What’s your vision for an individual or small group writing conference with first-year and corequisite writers—especially when they have submitted drafts in advance? Do you see the conference as a predictable genre, one that will unfold according to a standard script? Or is it something else? This semester, I am working with a group of junior and senior writing fellows, all of whom are partnering with first-year and corequisite writing classes. In preparation for the fellows’ first week of interaction in their assigned courses, I wanted them to think about what a writing conference looks like. Ideally, we noted, first-year writers will approach fellows with a clear sense of the help they want and a set of questions to address. But in reality, that rarely happens: initial conferences between novice writers and novice fellows may lapse into stretches of awkward silence, and fellows may feel compelled to fill that silence with “you shoulds” and “you coulds.” Queries and suggestions may be met with shrugs, nods, or respectful “oks.”  I asked fellows to consider some sample drafts and think about how they would initiate discussion during the writing conference: what would their opening gambit be? They shared these initial moves—both questions and comments—with the rest of the group, posting anonymous digital sticky notes.   Next, I invited fellows to analyze those opening moves much like they would the introductory paragraphs of a text. How might these comments and questions frame the following discussion? What expectations would those moves establish for student writers? Did the comments and questions give prominence to the student writer, the writer’s process, the form or style of the text, the assignment, language, developing content, the fellow as reader, or something else? Was an invitation to dialogue articulated or implied? Was a stance taken? As we began to evaluate the questions and comments we had generated, I noticed a growing sense of concern among the fellows: “I think I did this wrong.”  In short, they experienced in our preparation session exactly what first-year writers often experience during conferences: what they hear in questioning is that they “did it wrong.”   Of course, the fellows weren’t “doing it wrong.” They had targeted significant concerns about these early drafts. But conference spaces, like developing texts from the first-year writers, are sites of “logogenesis”—the making of meaning—where participants are establishing identities, navigating relationships, testing understanding, and making sense of genre conventions. As experienced college writers, the fellows recognize the complexity of writing choices and the impact of those choices on the resulting text. I want them to see they can apply a similar thinking process to their choices within the conference. In student conferences, we of course want to work on the paper at hand. But with corequisite writers in particular, fellows may also want to affirm student writers as writers, develop empathy, encourage agency, practice metalanguage, and offer opportunities for play. Thus, their opening gambits might include these: What is the big statement you wish to make with this assignment? What’s your biggest struggle with this paper? What part of your paper do you like the best? Why? What part of the paper needs the most attention right now? Wow! What a story—that’s really powerful. I struggled when I first read this assignment. How about you? As the fellows imagined opening moves, they realized they wanted more information:  when they get student drafts for review, where will students be in the process? Will they have received any instructor feedback yet? Are these drafts going to be assessed by a rubric? How many additional revisions will students have? What is the instructor’s goal for the conferences between fellows and students? These questions framed the fellows’ next session, when they discussed logistics and expectations with their assigned instructors.  When the fellows meet with first-year writers for the first time, the conferences may be just as rough as the student drafts they discuss. But if the fellows can reflect on the conferences as texts, critically, they can revise or edit their conference strategies, even as they assist first-year writing students to do the same with their papers.  I am excited about what will occur in the conferences—both for the first-year writers and the fellows. I suspect their reflections will prompt me to revisit my own conferencing strategies. How about you? How do you promote conversation in your individual conferences?  ... View more

The following interview with Haleh Azimi and Elsbeth Mantler, Co-directors of the Community College of Baltimore County’s Accelerated Learning Program, focuses on professional development for faculty teaching corequisite composition and was conducted via email in December of 2021. This is the first of four parts. David Starkey: First, I want to say how lucky I feel to be able to talk with the two of you about your role in faculty development for instructors teaching accelerated/corequisite composition. Can you tell me a bit about how you came to take on this role at the Community College of Baltimore County? Haleh Azimi: Peter Adams, the founder of the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) designed the ALP leadership structure with our Dean of Developmental Education and the Vice President of Instruction. When ALP was instituted at CCBC in 2009, ALP was a co-requisite course sequence that paired Composition I with English 052 (Basic Writing). After Peter retired, Professor Susan