I was recently invited to Southern Utah University by Dr. Julia Comb to talk about writing on November 10. She wanted me to do two things: 1) a 30-40-minute lunchtime presentation to faculty on bringing writing into their classrooms; and 2) a 90-minute workshop on writing practices for students.
Below are the slides and text from my presentation to faculty. Since this was a buffet lunch, our thinking was that a hands-on workshop at this time would not really be as effective as we would like, so, instead, we opted for a straight presentation. My goal was to give them as broad an introduction and as broad an overview as possible. There's a lot here, and it only scratches the surface, so hopefully they'll have me back for a series of workshops in the future! :)
As with most of my presentations these days, SlideShare cannot really capture the presentational aspects or the music and videos that I incorporated, so if you'd like to see the whole thing and watch in "presentation" mode, I'll be happy to send you the ppt file. Just let me know.
Slide 1 - Opening
I want to thank you for inviting me
here today. When Julia asked me to talk about writing with all of you, I was
jazzed. Something that I love to talk about, some say something that I can't
shut up about. But Julia said that since it was a buffet that I probably
shouldn't try to do a workshop (maybe something that we can do in the future!)
So I thought, instead, that I would try to give you some broad coverage on
writing in the classroom. This means that I'm going to try to cram A LOT into
my talk today. To stay on time (30-40 minutes), I'll read from prepared notes.
Here we go!
Slides 2-10
Write Bytes appears to be a fantastic
program, and can be used to promote important conversations that revolve around
writing. And that’s what I’m going to take as my charge today: What are ways
that you all can frame the conversations around writing for the future? I hope
when I’m done that I can give you some ideas for future discussions, future
conversations, future brown bags, future workshops. I'm sure Julia will be
ready and willing to continue the conversations and arrange for future
opportunities. But I also want to talk about one of my personal hobby horses:
How can we integrate writing in ways that support our teaching goals but are
not OVERTIME? In other words, how can we use all the pedagogical tools at our
disposal, especially writing, and still maintain work-life balance? Before I
answer these questions, questions which may possibly ask you to think about
changes in all kinds of fundamental ways, I want express the sincerity of my
message.
As I was planning this presentation, I
read an interesting post by Kate Bowles on institutional change that posed a
whole bevy of questions that she wanted answered before she would agree to
willingly participate. To me, her questions capture the intellectual skepticism
that faculty often bring to institutional change. And since bringing writing
into classrooms across disciplines/across the curriculum often arise as
institutional initiatives (not that that is what is going on here), but I found
her questions compelling enough that I wanted to use them as a starting point,
as a way, I hope, to convince you to take next steps and participate in future
opportunities to bring writing into your classroom more effectively and more
efficiently.
For me, the reason that I'm here is to
show you that a powerful pedagogical tool is at your disposal and that it
shouldn't be difficult to use, or complicated, or overly time-consuming
(although, all pedagogical tools are, for the most part, time-consuming).
Writing is ubiquitous, especially in a digital age, and so if it's not a part
of your teaching toolbox, then that, in my mind, is a problem. And this cuts
across disciplines and across the curriculum, something that very well could be
an institutional need.
And while I don't know the specifics of
your situation and how much you use or believe you need to use writing in the
classroom, the fact that you have me here, and the fact that you are all here
willing to listen and to engage, tells me that my message may be applicable.
And whether or not this
"problem" is institutional, I will offer you ideas and starting
points that will make your teaching lives better, more manageable. Obviously,
however, 30-40 minutes to listen to me yap will not do it alone, but this can
be the start of something better in all kinds of ways. Writing, for me, has
that kind of power.
I'll briefly describe for you the ways
that we have used these ideas in a variety of writing programs, strategies that
helped writing teachers operate from a 10-hour-per-week perspective. In other
words, we instituted practices that allowed our writing teachers to complete
all of their work in no more than 10 hours per section, that includes Time
in class, Time in office hours, Time preparing for class, Time
responding to and evaluating student writing, and Time in teacher
development.
