Tag: Fellows’ Post

One of the most eye-opening revelations of critical pedagogy in the 1990s was that learning technical academic discourse—whether how to formally analyze the meter of a Shakespearean sonnet, the articulation of a mechanism for an advanced engineering course, studying the evolution of the myth of American exceptionalism in a history seminar, or how to read warranted implications in a mathematical proof—is a terribly difficult and arbitrary process that leaves many confused students overwhelmed by feelings of powerlessness. When we consider that students are often simultaneously learning 4-5 competing sets of technical academic discourse on the fly, and that this stress would be most pronounced among cohorts of incoming freshmen, it comes as no surprise that longitudinal studies have found that students are most likely to succumb to feeling  helpless to marshal so many discourses all at once during their first two semesters in college. Although we tend to think of this problem in the narrow framework of improving academic competency in one particular classroom at a given moment in time (e.g., how to prepare students for an upcoming midterm or for an upcoming research paper), WAC pedagogy reminds us that no class unfolds in a vacuum, as it were, and, furthermore, that the most instructive perspectives for teaching often originate from a dynamic interdisciplinary approach. With this in mind, I would like to discuss the wide-ranging benefits of giving a valued place to regular (low-stakes) creative nonfiction writing activities in the classroom.

As we all know, student learning outcomes are a process, and not a product. Each student’s relative success unfolds within the interdisciplinary fabric of not just their other coursework, but through the sociocultural richness of their other personal interests and commitments outside of school as well. WAC philosophy invites us to use writing to seize on the untapped potential of these interconnections, and one of the most intriguing ways of doing so involves featuring regular creative nonfiction writing exercises throughout the semester. I should note, in passing, that these writing activities need not add to an instructor’s workload or radically change how an instructor would calculate  the final grade for a course. In fact, the most straightforward and organic way to add creative nonfiction writing to a course would be to subsume it under participation or extra credit. It is precisely the “low-stakes” nature of these regular writing activities that can benefit students.

My interest in implementing creative nonfiction writing in the classroom can be traced to the work of  rhetoric scholar Douglas Hesse. Having witnessed the parallel evolution of creative writing into an autonomous academic program and studied the subsequent explosion of creative writing programs in American higher education, Hesse looks towards the model of untrammeled “process” writing and workshopping that takes place in creative writing seminars for inspiration to reinvigorate the conventional teacher-student dynamic. And while Hesse concentrates on how to adapt these intensive writing methods to first-year English composition curricula, my starting-point is that these very same principles and techniques can have far-reaching liberating effects across and between disciplines.

A regrettable consequence of the bureaucratization of higher education is that departments are often fenced off from each other in competition for ever-more exiguous resources, and, as a result, in can be very difficult for instructors to consider their course goals and design beyond the cloistered compound of their respective departments. However, building on Hesse’s innovative theories, I would submit that providing a regular (low-stakes) space for students to creatively reflect on their development—in terms of learning course material in addition to the holistic totality of their evolution as college students and young adults—would empower teachers and students alike to creatively tease out and engage with the intersections between their respective courses and other fields of study and experience. Indeed, what student or teacher wouldn’t benefit from creatively thinking and writing about (these are but a couple hypothetical examples) the thought-provoking parallels between the indeterminacy principle studied in a Physics class and Gödel’s theorems in mathematics, or, perhaps in a seminar on modern American poetry, how the terms and concepts of theoretical science are wed with a Romantic poetic vision in the work of A.R. Ammons? These intersecting perspectives would deepen and enrich each other by facilitating students’ in-depth understanding of their coursework.

Hesse maps out the terrain of writing into two distinct, and seemingly diametrically opposed worlds—the “Terra Facta” or “Terra Argumenta” of “thesis and support, information, . . . assertion, and evidence”—in short, our quantifiable expectations of student proficiency which form the basis of grading criteria in any given course—and the “Terra Imagina” of fiction whose “open lands” are exhilarating precisely because they don’t lead anywhere in particular. Without getting bogged down in a minute recapitulation of Hesse’s argument, the gist of his intervention is that our academic discourses all too often leave little or no room for the “Terra Imagina” of fiction—the open-ended terrain that imaginatively involves students in the writing of their own narrative as they find and develop interconnections between new forms of knowledge. Viewing Hesse’s theory through the lens of WAC pedagogy, I suggest that an interdisciplinary approach to using creative nonfiction writing in the classroom can provide an inclusive educational framework for students to explore, synthesize, and reflect on their own learning paths.

As instructors, we understand the importance of the syllabus: it is the course “contract” where students can find objectives, expectations, policies, assignments, and more. We want to ensure that our syllabus communicates clearly what will be expected of students over the course of the semester, both to better prepare them for the work ahead as well as to avoid any future confusion or disagreement over course policies or grades. Designing a clear, comprehensive syllabus can be challenging enough as is, but for the instructor of a Writing Intensive course there is the additional challenge of communicating WI-specific goals. Below are just a few strategies for integrating WI requirements with individual course content:

1. Clearly identify your syllabus as ‘Writing Intensive’ and explain what it means to you as an instructor.

Note clearly and early on in your syllabus that your course has been designated Writing Intensive, and that students should therefore expect to write frequently, both in and out of class. Beyond this, we encourage you to make this section your own: how exactly do you envision your students using writing? Do you want students to write responses to the assigned readings? Blog posts? Lab reports? Thesis-based research papers? Will students be writing every week? Every class? This can and should be tailored to your unique discipline, in whatever way you feel best suits your course.