Gabriel became the director of the program which shifted to an integrated reading and writing model (IRW). The configuration shifted in 2016 so that Composition I was paired with Academic Literacy 053 (ACLT). Critical reading instruction then became infused in the ALP support course. DS: So, you have a co-curricular model. HA: Yes, and that model influenced the leadership structure because this new course arrangement consisted of an English class and an Academic Literacy class. CCBC looked at this new structure to build the new leadership model, which is a co-directorship. DS: Haleh, you’re an Academic Literacy faculty member, and Elsbeth teaches in the English department. HA: We come from the two disciplines that form the ALP course. The best part of this co-directorship is that I get to work with my colleague, Elsbeth, on such a close basis, and both of us also teach an ALP class every semester. We think this is essential in leading this program because it gives us an opportunity to grapple with the same issues other faculty deal with on a first-hand basis. This has truly been the most collaborative partnership, and one of the most rewarding parts of our work is that we both learn so much from each other regarding discipline-specific practices. One example of this would be ways to address students’ grammar in context. Prior to collaborating with the English department, I would teach discrete skills that had nothing to do with what they were writing about. Now, I focus my efforts on providing just-in-time support based on individual student needs. So, if a student has a chronic writing issue, I will work with them individually with their own writing. Elsbeth Mantler: I’ve learned so much about incorporating critical reading strategies from Haleh and others in her discipline. Before I started collaborating with ACLT faculty, I would assign students complex readings with no context about who wrote it, when it was written, and what it was about. Oftentimes, students would come in having read the assigned reading but not understanding a lot of the concepts presented in the reading. Now that I have learned more about reading strategies, I spend a lot of time scaffolding the readings with pre-reading strategies. I have students research topics, authors, and publications prior to even reading an article. This helps students access prior knowledge, and it provides context for what they are about to study. This cross-collaboration between English and Academic Literacy is the reason why this partnership has been so successful – but I also want to reiterate that teaching as part of my co-director role is invaluable because I love our students, and I am able to remain current on ALP developments. The teaching provides an opportunity for both of us to put in practice new methodologies.  ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Michelle Graber, Instructor of English and Communications at Mitchell Technical College.   Superheroes Students sit six feet apart – eyes beaming up at me expectantly, masks askew. I’ve never noticed so many of my students’ eyes: shades of blue, brown, green, and hazel. I wonder what the rest of their faces look like, this sea of superheroes tolerating the mandated masking of their identities for the sake of public approval. Wow. I’m teaching superheroes. I face the class during the pandemic peak and push them through their studies. One student raises his hand to ask a question, and I find myself contemplating Charlie Brown’s problems understanding his teacher. She must’ve been wearing a mask, too. “A little louder, please,” I say, trying to resist leaning forward to hear better as I meet the grass-green orbs of the student whose name I can’t associate with a face and whose words I cannot hear.    Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Stuart Barbier, a Professor of English at Delta College.   Pension “Your Internet connection is unstable,” warned my computer during yet another Zoom. That’s not the only thing that’s unstable, I thought, unable to separate non-work life (gardening and PBS period dramas) from work life (freshman composition and workplace drama). Face-to-face, I taught all students at the same time, answering questions within the class well enough that students rarely contacted me otherwise. Online? Endless emails, texts, phone calls, and videos, assignments trickling in like water torture, twenty-four/seven, as I turn my computer on when I get up and off when I go to bed. Retire, a friend suggested. Alas, too young.     Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

When many of us Baby Boomers and Gen Xers received our composition training, discussions of how to teach reading were an afterthought, if they were addressed at all. Fortunately, in recent years that has changed, and there’s currently a much-needed emphasis on integrating reading and writing in all composition courses, whether or not the word “reading” appears in the catalog description. While contemporary research about reading has begun to flourish (see the Works Cited and Suggested Reading List in the CCCC Statement below), in this post I’d like to focus on three especially valuable sources for supporting college level reading: the Reading Apprenticeship program, the essay collection Deep Reading, and the “CCCC Position Statement on the Role of Reading in College Writing Classrooms.” The Reading Apprenticeship program began in San Francisco in the 1990s and has become a robust and many-armed national entity. While enrolling in a Reading Apprenticeship class is not cheap—the 7-week introductory course costs $750—many institutions are willing to cover the cost for interested faculty. Moreover, much of the good sense and practical classroom activities covered in the courses are distilled in Reading for Understanding. The book and program employ an equity-minded, asset-based approach, building on students’ previous experiences as readers and creating a safe space for practicing common problem-solving strategies such as collaborative reading, chunking, inference, LINK (List, Inquire Note, Know), and the “Think Aloud” routine, in which a student reports to another student what they are thinking during the act of reading aloud. Throughout the book and courses, the emphasis is on metacognition, a conversation that is “both internal, as individual readers observe their own minds in action, and external, when readers discuss what they are noticing, what they are stumped by, and how they are solving reading problems” (89). Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom (NCTE, 2017) is a “celebration of literacy, intellectual generosity, and classrooms alive with deep reading and deep learning” (xxiv). In the book’s introduction, editors Patrick Sullivan, Howard Tinberg and Sheridan Blau refer to Elizabeth Wardle’s theories of two distinct learning propensities: “problem-exploring dispositions” and “answer-getting dispositions.” Clearly, the latter is preferable for inquiry-based college reading, and yet legislators continually attempt to proscribe the “messiness of deep thinking,” which Wardle argues “can be understood as an attempt to limit the kind of thinking that students and citizens have the tools to do” (xvi). The editors cite another reason for the disconnect between reading and writing in higher education: much of the most vigorous work on reading has been “written by and for secondary school teachers,” which “has helped perpetuate the idea in our discipline that reading instruction is the concern of K-12 educators only and does not require the attention of college instructors” (xvii). Happily, Deep Reading offers a wealth of approaches to reading instruction from a variety of instructors. Among the important areas the collection addresses are the reading attitudes and practices students bring with them from high school to college, strategies for cultivating reading skills students already possess, and the necessity of teaching “rhetorical reading,” which Tinberg argues in his chapter is particularly important in peer review, where “any reading of another’s draft needs to take into consideration the situation that produced the draft and the criteria and set of expectations that helped shape the writing” (253). In March of this year, CCCC released its “Position Statement on the Role of Reading in College Writing Classrooms.” The statement “affirms the need to develop accessible and effective reading pedagogies in college writing classrooms so that students can engage more deeply in all of their courses and develop the reading abilities that will be essential to their success in college, in their careers, and for their participation in a democratic society.” Those familiar with the Reading Apprenticeship program and Deep Reading will find a number of familiar concepts in the statement, including the four central principles for supporting the teaching and learning of reading: Teach reading comprehension. Teach reading approaches that move beyond basic comprehension. Foster mindful reading to encourage students to think metacognitively about their reading in preparation for a variety of reading in different contexts Teach students how to read texts closely and focus on significant details and patterns. Helpfully, each of these principles is accompanied by five specific strategies for employing the principle in the classroom. And the CCCC Statement offers a pointed reminder that instructors are never too old or young “to develop reading pedagogies that serve ever-changing student populations and are responsive to the contemporary moment.” ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Heidi Rosenberg, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Wisconsin Business School.   Teaching in the Time of COVID Shana says she’s all right. How can I help? Each student is a square within a square I hold. She nearly pulled her finger off—it got caught so typing is one-fingered. She moved to her own place. She was pregnant, then not. The father of the never-born-baby smacks. I email, it’s her birthday—“happy birthday.” I am the only one who said that.  Her family—This is why I moved out. I say, You didn’t move far enough. She has a scholarship, job, apartment. We come to terms. One thing she asks: how do I stay when there’s nothing?     Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

As we move closer to the second year of the Covid pandemic, it has become something of a truism that online education is not as effective as face-to-face instruction. A September UCLA Health study, for instance, reported that 93% of undergraduates surveyed “were having trouble coping with pandemic stressors.” Those challenges have been especially hard on first-year college students. Writing in Insider Higher Ed, Maria Carrasco cites an ACT report in which students refer to issues with technology, as well as “lack of motivation, difficulty retaining information and trouble understanding concepts without ‘hands-on’ experience as their biggest hurdles.”             