And while I haven't spent much time
evaluating your institutional environment, I do believe that everything I
describe here today can be incorporated into your regular activities; more
importantly, I situate all of my suggestions based on you making choices based
on your values, your teaching goals and your teaching practices. They really
should fit seamlessly with the work that you currently do and can add all kinds
of value in the long run.
So, I have two primary goals for this
talk today. First, I want to offer you a way to frame future conversations
around writing, to give you a common language for exploring the possibilities
in the future. Ideally, each practice and activity that I describe can take the
form of a guided discussion, or a brown bag, or a workshop in the future. My
second goal is probably more intriguing, and that's to convince you that doing
more with writing, especially more at the front end of your course and project
design processes, can actually mean working less! Yes, you heard it here first.
To meet these goals, I've split my
presentation into four parts. First, why do YOU use writing in the classroom?
Part II, HOW do you use writing in your courses? Part III, how can you be more
effective and efficient using writing in your courses. And Part IV, what can
you all do in the future to help make all this wonderful-ness happen? Sound
like fun? Then let's get to it.
Slides 11-16
As you can see, my emphasis here is on
YOU because, as I said, my firm belief is that we work more effectively if we
can incorporate new activities seamlessly into our normal work routine. Adding
something like writing to your courses should not be an add-on, should not
require you to do MORE work, to pile more helpings on your already too-full plate.
To convince you that my vision is not
cracked, I first need to dispel six common myths about writing in the
classroom. These have been around for as long as we've had writing in the
classroom, and they have been vanquished again and again, but they keep
reappearing. So, I'd like to deal with them one more time.
When this slide appeared, I can
imagine a number of smiles and internal snorts of derision, and while maybe
none of us in this room actually believe that students spend enough time
drafting, revising, and editing, we often assign writing as if this is the
case.
In other words, many a writing
assignment expected the kind of drafting, revising, and editing that you see
playing out on the screen. For example, when we assign writing at the beginning
of the semester and not require drafts or peer review or teacher review before
final submission, we are assuming that students will do all of the work
projected in this short video. But even if students do as much drafting,
revising, and editing as you see in this example, they probably completed it in
a torturously short stretch of time, the last-minute all-nighter. As I always
tell my students, I'm not really interested in reading a first draft that you
wrote at 4:00 in the morning on the day that it was due. But all of us
recognize in this video the time and effort needed to write a quality paper,
and all of us have labored over draft after draft before finally submitting it
for review or for evaluation. Maybe we’re the exceptions.
But too many of us still believe that
we will get a complete draft, one that looks like this one.
But, alas, too often we get our hearts
broken and only get the first draft that, if we're lucky, looks like this one.
So we have to know that without our help, students will NOT spend the necessary
time to create a quality draft or even develop good strategies for writing well
in the future.
Slides 17-18
The second myth applies most
specifically to writing in the classroom because if we don't get the complete
version from above, instead receiving too many first drafts, we oftentimes try
to overcompensate:
Slides 19-21
The next two myths are related and are
the main reasons why so many teachers break out into a cold sweat or wake up
screaming in the night when thinking about using writing in their courses. Do
we need to read everything? Do we even need to evaluate everything? And why do
I see so many papers where the teacher has actually written more than the
student? Why are there more comments than text? Is this helping any of us?
These two myths combined are the basis for stacks of papers and overwork. But
we don't have to look like this:
Slides 22-24
The final two myths get at the heart of
most animosity towards writing on college campuses. There is this belief that there
are teachers out there who brilliantly create these "publishable"
writers each semester and share them all over social media. We see all kinds of
testimonials of the high-quality work that comes out of some of these
classrooms. How valid are these claims? To me, we might as well stand in front
of a mirror and say the Candyman's name three times. As we think about the work
that we do and the goals that we have as teachers, it’s important that we are
honest with ourselves about just how much students can learn in 16 weeks.