2. Include course objectives that are WI specific.

Again, this will look different depending on your individual discipline and course. Ask yourself what your overall course outcomes are and how you can utilize writing to help your students achieve those goals—perhaps you might ask students to define important course terms and concepts in writing; compose a lab report using discipline-specific vocabulary and formatting; write an argumentative paper on a controversial topic in the field; or explain a complicated theorem in layman’s terms. However you choose to incorporate writing in your course, make it clear to your students that they will be writing in order to engage with and better understand the course material.

3. Include a comprehensive course calendar that indicates assignment due dates and the steps of the scaffolding process.

Including a course calendar in your syllabus helps to orient your students and communicate your expectations and their responsibilities: what deadlines must students be aware of? When can they expect quizzes, exams, or paper due dates? What do they need to do in preparation for a particular class? For WI courses incorporating WAC pedagogy, this is especially important: all major assignments should be scaffolded (i.e., broken up into smaller assignments that are completed gradually over a period of days/weeks), and students must be made aware of when each individual assignment/component is due.

These are just a few of the elements of a well-designed WI syllabus. For more strategies, techniques, and examples, attend our  faculty workshop on Creating a Writing Intensive Syllabus.

In this post I would like to discuss some strategies for turning students into better, more active readers. By teaching our students how to engage deeply and actively with the texts they read, we are preparing them to be critical thinkers and thoughtful writers. This process begins with the instructor taking on both reading and writing instruction as her responsibility. The list below draws from my own teaching experience and from chapter nine of John C. Bean’s Engaging Ideas (titled “Helping Students Read Difficult Texts”).

1. Model your own reading process.
   As a college-level instructor, you are an expert and experienced reader. Allow your students to benefit from your knowledge! On the first day of class, pass out a guide describing your own reading practices. You may describe where you read, what you read with (pen and paper? tablet? computer?), and where and how you take notes (do you prefer marginalia or a reading notebook?). Most importantly, explain what you do when you get stuck, confused, or frustrated in your reading. Your descriptions of how you overcome such stumbling blocks may be general or discipline-specific; either way, they will help prepare your students for the inevitable difficulties of reading complex texts. (See below for the reading guide I provide for my literature students. Feel free to alter it to reflect good reading practices in your discipline.)
2. Explain the genres and writing conventions of your discipline.
   Your students encounter varieties of texts in their studies and their lives. Prepare your students for your reading material by explaining what kinds of texts you will assign (i.e., scholarly articles and textbook chapters, essays and poems) and describing the best strategies for reading them, keeping in mind the distinct methods we use to read different texts.

   Similarly, you should teach your students how to identify the writing conventions of your discipline. If you assign articles from a peer-reviewed science journal, you should explain how to identify an author’s hypothesis, methodology, results, etc.; if you assign fiction, you might devote class time to discussing narrative point of view and irony.

3. Avoid lecturing over readings.
   Though it is important to review difficult passages in class, the instructor should stifle her urge to “lecture over” or “explain” the text to her students. Over-explaining a text, argues Bean, teaches students that they do not need to read the assigned material (Bean 168). Instead of explaining the reading material to your students, encourage them to read actively and bring their own explanations, conclusions, and questions to class.
4. Create active reading assignments.
   You can goad your students into reading and participating actively by constructing low-stakes reading assignments. For example, you may require your students to submit reading logs or response notebooks that record the questions, comments, and insights that occur as they read. These assignments may also be tailored to address the specific reading troubles your students encounter. If your students have difficulty comprehending a writer’s diction and syntax, you may ask them to write “translations” of particular moments of the text or to produce a glossary of new vocabulary. If your students have trouble comprehending the structure of a writer’s argument, you may ask them to provide a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of what the text “says” versus what it “does” (Bean 170-1). Finally, a warning: reading quizzes are sometimes necessary, but recent studies suggest that they promote “surface” rather than “deep” reading (Bean 168). Keep in mind that our goal should be to produce students who have an active, critical relationship to the texts they read and who do not merely search for “right answers.”

Example: A Guide for Effective Reading (Literature)

Reading a work of literature is not like reading a text message, a menu, or a street sign. Whereas those forms of media merely communicate information (“I’m not home yet,” “All sandwiches come with fries or salad”), literary texts present a narrative. The word “narrative” refers not only to the events of a story but also to the various elements that make it up, including the narrator’s language, descriptions of setting and character, a diversity of moods and emotions, and a multiplicity of philosophical and psychological vantage-points. Such a complex work requires more patience, concentration, and participation from its readers than other forms of written language. Please consider the following recommendations in this spirit.

1. Always read with a writing utensil and a piece of paper. Mark passages that are interesting, exciting, humorous, confusing, or which you would like to revisit later. You should draw from these notes during class discussions, while studying for tests, and while composing your final paper.
2. If you prefer to read on a tablet, use an annotation feature to highlight important moments in the text. Do not read on your cell phone.
3. Use a dictionary to look up any words that you do not understand. If you do not look up the meaning of a word, you will never know what you are missing.
4. If you do not understand a sentence or a paragraph, re-read it. If you still do not understand it, read it aloud. This is especially helpful when reading plays or poetry.
5. Sometimes you have to re-read whole stories, chapters, or books to grasp their meaning. You will be amazed how much clearer a difficult text can become when you know what to look for.
6. Steer clear of reader’s guides such as SparkNotes, which are marketed to lazy high schoolers and are often oversimplified and inaccurate. More importantly, these summaries leave out of the most important part of any work of literature: its language. If you need help thinking through a text, I am happy to recommend useful essays by qualified writers.
7. Lastly, please write down any questions that occur to you while reading and share them during class discussion. If you are confused about something, your classmates probably are, too.

Works Cited

Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. 2nd Ed. Jossey-Bass, 2011.