There’s no doubt that online instruction presents obstacles for many students, whether it’s a lack of reliable internet access or an inability to make human connections through digital platforms. And yet e-learning, in some form or another, appears here to stay. As we come to terms with that fact, it’s worth identifying those areas where online education is most effective. In first-year composition, peer review of drafts is a particularly productive locus for communal digital learning.             Peer review has long been a staple of in-person composition courses, and for good reason. It’s a fairly low-stakes—usually ungraded—activity that allows students to stretch their wings as both writers and readers of expository prose. When it is going well, peer review encourages students to think on their feet and to offer insights that may not have occurred to their instructor. Presenting a draft to their classmates makes it clear to that student writing has a real, live audience.             And yet peer review in the face-to-face classroom can too easily veer into a conversational free-for-all, where talk about last weekend’s activities overshadows discussions of an essay’s organization and purpose. Unfortunately, even when students stick to the topic, their advice may counter to our process pedagogy (e.g., “This is great as it is—don’t change anything”). Moreover, monitoring and shaping the progress of five or more separate peer groups scattered around a classroom can also be too much for a single instructor to handle. Even in the smaller corequisite section, when it’s easier for the instructor to help maintain focus, too often, in my experience, entropy prevails.             In contrast, asynchronous online peer groups offer a more deliberative revision experience. Whereas the in-person peer review session may, despite the best planning, quickly go off-track, the online peer group is driven by the questions the instructor provides. Instructors have a written record of who has commented and what they have said. Helpful advice can be fostered and questionable advice can be addressed in a way that honors the commenting student’s thinking, yet guides it towards an approach more in keeping with the instructor’s pedagogy.             The asynchronous format also provides students with more time to respond. Too often, in face-to-face peer review, the glibbest person takes over the discussion, with shy students effectively shut out of the conversation. However, the most thoughtful peer comments tend to be the product of careful rereading and reflection, and online peer review enables students to sit with their observations rather than blurting them out in a competitive fashion.             Carrasco points out that “students from low-income families and…first-generation students had limited access to both technology and the internet,” and I in no way want to minimize the complications facing students trying to reach what Katz et al. call “remote learning proficiency.” Not surprisingly, students with difficulty accessing digital spaces are frequently among those most eager for in-person instruction. However, students who, for whatever reason, do find themselves in an online course, are better served by an asynchronous than a synchronous experience when it comes to developing “workarounds for spotty internet and malfunctioning devices.”             Once they are connected, online peer review allows students to comment on each other’s work in a far more robust manner than those of us who came of age in the analog classroom could ever have imagined. Whether it is employing a tool as basic as the Comments feature in a Google doc to annotate a passage, or taking advantage of sophisticated educational software like Achieve, the available technology is remarkable, to say the least.             My final peer review question for students is this: “Do you think the student writer enjoyed composing this essay? If not, what can the student do to make the essay topic their own?” I like to end by reminding everyone in the peer review group that—however many suggestions they receive from their classmates—ultimately, the writing they do belongs to them. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Patrick Morgan, Assistant Professor of English and Director of First-Year and Professional Writing at the University of Louisiana Monroe.   Tragedy to Hope It was my first semester teaching in the Deep South. Introducing a narrative unit to twenty-four freshman writers, I shared that apocryphal story about Ernest Hemingway betting a bunch of writers that he could compose a six-word short story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” I asked them to unpack the story. Twenty-three students offered the usual tragedies: variations on infant mortality and infertility. One shy student said, “Maybe the author is a shoemaker.” And just like that, tragedy turned to hope. This was the story of an enterprising cobbler carving out the market for new shoes.       Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