But this myth leads directly to the
next one: what is wrong with composition? What are you teaching students in
those classes? And while I have this listed as a myth, it really is a qualified
myth because they do teach writing, but composition courses and composition
programs can not teach writing in all of the ways that all of the different
stakeholders would like. There is no generalizable "writing" that we
can teach students at an early age, no "content." We have to keep in
mind that this is only a myth because the "fact" is that writing is
not something you ultimately "get" once and for all, there is
no inoculation, writing is something that all of us have to work on for a
lifetime, and even then, we continue to learn new ways of doing things, new
strategies, new practices. Come to the student workshop tonight and I’ll tell
you about all of the ways that my own writing practices have changed
drastically in the last few years.
So now we have a baseline, a starting
point for thinking about writing in our classrooms, for thinking about writing
in more constructive ways.
Slides 25-40
As I've said, and as I will discuss
shortly, writing is a versatile teaching tool, so there really is no reason why
you shouldn't use writing to meet your goals. I really want to focus on you
using writing for your reasons.
Teachers that I have talked to over the
years are often hesitant to use writing because they buy into the myths, or
recall how writing was “used” on them. Writing was (still is, predominantly)
used to deliver information (in “boring” text books and lecture notes), writing
was used to test for recall (in exams), and writing was used, mostly in
mysterious ways, to differentiate abilities (grades on essay exams and term
papers).
Likewise, understanding how you write
(and I'm assuming that writing is a social process for you, embodied in your
interactions with colleagues, family, co-researchers, and reviewers) is a key
to understanding and developing empathy for how your students write. It’s also
the key to teaching them the modes, manners, and conventions of communicating
in any given field. Teaching writing, in other words, is not just a matter of
teaching students how to edit academic English (which is what happens when you
emphasize surface-level “errors” in grading). And, as I'll describe later,
writing involves the process of inquiry from start to finish, and modes of
inquiry vary from field to field.
In this respect, as you can see, there
are myriad reasons why we might use writing in our courses. So the most
important consideration as you prepare to bring writing in your classroom is to
think about tasks that are linked to key issues of the course, but also to
students’ lived experience. Writing activities need to keep students interested
in the task at hand and also develop and refine the particular skills that you
deem important. Short, in-class writing activities can be simple—focusing on
interpreting a particular text’s argument—or complex—focusing on the “big”
questions of your field. Once you determine what you want students to learn or
know how to do, it becomes fairly easy to incorporate writing activities that
facilitate these goals. Of course, these goals should be articulated on the
levels of the course, the module or project, and tied explicitly to particular
texts or in-class lesson. While it may seem hard at first, thinking in terms of
macro and micro outcomes becomes easier as you become more adept at designing
writing activities tailored to particular goals.
Many of the writing activities that
I'll be describing are not necessarily concerned with a final “product” as much
as they are with capitalizing on the early stages of the writing process to
assist students in identifying, exploring, and developing insights about particular
problems posed by the teacher or, in due time, the students themselves. These
kinds of writing activities are typically known as informal writing assignments
because they focus students on critical thinking activities that help us
discover or develop or clarify our understanding of course materials and
concepts.
Slides 41-44
So, to reiterate, using writing in your
courses should be about meeting your teaching goals and students learning
goals. The advantage of this is that it allows us to articulate our work with
students as transparently as possible.
For me, this means aligning with the
goals articulated by our colleague at UNLV, Mary-Ann Winklemes, who is the
Director of the Transparency in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
project. For me, these three questions can be applied to any activity or
project or course that you design. Or if you want to take it a step further,
this transparency (these questions) can be applied to the assessment that we do
as individuals, as a program, or as a major. As I'll discuss shortly, you can
design all kinds of writing activities designed to determine if students meet
project evaluation criteria, course outcomes, or larger program goals.
For example, in our professional
writing program, our program assessment begins in a fairly typical way, and
this image represents for us the ways that all the features are designed to
work together. We have seven program goals, and each of the outcomes for each
of the courses and each of the criteria for each of the projects are meant to
connect with each other and with these seven goals. And we want to be able to
show this in our program assessments.