Finding what to write about for an essay topic, for a thesis statement or that catchy topic sentence which succeeds in condensing an profound idea as elegantly as possibly, can often come down to knowing that one right word. Mark Twain once remarked that: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning”. As a WAC fellow, and a writing instructor, I’m familiar with this axiom in as far as regarding writing as not being an absolute science which can easily be condensed down to either a right or wrong approach. Using the right word requires a certain level of understanding of a certain “je ne sais quoi”; i.e., which word, which statement, which thesis, which semi-colon is right for the occasion one is writing about. It denotes this constant dance between being an exact science and that of being a philosophy where the final word rests on what constitutes good writing. Additionally, this level of discernment, between almost right  and right is not easily arrived at, and the origins of this difficulty can be historically traced back to the earlier pedagogical philosophies of the early 20^th century.

In his seminal essay entitled “Writing across the Curriculum in Historical Perspective: Toward a Social Interpretation,” David R. Russel illustrates this difficulty by asserting that for a long time, “Writing thus came to be seen as a ding an sich, a separate and independent technique, something that should have been learned elsewhere, taught by someone else-in high school or in freshman service courses. Hence the almost universal complaints about students’ writing and the equally ubiquitous denials of responsibility for teaching it” (55).  As writing instructors, we are trained to take up this mantel of responsibility and have the experience in knowing just how hard it is for students to tread this fine line of what is good writing and what is not; between the right word and the wrong word. As a WAC fellow I’ve always put an emphasis on the fact that to arrive at a definitive answer to this question is to help students find their own voice, whilst still being able to write within an MLA, WAC and WID framework. We as instructors therefore share the responsibility of helping students to define, through their own negotiations, what constitutes good writing. Additionally, it demands more engagement and understanding from the instructors’ side to acknowledge the diverse background of the student body, and as such to take up the task to facilitate the students’ journey towards finding the “right” words, which isn’t always as straightforward as it may seem.

As WAC fellows we’re aware that the initiative has an obligation towards recognizing diversity when it comes to writing instruction. This fact has been stressed by Russel in his seminal essay, wherein he excoriates the academy when he remarks that: “concerted efforts to promote writing in the whole curriculum are at cross-purposes with the modern university’s compartmentalized, bureaucratic structure, its diverse missions, and its heterogeneous clientele” (62). Therefore, a deep understanding is required of how the practice of writing instruction is influenced by these complex, but essential, considerations, which prove to be creating a schism between the curriculum of the Anglosphere and the background of the student body. Moreover, instructors who are applying WAC pedagogy have to be susceptible to the ongoing issues regarding exclusion when being faced with an English language-based curriculum, and the role WAC pedagogy plays in mending this schism.

When further regarding the origins of this divide between the diverse student body and the curriculum Russel illustrates the historical background that provides the origin of this problem, when he claims that:

“From its beginnings, the university adopted Harvard’s current-traditional rhetoric, an ‘inner-directed’ pedagogy [ . . . ] which assumes that writing is a single universally applicable skill, largely unrelated to ‘content’; it ignored the ‘socialized’ rhetoric [ . . .  ], with its ‘outer-directed’ view of pedagogy, which assumes that thinking and language use can never occur free of the social context which conditions them. Writing thus came to be seen as a ding an sich, a separate and independent technique, something that should have been learned elsewhere, taught by someone else in high school or in freshman service courses. Hence the almost universal complaints about students’ writing and the equally ubiquitous denials of responsibility for teaching it.”(55).

This “elsewhere” where students should have a priori acquired an English language-based writing toolbox in order to find the “right” words when writing their college papers is therefore seen as a great misconception. One which we as instructors find ourselves attempting to help bridge the divide between the pre-acquired English language jargon of academic North American English, to that of one which considers a student’s individual habitus. This should all preferably be achieved in a holistic manner as mentioned previously, to help students find their own voice and to guide them on their individual journeys to fine their right words. Moreover, as instructors it becomes our duty to avoid becoming a “writing police”. Historically this became a prevalent pedagogical strategy, in so far as it required as Russel argues:

“faculty in all courses to hand delinquent students over to the English department for correction in a ‘writing hospital’ as it was called, or ‘lab’ as we call it today [ . . . ] Today, many universities carry on the tradition of writing police and remedial lab; faculty prescribe treatment (often high-tech), administered by a staff member or tutor-but rarely by a tenure-line faculty member. Responsibility remains outside the community, drop-out rates are high, and the status quo is preserved.” (64).

The most important thing to realize is that WAC is more than a means of improving pedagogy: it is and always has been part of a complex dialectic which forms curricular, institutional and, ultimately, social policy. The desire end goal of having WAC philosophy dialectically influence social policy would be considered a utopian goal. However, by starting to acknowledge and to bridge the gap between the diverse background of the student body and that of the anglosphere of the curriculum, one can make a start in fostering student learning, and this would lead them to eventually becoming better writers in finding their own “right” words.

Russell, David R. Writing across the Curriculum in Historical Perspective: Toward a Social Interpretation. College English, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Jan. 1990), pp. 52-73.

 

At the core of WAC philosophy is a commitment to the view that learning is fundamentally about developing the capaciousness for critical thinking, that writing is foundational rather than ancillary to this aim, and that writing-to-learn as a pedagogical orientation entails viewing writing and learning as processual and iterative. Drawing from and expanding on our most recent faculty workshop “Minimal Marking and Effective Grading,” I would like to suggest that a WAC-inspired approach to providing feedback on student writing entails adopting two conceptual orientations to student assessment: privileging higher order concerns in student writing and viewing grading (in addition to assignment design) as a scaffolded process. I will briefly elaborate on these two conceptual orientations before turning to some concrete strategies that can help foster their implementation while also reducing the labor-time entailed in writing assessment.