We know from our own experience, and from mountains of research (see Iowa State’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching to get a sense of what’s out there), that students need to feel like they belong in our classrooms if they are going to succeed. We foster this sense of belonging in everything we do: from the way we greet students on their first day in class to the way say goodbye on their final day.  For me, though, course design is the first area of focus that comes to mind when I think about how to ensure students feel they are an integral part of the class. We can help our students feel at home even before they arrive in our classrooms by carefully planning the fifteen weeks we will share with them so that our time spent together is equitable, clear, relevant, and reflective. The Course Design Equity and Inclusion Rubric available at Stanford’s Teaching Commons offers a helpful way to evaluate one’s own course content. The rubric features categories such as “Personal Connections and Relevance,” “Transparency of Content,” “Diversity of Perspectives” and “Diversity of Media” that will remind instructors—especially those of us who have been around a while—to take a fresh look at not only what material we are assigning but how we expect students to respond to it. The pandemic has reminded us how reliant we have become on technology to enable learning, but also how tentative our connections to that technology sometimes are. It’s vital, therefore, that while we take advantage of the learning resources that are at hand, we make no easy assumptions about students’ access to or competence in the technosphere. As Clint Smith points out in his 2019 Atlantic article “Elite Colleges Constantly Tell Low-Income Students That They Do Not Belong,” it is wrong to treat all students “as homogeneous…, as if they all navigate these schools in the same way.” Naturally, our course homepage and syllabus should be easy to read and easy to navigate. We not only model clear writing for our students in these documents, but we also ensure that our expectations and theirs are in concert. And it is here that we demonstrate—by assigning diverse authors and content-creators in varied genres—that we honor a range of ways of expressing ideas and opinions. Of course, students cannot succeed unless their basic needs are met. Even the most dedicated student will necessarily prioritize shelter and food over a problem-solution essay. Our awareness of our campus’s full resources, and our ability to guide students directly to the resources they need, is a clear sign that we believe all students belong in our classes. Instructors in every discipline take for granted the importance of their own field of study, but those of us in English probably feel that the importance of our subject is self-evident. It’s obvious to us that success in college will depend, to a large extent, on one’s ability to communicate clearly and persuasively. However, our discipline’s relevance may not be immediately apparent to a student planning to study Chemistry or Computer Science, and we need early and often to connect the value of effective written and spoken communication to success across the curriculum. In a study of college students from nonmajor sections of biology, psychology, and English, researchers found that students feel an increased sense of belonging to the course in which they are enrolled when they perceive that “academic tasks are interesting, important, and useful” (Freeman et al 205). Finally, we must plan time throughout the semester for students’ self-reflection. In my experience, these meta-conversations about college that students may initially feel are off-topic, may wind up being as important as any discussion of course content. Maithreyi Gopalan and Shannon Brady recommend creating an environment “that helps students feel connected to each other, to faculty and staff, and to the institution.” Among their suggestions for fostering this sense of belonging is foregrounding the idea that “certain kinds of challenges in the transition to college…are common, shared by many students from diverse backgrounds, and likely to abate over time. Such thoughtful outreach seems to be especially powerful for Black, Latinx, Native, and first-generation students.” Granted, Day One of any class is a crucial one, but “Day Zero”—the planning that takes place before the course even starts—is just as important. ... View more

Tiny Teaching Stories: Launch  Share Your Inspirational, Motivational or Funny Teaching Anecdotes With Us! Hello! I am excited to announce the launch of a new series on Bedford Bits: Tiny Teaching Stories, and to invite your participation.  What are Tiny Teaching Stories, you ask? See our introductory video or view our hub here:   To get us started, I'd like to share my own Tiny Teaching Story with you. We were small zoom squares, remote, distant, across 4 continents. In our online writing class, I talked about the need to create a classroom community; they filled the chatbox talk with fears about the pandemic, who had died, and who was in the hospital. Isabelle, in Vietnam, sprawled on her pink ruffled bedspread; Zara, in Pakistan, turned off her video to leave class for morning prayers. We understood that we would never see each other in person; we would always be at a distance, always in gallery view. And yet, when I missed class on the day my mother died, from across 4 continents they sent me poems of consolation and a bouquet of sunflowers.   Now, we want to hear from you. Send us your Tiny Teaching Story! Submit your Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com. Guidelines for submission: Stories should be no more than 100 words. Include with your submission the attached release form. Tiny Teaching Stories can be published anonymously or with attribution; please indicate your preference in your submission and include a brief one to two-sentence biography for non-anonymous publication. If you would like to, we encourage you to also submit your social media handles and a headshot (optional). Please change identifying names and details of students to protect their privacy.     ... View more