So, what might this look like? Ah, now
he's starting to get at it. Maybe something more than just abstractions?
:)
Slides 45-47
Historically, (well, since the
eighties, give or take), writing activities are normally categorized as Writing
to Learn or Learning to Write. And while they can be separate, they can also be
linked in all kinds of fun and interesting ways.
Writing to learn are usually in-class
freewriting activities that involve students taking a few minutes at the start,
middle, or end of class to synthesize what they have gleaned up to that point.
Tell students they should write quickly and efficiently, not worrying about
surface-level correctness. The goal is to stem the flow of information and
provide students the opportunity to reflect on lectures, readings, or
activities. This “processing” time can increase retention. Also, knowing they
will be asked to do this forces students to prepare more thoroughly and listen
more actively. This kind of writing can help students summarize a text,
define key terms, or raise questions for further discussion, create a list of
key features of a concept, or tell you who/what/where/when. These simple
tasks—formalizing their note taking—are the building blocks for higher-level
thinking and help students engage the issues of the course.
Student responses may at times be
fragmentary, but the act of writing will help them begin to articulate their
thinking and allow you to design more effective classroom activities.
For example, a minute paper is an
excellent end-of-class activity for students that helps them summarize,
evaluate, or question the day’s activities and gives you an understanding of
what they know, don’t know, or want to know about that day’s topic without a
heavy burden placed on you.
Or you can ask students to write a
knowledge probe on their topic that you can collect and respond to quickly and
efficiently. This helps students focus more effectively on their research and
provides you with a quick overview of their projects. Summarizing activities
help students re-define key concepts or ideas by putting them into their own
words. This kind of translation helps students demonstrate a more complex
understanding because they have incorporated the material enough to think of it
in their own terms, rather than just the regurgitation of textbook definitions.
Slides 48-50
Formal writing, unlike informal
writing, calls for “finished,” “polished,” or “manuscript” quality writing.
Moreover, these formal writing assignments should provide numerous
opportunities to help students fundamentally improve their thinking and
writing. As you know from your own experience, this kind of writing often
requires several revisions, so they also provide an opportunity to model the
effective behavior of successful writers.
For me, the formal writing assignment
should do more than just provide a “hoop” for students to jump through, for any
extended research activity should promote critical literacy for students and
help them see how information is used in academic classrooms and as a daily
part of their lives outside the classroom. What should distinguish the formal
writing assignment is an emphasis on the relationships among writer, reader,
text, and context, and the process that models the kinds of intellectual
behavior that we expect from research performed in our discipline.
But, as you can see, while the
traditional research paper remains a staple on many campuses, we don't have to
limit ourselves to that somewhat archaic genre. Think about the kinds of
writing that occurs most frequently in your discipline or the kind of genres
that are most common, and develop a formal project based on that.
But as you begin to develop your
projects, I want you to keep a few things in mind relative to these principles:
- Establish a reason for the
assignment that meets your pedagogical goals
- Determine the skills that you feel
students should develop in doing a long-term project based on a particular
research method or genre.
- Determine information-gathering
and research techniques that you believe students need to learn
- Select a topic that students can
explore in detail and that will have some meaning to them
- Design an assignment handout that
provides students with all of the relevant details
- Create prompts to initiate student
thinking about the topic
- Build in-class and out-of-class
activities that help students develop particular skills and lead them to
the final product
- Incorporate the activities for the
assignment into the course curriculum so that they coincide with the
issues discussed in class
- Finally, involve students in the
planning, reading, and responding associated with any formal writing
assignment
In other words, the more front-end
planning that you do, the less you work on the back end.
Slides 51-56
To show this, let me give you a bit of
an extended example using a project template that we employ in our professional
writing program. Our project process begins with an enhanced version of a
traditional writing process. That traditional model was primarily individual,
primarily linear. But, for us, we want to think of our projects as cognitive
process and social practice.