Orientations Toward Student Writing

Higher vs. Lower Order Concerns: Thinking about student writing in terms of higher and lower order concerns provides a heuristic device that can help instructors provide feedback to students that prioritizes the substantive learning outcomes in their courses (Bean 2011: 322). Higher order concerns refer to the conceptual and structural aspects of student writing: Does the student respond to the assignment? Does the student articulate a clear argument? Is the essay structured in a clear manner that supports the argument? Do the paragraphs develop ideas grounded in a topic sentence and do they flow together in a logical fashion? Has the student provided evidence and/or reasoning to support their claims?  In contrast, concerns about grammar, punctuation, mechanics, and usage should be seen as lower order concerns, not because they are unimportant to student writing, but because there is little point to encourage revision of these concerns until the larger conceptual and structural issues have been addressed. Emphasizing higher order concerns in feedback on student writing will guide students to concerns of more substantive import, reduce the time spent marking small errors on student work, and can facilitate more thoughtful revision.

An emphasis on higher order concerns entails a shift in how we think of our role with regard to student writing. When we focus on lower order issues we often fall into the role of editors and judges, pointing out, correcting, and penalizing errors in the written assignments we receive from our students. By shifting our focus to issues of argumentation, structure, organization, and analysis, we open the door to approaching our students as serious interlocutors and seeing ourselves as engaged readers of their work. This shift from editor to reader, from judge to mentor, is not only more constructive in helping students to develop their capacity for critical thinking, it also models the kind of work that is actually carried out in our respective disciplines. Approaching our student’s work as we would that of a respected colleague will inevitably also move us towards forms of commentary that replace condescension and judgment with forward-looking and more substantive feedback.

Scaffolding: Scaffolding is often used to refer to the practice of breaking large, formal writing assignments into a series of smaller, more informal components. The basic premise of scaffolding as a pedagogical tool for teaching writing is that students become more familiar with the subject of their writing the more they return to it. Through the iterative process of working from rough free-writing eventually polished final drafts, students are given the opportunity to refine their ideas, deepen their engagement, and develop confidence in their ideas. As a consequence of this structured, gradual development, final student work tends to be of higher quality than non-scaffolded term papers. The efficacy of scaffolding depends, in large part, on the privileging of revision  as a fundamental aspect of the writing process. At the same time, the extent to which opportunities for revision actually lead to substantively improved writing is conditional upon us as instructors adopting a view of assessment and feedback as similarly scaffolded.

Approaching assessment as a scaffolded process enables us to focus our attention as reviewers in ways that are more efficient with regard to our time and more helpful for students. Extensive comments and feedback should be reserved for earlier drafts of student work. There is little reason to provide extensive commentary if we do not give students the opportunity to take that commentary into account. Redirecting instructor effort to earlier stages of the writing process gives students a chance to respond to instructor suggestions before receiving a grade on their work, reduces the time spent on writing comments on final drafts, and improves the quality of work that is submitted for a grade.

Strategies for Effective Grading

Adopting a pedagogical orientation to student writing that emphasizes higher order concerns and sees assessment as a scaffolded process might, on the surface, seem to be asking a lot of instructors in terms of their time and level of engagement. However, I’d like to suggest that this is not necessarily the case. Specifically, I want to consider how several clusters of concrete strategies might help to achieve these conceptual reorientations while limiting the amount of time and energy spent marking and responding to student work.

Minimal Marking: Adopting an approach to grading that prioritizes higher order concerns does not mean abandoning a commitment to helping students improve their facility with English grammar, mechanics, punctuation and usage. Rather, such an orientation encourages us endorse a minimalist philosophy when it comes to marking students’ work for such lower order issues. A minimal approach to marking asks us to be reflective in our notations on student work; we should be attentive to both the individual student as a thinker and writer, as well as the stage of the assignment that we are currently revising. A foundational principle for minimal marking is that we avoid asking students to correct minor errors if we are also asking them to rewrite the sentences/paragraphs that contain those errors. Asking students to correct errors of grammar in situations when there is a deeper conceptual problem entails a contradictory demand, and students will often opt for the easier route of lower order revision while leaving the larger concerns unattended to.

Where it is appropriate to address lower order concerns, there are several strategies that might be employed that still align with a more minimalist mentality. One strategy for de-emphasizing our role as editors and empowering students to take responsibility for their writing is to simply place an “X” or other mark in the margin whenever we encounter a sentence with a lower order error (Haswell 2006). This strategy asks students to do the work of reviewing their writing, rather than relying on their instructors for editing. Such a technique will likely lead to papers with fewer typos, but may not help students to address issues that they are simply unaware of.  A second strategy that provides for more focused grammatical instruction is to highlight one lower order concern that is recurrent in a particular student’s writing. Emphasizing a single concern enables the instructor to spell out exactly what the issue is, identify some instances of the error in the student’s writing, and illustrate by example how the student might revise for the recurrent issue. A third strategy is to revise one or two paragraphs for lower order concerns to illustrate the kinds of errors a student may be prone to. Asking them to review the rest of the paper to try and identify similar occurrences encourages proofreading and limits instructor time spent looking for such errors. Each of these strategies enables instructors to guide students in addressing lower order concerns while also leaving a lighter footprint on student papers and time spent grading.

End Comments: When providing substantive feedback to students on higher order concerns, replacing excess marginal notes with a single comment (at the end or beginning of the paper) is an excellent strategy that clarifies instructor priorities for the student and reduces the amount of grading time required. Effective end comments often do the following: 1) open with a salutation, 2) restate the paper’s central claim, 3) identify the paper’s strengths, 4) discuss a few central areas for further development, emphasizing higher order concerns first, 5) end with a constructive and positive summation. Comments should be specific and constructive. For examples, making connections between marginal notes and end comments can help to ground larger comments in specific examples from the paper.

