Lisa Wathen

Lisa Wathen is an English Teacher at Nicolet High School, a school with 1,100 students in Glendale, Wisconsin. The school serves as a unified high school district for four diverse partner districts. As a result, the student population has a wide variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds, making what Lisa describes as a “rich learning environment”. This environment makes individualized writing feedback especially crucial.

Prior to using Turnitin, the biggest challenge Lisa faced was providing timely and personalized feedback. Turnitin Feedback Studio helped change that by making it easier to provide individual guidance to the student as they are working on the assignment. The diversity of the school also makes peer review an exceptionally powerful tool. Lisa uses the peer review features of Feedback Studio heavily, helping her students receive more opinions on their work. She also makes heavy use of rubrics and QuickMarks to clearly explain why the paper was given a certain grade.

Most importantly, Feedback Studio helps ensure that students are accountable for their writing and take ownership of their work. This gives Lisa and her students a common language to discuss both academic integrity issues and other potential problems with the writing, helping them grow and improve.