As cognitive process, our projects
(like students' learning) are developmental and recursive. Considered
developmentally, we can describe our projects as evolving through these stages,
but we expect it to be recursive, not linear: learners move back and forth
among the stages as they work toward submission of project deliverables.
As social practice, we want students to
engage with the class, to share knowledge and ask questions, to be sensitive to
their own learning needs while, at the same time, contributing to the larger
ongoing conversations. This open atmosphere helps students learn about and
learn how to choose and use a wide range of strategies that will aid in their
critical learning and reflective practices. We want students to
personalize their experience with the project, to develop from where they are
at, currently, in their thinking and skill levels.
For us, this occurs most seamlessly in
the planning stage and the reflecting stage, a time when students can
articulate what they want to learn and how they will do it. This means our
projects need to be purposeful, have meaning to the students so they engage
with the work (even if it's purely for their own reasons), so they feel like
they are accomplishing things, DOING something. But, as I will discuss shortly,
their work should not be limited to just the deliverables, which soon would
become merely artifacts for a course, rather than models for lifelong learning,
participation on multiple levels in an active constructive process.
While we want students to look inward
for their learning goals, we also expect outward participation, as well. At the
early stages of any project, students are gathering resources for understanding
concepts more fully and for completing the work. They are exploring and
reviewing uses for different software or apps that will help them construct
more effective deliverables. And they are beginning to draft materials for
those deliverables.
These early stages help students
explore and establish a context for the project, so they understand it well enough
to begin to discuss how their work should be evaluated. At this point, we
develop the evaluation criteria as a class. This includes an explicit
understanding that part of their reflection should address the ways that they
met the criteria relative to their own learning goals for the project.
Once the evaluation criteria is
negotiated and agreed upon, drafts of the deliverables can be completed, for
the first time. On this side of the project, student work goes through multiple
drafts, with time set aside for peer review and teacher review before they
submit their work for evaluation. The goal here is to model recursivity, to
encourage trust in multiple perspectives, to allow for the time necessary to
submit quality materials.
We talk about performing higher-order
revisions and lower-order edits before they submit a deliverable for
evaluation. And the deliverables are the only items evaluated. In all of our
courses, the majority of the work is participatory, a contribution to their own
learning and to the learning of their classmates. As you can imagine, the key
to all of this is time. We have to be patient and provide the time for students
to explore, the time to experiment, the time to fail, before they make the move
to final completion. And we think the final outcomes are stellar.
While we are technically a
"writing" course, we teach primarily content-based courses at this
level, such as document design and electronic documents and communication. This
means that while we want them to learn content primarily, we also feel like
they learn the content in more depth by going through a project process, by
setting class time aside to model what effective writing looks like and feels
like. For our program, we seek to create a networked learning environment that
encourages a more collaborative approach to learning, one that privileges
informal and situated learning, and promotes ubiquitous and lifelong learning,
thereby increasing learner control, learner choice, and learner independence.
Slides 57-60
MUSIC – Read me two times, Read twice
today . . .
OK, we've got to this point and many of
you are probably seeing all the same things that you feel make writing an extra
burden and more trouble than it's really worth. So now we can finally get to
the actual point of this presentation: to answer this question right here. And
in concert with that question, we really must answer this one, as well, because
to me, it all comes down to this.
Let me give you an example. A fairly
recent post on the Writing Program Administrators Listserv claims that
when a composition program tried to follow best practices, their teachers were
working 70+ hours per week. Now this post does not mention if these instructors
are teaching a “full load,” but a speaker at a recent Conference on College
Composition and Communication (CCCC) made a similar claim, that if a teacher of
composition taught three sections, then that teacher was automatically working
overtime. Why is that? More importantly, if this kind of workload
comes from “best” practices, then why don't we reevaluate our "best”
practices? Best practices should at least be manageable. So one of my
personal hobby horses is the concept of a "normal" workload. This is
particularly important to the part-time instructor and the graduate student
instructor. Growing up as a working-class kid with a teamster father, I try to
define working issues within the parameters of a full-time workload.