Technology: Providing feedback on multiple drafts of student work can be a daunting task, and identifying exactly how students have responded to previous feedback requires meticulous attention is student writing is submitted by hard copy. However, digital platforms can drastically reduce these difficulties while also creating opportunities to foster substantive revision. Use the “compare” function or “track changes” in Microsoft Word to quickly see what changes have been made from one draft to the next, or use a document sharing platform like Google Drive that stores past versions of student work. To encourage students to actually engage in the work of revision, post comments digitally and ask that students respond to the comments as the revise. Digital platforms that allow shared documents can also facilitate remote one-on-one student conferences (see below) or peer review, both of which can make writing a more collaborative effort.

Conversation: Another strategy for reducing time spent marking student papers while emphasizing higher order concerns and fostering substantive revision is to think about the role of conversation in the grading process. Being explicit about our expectations by providing detailed assignments and providing examples of strong student work are practices of transparency that help our students understand what we are asking of them before they begin the writing process. Once they have submitted drafts of written work, building discussions of their writing into class time gives students a chance to articulate and defend their ideas orally and lets instructors provide suggestions about how to further develop their work, or how to address discrepancies between spoken and written iterations of their ideas. Framing grading as a conversation pushes students to be reflective about their work, which facilitates revision-oriented writing and discourages last-minute word dumps. Asking students to submit a cover letter that identifies strengths and weakness in their work holds them accountable to thinking about their writing once a draft has been completed. Asking students to submit a reflection along with final drafts that discuss the kinds of revisions they undertook can similarly promote student accountability. Finally, in-person conferences can often be an effective way to provide students feedback without having to write up extensive comments. Simply reading the draft aloud and reacting as you might if you were marking the paper at home can give students insight into what it means for you to be a reader of their writing. Giving feedback in conversation like this can help ensure that students aren’t left guessing at what an instructor’s written comments might mean.

In this post, I have tried to suggest that WAC philosophy encourages us as instructors to privilege higher order concerns in student writing and to think about grading and assessment as scaffolded processes. Adopting these conceptual orientations has implications for how we understand our role and for how we consider temporality with regard to providing feedback on the written work of our students. On the surface, this orientation can feel intimidating because it demands a different kind of engagement with our students. However, as I have illustrated above, there are concrete strategies that we can employ to encourage substantive revision that emphasizes higher order concerns while also mitigating the amount of time we spend assessing student work. By adopting strategies for minimal marking, writing effective end comments, making use of available technology, and bringing our students into a conversation about their work, we might both improve the quality of written work and use our own time more effectively in aiding students in developing as writers.

 

References

Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. John Wiley & Sons, 2011.

“Commenting on and Grading Student Writing.” WAC Clearinghouse, Colorado State University, 25 Nov. 2019, wac.colostate.edu/resources/teaching/guides/commenting/.

“Do I have to be an Expert in Grammar to Assign Writing.” WAC Clearinghouse, Colorado State University, 25 Nov. 2019, wac.colostate.edu/resources/wac/intro/grammar/.

“Giving Feedback on Student Writing.” Sweetland Center for Writing, University of Michigan, 25 Nov. 2019, lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/instructors/teaching-resources/giving-feedback-on-student- writing.html.

“Grading Criteria and Rubrics.” The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, Brown University, 25 Nov. 2019, www.brown.edu/sheridan/teaching-learning-resources/teaching-resources /course-design/classroom-assessment/grading-criteria.

Haswell, Richard. “The Complexities of Responding to Student Writing; or, Looking for Shortcuts via the Road of Excess.” Across the Disciplines, no. 3, 2006.

We at WAC talk a lot about peer review as a strategy for scaffolding assignments and getting students thinking about writing. And for good reason. Peer review supports the research and learning process where knowledge is developed in stages through combining exploration, production, and reflection. Beyond these more commonly discussed aspects, peer review used strategically has other benefits for course design, supporting students, and making class logistics easier for instructors. In this post, we’ll have a look at some of the recent research on peer review that speaks to its usefulness.

One major barrier to great final papers is last minute work. Scaffolding assignments aids in preventing this. How can peer review support this? A number of studies have found that courses tend to have peer review sessions scheduled around a week prior to the final assignment deadline (Baker 2016, 181). In these studies, students focused on copy editing feedback in the form of grammatical points and spelling errors (ibid). The real benefit of peer review, however, comes in the form of development of student ideas. Earlier review sessions allow students time to deal with the content of each other’s arguments. Feedback recipients also can take time to think about feedback and implement it more thoughtfully. Schedule peer review sessions earlier in the semester (and have this be part of their grade). In addition to increasing the chances of higher quality work, this also makes students less likely to plagiarize since they have more time to prepare and work with sources. Foregrounding the role of peer review by scheduling it early in the semester as a graded component will also socialize students into the importance of peer review. Rather than seeing it as a final requirement after the bulk of the work is done, it can be a significant component to building a paper.

Emphasizing peer review as crucial in the process can also happen through assistance in giving feedback. While students may have done peer reviews before, the truth is they rarely get explicit instruction in how to go about this. The thought of giving negative comments to fellow classmates can be intimidating. And, students often are not sure what to focus on for feedback. Models for feedback delivery can assist with this. For example, peer review can include a handout with prompts for students to use. Incorporating this as an official feedback form gives students guidelines for thinking about their classmates’ work. Prompts can include:

• This paper is about _______________________
• The biggest strength of this paper is __________________________________
• You should most focus on ________________________ in order to support your thesis.
• You might think about (xyz theory, writer, etc.)
• I’m not sure I understand (how z supports y, x is connected to z, etc.) Can you explain this more?
• I was really interested in your point about ______________________________

These types of prompts help students understand supportive ways to frame comments. This also helps to guide them in what to focus on. If you want to go further with this, you can use these or similar prompts when working with assigned course texts. Doing this as part of a class discussion helps students become active readers and think of what points in a piece of writing warrant feedback. Along these lines, there may be a positive correlation between deliberation (as opposed to argumentation) around a topic and learning outcomes (Klein 2016, 228). Argumentation puts students in a position to defend ideas whereas deliberation invites more open-ended discussion. To this end, getting students to think of peer review as active engagement with a text’s ideas (as opposed to criticism) can foster deliberation. The prompts above can help with this.