As the new semester begins, instructors across the country will begin the process of trying to convince their students to persist in the face of the inevitable “failures” that come from learning and practicing new ideas and skills. In doing so, many of us will turn to the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. In that groundbreaking volume, Dweck opposes “growth” and “fixed” mindsets. The former “is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperament — everyone can change and grow through application and experience.” In contrast, a fixed mindset assumes that “your qualities are carved in stone.” You are who you are, and no matter what you do, you’re never really going to change. Dweck’s ideas have been adopted widely not just in education, but also in business, though not always as she might have wished. In an article in the Harvard Business Review, she points out three widespread misconceptions about growth mindset: “1) I already have it, and I always have. 2) A growth mindset is just about praising and rewarding effort. 3) Just espouse a growth mindset, and good things will happen.” Clearly, these are simplifications of the hard work needed to develop a growth mindset—the “passion and persistence of grit,” to quote Dweck’s fellow psychologist Angela Duckworth. As Dweck points out, having a growth mindset doesn’t just mean being “flexible or open-minded.” Instead, students with a growth mindset, to quote from Dweck’s “Brainology,” “believe that intelligence is a potential that can be realized through learning. As a result, confronting challenges, profiting from mistakes, and persevering in the face of setbacks become ways of getting smarter.” In other words, moving towards a growth mindset is an active and ongoing process. Dweck argues in the Harvard piece that “It’s critical to reward not just effort but learning and progress, and to emphasize the processes that yield these things, such as seeking help from others, trying new strategies, and capitalizing on setbacks to move forward effectively.” Moreover, institutions, as well as individuals, must “continually reinforce growth mindset values with concrete policies.” Ultimately, she claims, we are all “a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets, and that mixture continually evolves with experience.” In short, “A ‘pure’ growth mindset doesn’t exist.” The act of writing is full of challenges, course corrections, and constant minor victories and defeats—a veritable laboratory for creating a growth mindset. Consequently, college composition classes are particularly valuable sites for encouraging students to confront their setbacks head-on so they can unpack them and strategize ways to effectively address similar challenges the next time they arise. It’s possible to cultivate a growth mindset in everything we do in our college writing classes: from class discussions where equitable participation is paramount, to essay prompts that encourage growth mindset qualities like experimentation and introspection, to assessment and evaluation on written work that emphasizes constructive criticism and praise for risk-taking. In fact, I think we can begin fostering a growth mindset from the very first week of class, not long after the opening icebreakers and introductions. To nudge us in that direction, I’ve asked students to discuss the following conversation prompts with a partner, or in small groups: Think of all the people you know personally who have a growth mindset. Choose one of those people, describe that person, and give specific examples of how their growth mindset has helped them succeed. What traits do the people you’ve identified have in common with those of your partner(s)? How are they different? Make lists or a Venn diagram. Talk about which type of mindset you generally have — fixed or growth. Describe how that mindset has played out recently in your life. In which areas can you cultivate a stronger growth mindset to help you overcome the challenges you currently face? Developing a growth mindset is essential to student success, especially in accelerated composition courses, where some students may initially feel underconfident. You can do it, we need to keep telling our students, and we need to show them, step-by-step, how to achieve their goals.   ... View more

I am writing this blog while my FYC/corequisite students are composing the first draft of a literacy narrative. While most of them, like me, are tapping on keyboards, a few are scribbling in notebooks. Earbuds are evident, as are energy drinks and iced caramel macchiatos from the coffee shop upstairs. Some of us are masked; many are not. Every few moments, I hear a sigh—and I see a student staring at the screen. The process has begun. I am assuring my students that what happens today is not the end; they must trust that I am leading them through a process—a process which, though bewildering and murky now, will eventually lead to a text they can submit with confidence.  I am also assuring myself. I actually wrote the previous paragraph two days ago; this blog post hasn’t come together, and the vague idea I had hoped to flesh out remains “formless and void.”  So, I am trying again this morning, this time while the students are working in groups on their first peer review. I have asked them to read drafts aloud to their groups, so there is a humming across the room. I occasionally discern words: language, Spanish, soccer, try out, world. And while it isn’t really distracting me from finishing this blog, it isn’t helping either.  Basically, I’m stuck.  Where have I heard that before?  