Be It Hereby Resolved

[mimmoore]

It’s January, and I am seeing signs of resolutions everywhere: explicit declarations of relationship, health, and professional goals, along with tacit commitments indicated by images of tracking devices, fitness equipment, organic fruits and veggies, garden plans, drawers or closets awaiting organization, and booklists. 

Resolve—along with related forms resolution and resolute—is a rich and powerful word, brought into English as a verb from Latin and extended via functional shift to serve also as noun. We resolve (make resolutions) to address what is unresolved—dissonant, jumbled, confused, unsettled, or lacking—in music, in labs, in institutions, in government, and in ourselves. 

After spending a day with colleagues and workshop leader Asao Inoue reflecting on our pedagogy and, in particular, our assessment and feedback practices, I am ready to make some resolutions for my FYC and IRW co-requisite classrooms this spring. I am also inspired by Traci Gardner’s "My New School Year’s Resolutions."

Here are my resolutions for this semester:

1. Expand use of social media/technology to support collaborative activities outside the classroom, with an overarching goal of fostering a deeper sense of community within the class. Collaborative activities—from shared reading experiences to peer review—is difficult to establish (much less sustain) in the 150 minutes we are together weekly. And all too easily, these activities within my classes can become perfunctory, not constructive. As a starting point, I want to explore joint annotations of some sections of our more difficult readings using Google Docs.
2. Give students more options and opportunities to negotiate our classroom activities and (some) assignment parameters. One of the “big ideas” or threshold concepts that I use to structure my writing course is that all writing involves choices that affect meaning, whether words, structures, details, punctuation, or organization. But I suspect it’s difficult for students to accept the potential power of (and responsibility for) smaller writing decisions when they have little sense of agency for broader learning activities in the classroom.
3. Make a meaningful portion of a student’s grade related to the labor the student has invested in the process of the course (see Traci Gardner's post, as well as Asao Inoue’s Labor-Based Grading Contract). I am an Alabama Crimson Tide football fan (I hope I won’t lose too many readers at this point!), and I have read a several articles about Nick Saban’s approach to coaching, which centers on what he calls “the process.” He asks his players to commit to the process—the rigorous and regular work that goes into a season and into each individual game—not to a specific outcome. Players can control the time devoted to the process, but they cannot control (not fully!) the outcome. I am going to play with an analogy to Saban’s coaching this semester, asking my students to commit to a rigorous process that requires time: completing drafts, participating in workshops, reading (and annotating readings collaboratively), and exploring language with me. I am asking them to trust this process, and a significant portion of their grade will be derived from their willingness to devote time to this process, regardless of the final outcome or product.
4. Introduce vocabulary and concepts from rhetorical and systemic-functional grammars. I have been using a writing-about-writing foundation for my FYC and co-requisite courses for a few years now, and I am pleased with the results. But I am not yet satisfied with my approach to grammar within that framework, and I’d like to experiment with the metalanguage of rhetorical grammar and SFG as strategies for helping students re-envision their grammatical choices.  
5. Reduce the number of major writing assignments so that students can spend more time on them, seeing their investment in the process of these assignments yield intellectual insights that encourage them to continue reading and writing. Similarly, I plan to increase opportunities for low-stakes, exploratory writing and reflective writing.

My resolutions come from the tensions I have been wrestling with for the past couple of years: fair, meaningful, and useful assessments; effective collaboration; grammatical instruction that empowers student choices.

What are your resolutions for teaching in the coming year?