What sort of feedback has results? How can we give our students specific models so that peers have usable feedback? A study of peer review in an ESL class offers clues. In a 2017 study of digital peer review sessions for ESL students, researchers classified types of feedback into a number of categories describing content and qualities (Leijen). They found that two types of feedback were most likely to lead to revisions: alteration and recurring (ibid, 44). Feedback classified as alteration offered specific guidance on points in the text. For example: “Evidence A doesn’t seem to connect to your main point. Maybe add an explanatory paragraph to clarify.” This is in contrast to more global feedback such as “Evidence doesn’t support main idea well.” Recurring feedback was the same advice given by multiple reviewers. This study provides valuable information for helping students design feedback for peers. Giving them examples of specific and direct feedback and having multiple reviewers can make feedback more productive for students.

All of this we have discussed so far relates to the inherently social nature of writing. Klein (2016) notes that more recent theories of writing characterize it as created within various kinds of contexts and by multiple contributors (329-330). Indeed, writing is never truly a solitary affair. Feedback, ideas from the world around us, course lectures and readings, and many other things all come together to create written work. Peer review is a way to build on the multi-voiced nature of writing to help students succeed.

References

Baker, Kimberly M. 2016. “Peer Review as a Strategy for Improving Students’ Writing Process.” Active Learning in Higher Education 17(3): 179-192.

Klein, Perry D. 2016. “Trends in Research on Writing as a Learning Activity.” Journal of Writing Research 7(3): 311-350.

Leijen, D.A.J. 2017. “A Novel Approach to Examine the Impact of Web-based Peer Review on the Revisions of L2 Writers.” Computers and Composition 43: 35-54.

Related to our faculty workshop, Minimal Marking and Effective Grading (the last one in our series this semester), I would like to discuss a couple of options for how to design the final exam for your course. While the workshop presents various strategies for saving time on grading and giving feedback, I want to focus here on exam formats that are designed with these time-saving methods in mind. One will be a broader template that can be adapted to any discipline, and the other will be more geared towards the humanities and social sciences, where a longer essay answer is an appropriate format for testing the students’ knowledge and skill set. My goal is to present two options for the final exam that allow students to shine on the page according to the main tenet of WAC pedagogy; that writing to learn and learning to write are equally important tasks that should be supported with ample scaffolding.

So how do we balance these seemingly contradictory goals of providing ample scaffolding and feedback while sticking to “minimal marking” strategies? And how do we make sure that the work we are assigning to students is actually useful to them, even as we prepare them for standard department tests at the end of the semester that can seem to contradict the main message WAC promotes about writing i.e. that it should be a carefully thought-out process with preparation and planning?

1. WRITE THE FINAL EXAM TOGETHER!

My students were always excited by this prospect when I introduced it to them in the second half of the semester. The thinking behind collectively writing the exam is to allow students to take ownership over course material and decide for themselves what was most impactful in terms of their development and learning.

Students prepare for this at home ahead of time by looking back over their notes from the semester, and then deciding what they would like to see appear on in the exam itself. When they come into class, you firstly split into groups to vote for people’s favorites, and then together you decide which questions should make up the final exam. This conversation is usually very lively and gets the students deeply engaged in the course material while they work to justify to each other what should and should not appear.

Once these decisions are made, the exam is written up and given to the students ahead of time, so they are able to work on prepared responses at home that hopefully mimic the redrafting process that is so crucial to WAC pedagogy. This method also allows them to become more comfortable in an exam setting once you take away the anxiety of the “unknown”.

Here is a suggested template for designing the exam, taken from a former ENGL 220 course:

SECTION ONE (30 Mins)

Definition and Example questions (in the exam you will choose 3/8)

You will be given 8 key words (literary terms, characters, themes or ideas; in STEM these can be formulas, symbols or methods that need explanations) and you must choose THREE to write about. You will define the term and then give me an example using one of the texts/theories we have studied this semester, stating its importance or relevance in the context of that work.

TOTAL POINTS: 15 (5 per question)

SECTION TWO (30 Mins)

Identification of a Passage (in the exam you will choose 1/5)

You will be presented with three excerpts taken from the poems/plays we have looked at this semester. It will be your job to pick ONE to write about. You will identify the author, and the poem/Hamlet, and then discuss its relevance in relation to one of the key themes/ writing features we have been discussing this semester.

TOTAL POINTS: 15

SECTION THREE (1 hour)

Essay Question (in the exam you will choose 1/8)

You will write an answer to ONE of the essay questions, using the whole hour (writing a mini plan is encouraged) to talk about at least TWO of the texts we have studied this semester. The questions will focus on issues we have discussed throughout the semester and will use familiar terminology e.g. epiphany / the sublime / sane vs. insane.

TOTAL POINTS: 30

YOUR TASK AT HOME THIS WEEKEND:

Come up with the following to present to the class during our next session:

5 possible key words/terms

2 examples of passages

3 possible essay questions

*(providing examples of whatever you are asking for is a good idea here – I usually go over the exam format in class time first before asking them to prepare it themselves at home).