Reviewing teacher workload from this perspective means establishing attainable
standards for successful teaching. Defining professional behavior in terms of
the time necessary to perform the expected activities not only makes explicit
program expectations for teachers, but can also help administrators recognize
those activities and materials necessary for teachers to work more effectively
and more efficiently.
For example, at our university,
teaching four courses is considered full time (I know, I know, but I'm going to
keep it as simple as possible for now), so this means that if a teacher is
teaching full time, then they should not have to spend more than 10 hours per
week on any one section, that includes Time in class, Time in office
hours, Time preparing for class, Time responding to and evaluating
student writing, and Time in teacher development. To assist our writing
teachers, we offer a sample 10-hour-per-week schedule (such as this one from
our Business Writing program). Our teachers should be willing and able to
teach effectively within the parameters of a “full-time” workload. No more. No
less. While some may argue that “teaching is more than a job and less than a
life,” we all need to challenge the veracity of this statement (at least the
first part). Teaching, we believe, is NOT more than a job. It is a remarkably
satisfying job. It is an important job. But it is, at the end of the day, a
job. And we all, at the end of the day, go home to a life. All of our thinking,
all of our planning, all of our administrative energy should begin with an
understanding of the “time” necessary to do the job well.
So, as a preview of my (somewhat windy)
concluding points, 10-hours-per-week offers us a way to reimagine faculty
development and gives us permission to focus on local issues and trust in the
long-term, such as when we determined that our teachers were spending far too
much time on student papers without seeing any significant benefits for
students. This problem was exacerbated by increasing numbers of ESL students;
we had several instructors who felt it was their responsibility to copy edit
every single student’s assignment and mark every single error. Who was learning
in this situation? Certainly not the students based on our program assessment.
So we changed our thinking, with a 10-hours-per-week approach in mind. Our
goals were to reduce teacher workload, reduce administrator workload, and
improve student learning. To achieve these goals, we required teachers to
respond to a draft in process and then (after student revision) evaluate it as
a final product. And each teacher was asked to make this process clear to
students. When students submit a draft to a teacher, they know that they will
be given higher-order feedback at this early stage, designed to help them
improve their draft and improve their writing. As a program, we make it clear
to students that our teachers are writing teachers, they are not editors. The
job of the teacher is not to respond to every single error; instead, the job of
the teacher is to help students understand how to improve their writing by
offering guidance where necessary, along with higher-order and lower-order
strategies. The students are expected to develop their skills for
revision/editing and are expected to take responsibility for their learning. We
reimagined our administrator responsibilities by making program expectations
for teachers and students more explicit and more transparent. Since we changed
our approach, teachers spend less time with student papers and student
complaints dropped significantly.
Slides 61-69
So what does that mean for you? First
let me dispel a few more myths. These are key and connect to everything else
that I'm going to tell you. First, reading two drafts does not double your work
(and, no, it doesn't triple your work, either). You don't have to mark
everything (or read everything, for that matter). And being
"writing-intensive" does not have to mean separate assignments. In
fact, I would argue that it absolutely should NOT include separate and
unrelated assignments. Taking to heart that these are myths is the first step
to bringing writing into your classroom more effectively and more efficiently.
For I truly believe that all faculty have both the knowledge and the
obligation to help students learn the writing skills necessary to participate
in the myriad disciplinary discourses they will encounter. To begin, let's take
to heart what Mick has to say.
Time really is on your side if you
start early. You have to determine your time commitments and plan accordingly.
You can assign writing in all kinds of fun and interesting ways, and still meet
your teaching goals within the time you've allotted. And the two most important
tips is to plan for the entire semester within the confines of your regular
routine, your regular workload.
One way to think of this is by
scaffolding the workload in your class. If you see writing as a tool for
learning and a tool for determining what students know, then you can ask them
to do a good bit of informal writing to develop material for a final project.