From my son, for one. He’s a high school senior in a fairly rigorous college-prep program; he loves the math and individual exploration components (he’s writing an extended capstone essay about the math he uses in video-game design). But he finds no internal motivation to power through his English assignments; he prefers to put the energy required for analysis into problems that are important to him. The value of poetry analysis and explication, despite my best attempts at persuasion, eludes him. So, he shifts to work on the latest iteration of a game code, de-bugging a program, solving a math challenge, or creating a digital design. The essays remain unwritten.  I came into his room a couple of weeks ago and found him staring (yet again) at a blank screen.  Well, not totally blank. He’d written the required header. The floor around him was littered with copies of the assigned poems, notes, and rubber bands, which are a kinesthetic coping mechanism: he shoots them at chess pieces that line the tops of window frames in his room, honing a shooting technique that improves the speed and spin of the rubber bands. (He attempted to teach this to me, but as a somewhat inept shooter, I ended up hitting myself in the face…) I offered to talk with him about the poems. That invitation became a four-hour marathon, first of listening to his frustration with the assignment itself, followed by a meandering path towards a thesis. I queried, “Are you saying . . . So, does that mean . . . Which entails this—is that where you are heading?” “No, that’s not it. I want to say…”  “Wow. I think you just said it. Write it down.”  A few moments later, he grimaced. “I’m stuck. I need a word that means…”  I offered a few suggestions. “Motivation? Cause? Source? Impetus? Force?”  He considered. “No, no, no… maybe. Let me think.”  So, I waited in silence. After a few minutes, he read a sentence back to me, nodding and pointing at the screen. “Yes. That’s what I want to say.” It had taken over 30 minutes for the concept to materialize in words. Throughout the process, he moved back and forth between his sense of the poem and a rhetorical approach to the assignment: “So, I’ve made that claim. Now I want to set up a justifying quote.” With his focus on the screen, he rarely saw my smiles. But four hours later, he had a couple of pages, and he thanked me. My son’s teachers know him. They know his giftedness, and they empathize with his writing struggles. They aren’t offended by his self-advocacy: “If I accomplish the purpose of the practice assignments after the first three, do I still have to do the fourth one?” He wants to know the why behind his assignments, and they are usually more than willing to tell him—and on some occasions, negotiate. And he’s got a mom with the schedule flexibility to sit with him for four hours and support him in the hard work of writing a paper he doesn’t like. He doesn’t have to race to a job—he can devote those four hours, finish a couple of other assignments, and still get a good night’s sleep.                                                                                            . . . I am watching my students again; they are taking this first peer review seriously. They are using the words I gave them: “Thanks for sharing. I hear you saying that…”  Some of these students will not have the advantage of four undisturbed hours to work on their literacy narratives. They may not know that they can ask me about the assignment purpose or negotiate some of the requirements with me. They may be squeezing the writing into short breaks at work, or in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, where they have taken a parent or sibling. Some come to the school after hours just to find a wifi hotspot.  As per my peer review instructions, I should ask myself this: what do I hear myself saying? I’m saying there is a writer in every student—even if that’s a “little w” writer, as a grad-school friend used to say. I have to remember how hard the process is, even for privileged learners, and find ways to support ALL my students to work through that process intentionally and effectively (even if I can’t give four hours to each one).  ... View more

This post is part of the Campfire Session series from Corequisite Composition Summer Camp 2021. You can find all recorded sessions and resources from Camp here. By Tracie Grimes, M.A. Professor of English, Bakersfield College As educators, we go miles out of the way to feed the need for help when students struggle to find their academic writing voices. However, many times the words we so carefully craft, words that we just know will add college/university-level skills to their writing toolbelts, seem to fall on deaf ears.  It is a delicate dance finding that “sweet spot” of constructive criticism; one that gives them the suggestions/corrections they will see as helpful and want to use rather than critiques that send them cringing into the corner of our classrooms.  In today’s arena of teaching spaces filled with underprepared composition students, it is difficult to give students usable, non-threatening feedback that provides them with a clear idea of what they need to do and how they can do it to be successful. Susan M. Brookhart, in her book How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students, tells us a good start is one that takes into consideration the following: The topic in general and your learning target of targets in particular Typical developmental learning progressions for those topics or targets Your individual students (12)  “Try to see things from the student’s-eye view…Which aspects of the learning target would the student benefit from improving next?” (Brookhart 12). Putting ourselves in the shoes of our students not only helps us empathize with someone who is on the receiving end of constructive criticism, it helps us understand more about the importance of the relationship between feedback and how it is used by students (Pitt and Norton 499).  