2. PRE-PREPARED ESSAY-STYLE RESPONSE!

The second exam model I propose is more suited to humanities and social sciences subjects in which the bulk of course material being assessed can be presented in an essay-style response. It involves putting together a selection of prompts that cover a variety of topics and then students choose one to answer in the exam in the form of a long, essay-style response. Similar to the strategy above, you could have students look over their notes at home first in order to come up with suggestions for what kinds of prompts could appear on the exam, then together as a class you decide on the selection that will be offered. You can set requirements for what their answers must include – for example at least two different authors / characters / themes / time periods etc. – but importantly it should be up to the students to come up with the wording for questions, which helps them to internalize the material being treated on the exam.

An important part of this model is insisting that student’s write out their practice answers ahead of time, so that their response becomes the product of drafting and redrafting that will happen naturally during their revision process and exam preparation. Allowing them to see the questions ahead of time and select which topic to write on encourages students to order their thoughts the way they would do in an assessed paper, with more thought being given to structure and natural flow of an argument than they perhaps have time to do in a more typical exam setting when they haven’t seen the question first. The action of “writing from memory” that this sort of exam preparation leads to, can greatly improve the confidence students have in their own ideas and work, and again lessens the anxiety that can be triggered by feeling caught out or tricked on an unseen exam.

In the end, however you decide to design the final exam for your course, making sure that the format supports the same kind of development you are hopefully nurturing in your students’ writing over the course of the semester is important. By design, if students are able to prepare their responses for the final exam ahead of time, it should mean that they turn in a better product, which ultimately supports their development as writers as well as allowing them to handle course material confidently in an exam setting.

 

In anticipation of our upcoming November 21st student workshop on Plagiarism, I would like to focus on how integrating scaffolding and frequent low-stakes writing into the structure of a course can help to counteract plagiarism by holistically addressing the needs of students. Each and every semester, plagiarism is the most common problem cited by instructors regardless of academic field or course level taught. Although a cottage industry of subscription-based services (such as Safe Assign and Turn It In) has sprung up to facilitate the detection of plagiarism in student writing, resources for dealing with the challenge of student plagiarism before the fact are comparatively scarce.

We tend to think of and deal with student plagiarism and academic dishonesty in a moral vacuum—as if it were a prohibition whose infringement must be detected, quarantined, and automatically punished. A student “charged” with plagiarism or academic dishonesty faces the rhetoric and sanctions of criminalization, and the penalties at an instructor’s disposal for responding to plagiarism and academic dishonesty are often Draconian and retributive. We must ask ourselves: does automatically failing a student who plagiarizes or recommending a student for academic suspension actually serve to prevent the incidence of plagiarism and academic dishonesty in the classroom, or do these punitive measures merely criminalize plagiarism as a kind of unspeakable taboo in the hallowed groves of academe?  It can he helpful to think of this prohibition against plagiarism and academic dishonesty as a negative command: we are enjoining our students—who sometimes have little or no support in the form of tutors or robust writing pedagogy—to learn and master the codes and conventions of academic writing on the fly.

Promoting a classroom environment of student writing from the very first day of class can yield very fruitful results in giving students confidence in their abilities, which will in turn combat against plagiarism. As Richrad Arum and Josipa Roksa found in their landmark book Academically Adrift,

“Fifty percent of students in our sample reported that they had not taken a single course during the prior semester that require more than twenty pages of writing, and one-third had not taken one that required even forty pages of reading per week. Combining these two indicators, we found that a quarter of the students in the sample had not taken any courses that required either of these two requirements, and that only 42 percent had experienced both a reading and writing assignment of this character during the prior semester.” (71)

It seems self-evident to state that plagiarism is fundamentally a problem of students not becoming personally invested in an assignment by staking out their ownership of their own ideas and language. If we assume that Arum and Roksa’s alarming findings are broadly representative of the state of higher education in America, can we reasonably expect students who are not being given the necessary opportunities to develop proficiency in academic writing and critical thinking to be able to scrupulously apply these abstract skills in their formal assignments?

During our last faculty workshop, we discussed some of the far-reaching benefits of scaffolding course content in the context of developing plagiarism-resistant assignments. The piecemeal nature of scaffolding affords several practical advantages to instructors who wish to proactively defend against plagiarism.  Scaffolding dynamically reorients what would otherwise be a daunting, be-all and end-all final paper or project as a cumulative process consisting of several smaller assignments. It is vital for instructors to engage with the reality that plagiarism is not simply the result of “student laziness”; plagiarism is also the consequence of a crisis of confidence because students (quite naturally) feel that they cannot master academic writing. Scaffolding plays an important role in making a major assignment less intimidating by helping students overcome this fear and inertia of getting started to tackle an assignment. There is a direct inverse correlation between how much confidence students can build in these critical early stages of an assignment (when the stakes are relatively low) and how likely they will be to plagiarize the work of others on the eve of a due date.

Plagiarism will always be a perpetual problem of the classroom and scholarship. I have to imagine that, among the very first cohort admitted into Plato’s Academy for philosophical training, at least one student was surreptitiously cribbing notes under his robe. And while there will never be a fail-safe remedy or panacea for dealing with plagiarism, fostering a classroom climate of frequent writing exercises, encouraging students to write about their own heuristic learning process, and developing feedback-based learning activities can all contribute towards a more holistic understanding and approach to dealing with plagiarism. Please encourage your students to attend our November 21st student workshop on plagiarism in Namm 601A!

As citizens of the twenty-first century, we are no strangers to technology: From smart phones to social media to texting, we are thoroughly immersed in technology and navigate it daily. In spite of this, the thought of incorporating “technology” into my classroom originally filled me dread. I struggled to think of how exactly I could meaningfully transfer those daily digital experiences into the writing classroom. I assumed that I needed either specialist technical knowledge or a willingness to completely and utterly rewrite my pedagogy in order to successfully incorporate digital tools in my classroom.