From a process perspective, you can spend the first eight weeks of the semester
in the invention/planning stage of the final project, designing a range of
write-to-learn exercises that guide them through a discovery of the best topics
for writing in a particular disciplinary genre. This means that you can review
their work, their thinking, but without the need to put a grade on every
piece of writing. You can certainly hold students accountable for the informal
writing you ask of them, but you can use check/minus grades that help emphasize
the importance of doing thinking-on-paper. In this sense, “ungraded” writing
activities can be very constructive and help you reach the goals that you have
for the class, without overwhelming you with paper.
Once they have some text, some ideas
about what they want to say or do, then, to me, it's imperative that you take
at least one class period to review a variety of samples of the genre, both
effective and ineffective. This way you can have honest conversations about
what you expect from their work and how their work will be evaluated.
Which brings me to my next point,
creating rubrics, or evaluation criteria. They really can work on a variety of
levels to establish expectations, but can also save you time by providing a
language for discussing what you expect out of them, a means for
self-evaluation in their completing the work, and a structure for peer review
comments and activities inside and outside of the classroom.
For example, here's an evaluation sheet
that I use in my Advanced Composition course. Students have to create a series
of blog posts, and this lays out exactly what I expect from them, from an
understanding of audience, to the resources they should use, the structure of
the post, stylistic and design considerations, and whether they revised and
edited their work based on the feedback they've received. Finally, reading two
times really is about responding AND evaluating. 10 minutes per paper. No more.
No less.
It's important to remember that
responding is to work in progress. And, most importantly, this should be to a
draft that's been revised after the students have received peer review
comments. This at least forces them to think about it a bit more, to do a bit
more before you look at it formally for the first time. And you can emphasize
this to the students. Reading it in process forces you to understand that it
shouldn't be perfect (think of your own early drafts), so it gives you
permission to read past the surface errors and focus on content issues, like
accuracy, organization, argument structure, claims, and support. This also
gives you permission to focus on the 2-3 most important issues.
You can't fix everything, so don't try
to copy edit, and you will once again focus on modeling the process and not
creating a perfect product because too often the teachers do too much work to
get that product to a "perfect" state.
And then you evaluate. This is the
final draft. No more chances. Make it clear that students have had at least two
opportunities to get feedback from their peers and from you, so this should be
an example of their best work. You've discussed the criteria in class, you've
looked at samples, so this should just be a final evaluation. Use an evaluation
sheet to provide a brief commentary on the work based on the criteria and could
(maybe should) offer suggestions for improving their writing skills in the
future.
To summarize, some strategies for
grading writing efficiently includes having frank conversations with students
about the evaluation criteria, using a variety of samples that show good and bad
features, requiring a first draft that gets peer response and then is revised
before you see it formally, responding and evaluating their work. And most
importantly, limiting the amount of time that you respond and evaluate. You can
set your own limits, but we like 10 minutes. We do faculty development
workshops where we practice with egg timers. 10 minutes. Another benefit of
this strategy is that it gives every student the same attention. And this
is important. In my experience, too many teachers short change the good writers
because they have to spend so much time on the poor writers. 10 minutes really
does work because it really does get you to focus on the most important
features.
Slides 70-72
All of the strategies that I've
described, I believe, can truly allow you to frame future conversations around
writing and improve working conditions by creating manageable expectations for
students and faculty.
Framing conversations around writing in
the classroom does not mean dictating activities or prescriptive approaches to
teaching. Instead, the conversations are about faculty development, which means
that teachers have discussions about expectations, about standards, about
definitions for successful writing, and articulating the kinds of support
structures necessary for their long-term success. More importantly, faculty
development interrogates and defines working conditions in the context of the
kinds of writing that you want to do. Faculty development is more than making
writing in the classroom better. Faculty development is about making our LIVES
better.
I'll conclude by calling for continued
conversations, brown bags, and workshops for bringing writing into your
classrooms more effectively and more efficiently, all of which I'm sure that
Julia can provide. Or if you're really willing to drink the Kool Aid, you could
always bring me back for some hands-on work. Always willing to come join in on
the fun!
Thanks for having me.
Questions?
Slide 72 - Fade Out
