheat if we assign a major paper and then have no further involvement with the project until the students turn in their work. Assigning and grading a paper leaves out a crucial middle: working and talking with students while they draft those papers.” Of course, there is a huge distinction between “having no further involvement with the project” and commenting extensively on many hundreds of pages of student drafts each year. But it’s very clear that the more invested I am in students’ work, the more invested they are in their work. And when students feel supported rather than alone in the throes of difficult writing, they expend vastly more effort and, consequently, learn much more. If my foundational goal is teaching, then investing deeply in students’ drafts and letting them know that I am deeply invested effects the best results.

However, not every teacher works in a school with sufficient support to engage in this practice. In the SAR English department, a full teaching load is four classes, and the average class size is around 20 students. When the classes’ due dates are staggered, I can fit this work into my schedule if I manage my time well and plan my schedule with the awareness that I’ll receive piles of drafts that need to be turned over within 24 hours or so. (Knowing that the final grading process will be far easier helps push me to focus during those tight turnaround times.) If teachers have a heavier load, this process may not be possible, so keeping classes small and teaching loads reasonable allows space for such intensive coaching. The number of students and parents who thank me for working so extensively on drafts also serves as ongoing encouragement.

The finer points of writing cannot always be taught in a group setting. While we review techniques and skills as a class, nothing helps students grow as much as individualized instruction that responds to their actual writing. When students know that teachers are committed to their improvement and are available to help, the deep emotions that accompany being vulnerable in writing can be lessened, and the writing process can begin to feel, in the best possible way, like teamwork.


Dr. Gillian Steinberg teaches English at SAR High School. She holds a BA from the University of North Carolina and MA and PhD from the
University of Delaware.

 About Machon Siach: Machon Siach was established in 2015 with a legacy gift from Marcel Lindenbaum, z”l, honoring the memory of his wife, Belda Kaufman Lindenbaum, z”l.

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