Thankfully, I was wrong in both of my assumptions — incorporating technology requires neither specialist knowledge nor a complete overhaul of our teaching methods. Here are a couple of very low-tech strategies that even the most resistant luddite would find approachable:

Multimedia Texts: One of the most effective ways of incorporating technology into the writing classroom is to present students with multimedia texts. This can be as simple as showing a video clip in class and asking students to respond in writing before opening up to a class discussion. I’ve found that students are especially interested in dissecting and discussing these texts, in part because they feel more comfortable with them and therefore more confident; students may not feel like they are qualified to comment on a piece of literature, but they do feel proficient enough to discuss a music video or clip from a TV show.

Course Blogs: Course blogs are another great, low-tech method of engaging with a technological platform in the classroom. Students are already familiar with utilizing technology like social media and messaging apps in their personal lives, so the introduction of a course blog should be fairly natural. One great advantage of class blogs is that they can serve as an opportunity for low-stakes, informal writing that can be easily shared with the rest of the class. If class discussion begins to lag, an easy way to revive it is to ask students to share what they wrote for their blog post. The fact that they’ve written it already and are not being forced to think of a response on the spot makes students more willing to share and discuss (likewise, this strategy works to elicit discussion from shyer, less talkative students). There are countless ways to incorporate and utilize blogs, but some of the methods I’ve had the most success with are:

• Require students to write a short blog post every week (or have them sign up for particular days) responding to the assigned reading
• Provide prompts related to the course material that students must respond to on the blog before coming into class that day
• Ask students to select and post a multimedia text (a song, music video, clip from a film, etc.) and analyze it in a blog post.
• Require every student to comment on at least one post a week (this is an especially useful strategy, as it forces students to read and engage with each other’s writing)

This sort of digital interaction inside and outside the classroom can promote active learning, a core WAC principle that refers to teaching methods that encourage students to participate in their learning experience through non-traditional, multimodal activities. Active learning seeks to move away from (or at the very least, supplement) traditional “passive” learning methods like lecturing with more hands-on activities—like the low-tech suggestions mentioned above. Responding to multimedia texts or participating in a discussion on a course blog can enhance students’ learning experience and promote a deeper understanding of the course material. By incorporating even a small amount of technology in our classrooms, we can enliven the learning process and get students more involved with course content.

When my students ask me how they can improve their writing, my answer is almost always the same: revise. Young writers, inexperienced and impetuous, bristle at the thought of recasting what they have only just molded. What person devoid of masochistic tendencies wants to revisit and redo a completed writing assignment? But since part of my job as an educator is to deliver bad news, here it is: all the acceptable writing I have done has been on the second, third, or fourth take. 

The good news is that effective revision practices are easy to develop and, in my experience, habit-forming. (I could spend the rest of the day rewriting this blog post and, like Hamlet in his nutshell, call myself a king of infinite space.) Yet I suspect that I have too often taken the meaning of revision for granted, even as I have over-explained more arcane terms like “iambic pentameter” and “chiasmus.” So I will begin by defining revision as a new draft of writing that treats the initial piece as its courageous guide. A productive revision is an opportunity for the writer to revisit her assignment with the experience of someone who has been there before. The writer should aim to produce a fresh piece of writing that retains her first draft’s virtues but avoids its missteps.

I should emphasize that what I mean by revision is not merely swapping one word for another, experimenting with word order, or replacing punctuation marks. That kind of textual tinkering can be a playful method for stepping into a revision — or a satisfying way to conclude one — but by itself is no substitute for a comprehensive rewrite.

Below is a list of revision exercises that I have picked up in my years as a student and a teacher. I hope that these tips will help my students transform their drafts — which are often more praise-worthy than they suspect —  into successful papers. 

Revision: A User’s Guide

1. Let your paper sit. The first step of rewriting is to separate yourself from your work. Ideally, you should allow yourself a day or two away before you reread your draft. If you are working on a deadline, you should still afford yourself a short break. Go for a walk, make a cup of coffee, or play with your cat. (If you don’t have cat, consider getting one. A feline is a writer’s best friend.) This time away gives you distance from your work’s errors and weaknesses, and combats your brain’s impulse to read what you meant to write, rather than what is on the page.
2. Print a hard copy and read it aloud. Don’t be embarrassed! Reading your paper aloud forces you to review your work slowly and carefully and encourages you to engage with your prose style. As you read, ask yourself: where are my sentences awkward, unwieldy, or choppy? Use your ear as a tool. If a sentence sounds strange, you should probably rewrite it. Similarly, note the aspects of your paper that strike you as successful. You should try to capture the tone and style of these effective moments in your second draft.
3. Write a one-sentence summary of each paragraph of your paper. This mini-exercise, which you can perform in the margins of your essay or on a separate sheet of paper, encourages you to take a bird’s-eye view of your argument’s structure. As you reread these summaries, look for sentences that stand out as repetitive, extraneous, or out-of-place. Similarly, ask yourself if there are any gaps in your paper. If your structure is strong, your one-sentence summaries should read as a coherent outline of your paper.
4. Write a revision as a new word document. Using your old draft (which at this point should be covered with notes, corrections, and marginalia), begin your second draft on a blank document. This crucial part of the writing process ensures that your revision is a new occasion for writing and not a tweaked version of your first draft. As you write, consult your chain of one-sentence summaries and ask yourself whether they still reflect the paper you wish to write. If they do, consider incorporating these summaries as topic sentences (or elsewhere). If they don’t, then allow your new draft to break free of the old one. The beauty of a second (and third and fourth) draft is in the way it deviates from your initial efforts.
5. Try to take pleasure in the process. Consider your revision as a chance to play with your ideas again and use them to build something new. Take comfort in the fact that writing, unlike many aspects of life, permits second chances.