Studies from 2010 conducted by Richard Bailey, Mark Garner, and D. R. Sadler tell us what most of us already know: Students are not using our feedback. “Part of the difficulty arises from changes in thinking … about what the exact purpose of feedback is, how students engage with feedback and how they use it to improve their future assessed work” (Pitt and Norton 499). Given the fact that we are spending so much time giving feedback largely ignored by students, finding ways to connect our commentary to learning goals becomes an important consideration; it  gives students concrete rationale for why they are being asked to complete the assignments. When students see the connection between a task and a learning goal, a “shared understanding between teachers and learners” is established, which can motivate students to take their learning to the next level (Bailey and Garner 188). For example, a dialogue journal in which students and professors create short entries on a Google Doc in which student entries focus on something specified in an SLO, such as integrating evidence from a credible source into a paragraph, and citing the source using MLA style. Every week, the professor then responds to what students write, providing comments on what the student is doing correctly, and what the student could do to make his/her writing stronger. This type of formative assessment provides student-centered feedback using a constructivist paradigm of teaching and learning (Brown and Glover), and, when returned to students within a timeframe that allows them to make corrections before the final draft is due, can be seen as more useful by the students. Getting students to actually use our feedback is another challenge. Their choice to use feedback depends largely upon their reaction to what we say, and that reaction appears to involve a number of contributory factors. First and foremost is their understanding of the feedback they receive. Many times, students report that they do not understand the feedback given, which is why they do not use the comments to make revisions. For example, when a student sees a comment such as “awkward phrasing,” he/she may not completely understand what is meant by “awkward,” or how to correct it. A clear comment, such as “The writing here is a bit awkward and difficult to read because the phrase ‘for example’ is repeated several times. Try rearranging your sentence to get rid of the repeated phrase or keep the sentence the same and try plugging in different words in its place. If you’re at a loss, do a quick search for ‘other words, for example’.” This explicitly states what the problem was, why it was a problem, and what steps could be taken to improve. Another example comes from a writing tutor, “Right now, your thesis can be improved by addressing the prompt directly with the same keywords. It is tough to see that you are answering what it is asking. A strong thesis would likely mention some ways that cyberbullying affects bystanders to act positively and negatively. Yours mentions some positive reactions, but it does not clearly mention negative bystander reactions, only that it does not occur in social media.” Critiques about something as personal as writing can be hard pills to swallow, but administering the dose is no walk in the park either. Researchers are seeing more and more comments such as, “They may read it and not understand it. The challenge for us is trying to make it as easy as possible to understand. People outside education don’t use words the way we do” -Nursing (Bailey and Garner 193), or “Some [students] are motivated and conscientious and make changes. Others don’t really care and are satisfied with less” -Social Sciences (192). The stakes are high as we search for ways to engage our students with accessible, usable feedback. However, by offering clear direction about what our students need to do and how they need to do it in the form of information that “takes them … to the next level” (Brookhart 12), we may also find that our words become the catalyst for change in the way students respond to feedback. Works Cited Bailey, Richard, and Mark Garner. “Is the Feedback in Higher Education Assessment Worth the Paper It Is Written on? Teachers’ Reflections on Their Practices.” Teaching in Higher Education, vol. 15, no. 2, Apr. 2010, pp. 187–198. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/13562511003620019. Brookhart, Susan M. How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students. Assoc. for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2008. Brown, E., and C. Glover. “Evaluating written feedback on students’ assignments.” Innovative assessment in higher education, ed. C. Bryan and K. Clegg, Taylor, and Francis, 2005. Reinholz, Daniel L., and Dimitri R. Dounas-Frazer. Personalized Instructor Responses to Guided Student Reflections: Analysis of Two Instructors’ Perspectives and Practices. 2017, doi:10.1119/1.5002683. Sadler, D. Royce. “Beyond Feedback: Developing Student Capability in Complex Appraisal.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, vol. 35, no. 5, Aug. 2010, pp. 535–550. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/02602930903541015. ... View more

This post is part of the Campfire Session series from Corequisite Composition Summer Camp 2021. You can find all recorded sessions and resources from Camp here. How Story Forms the Foundation for Teaching Composition and How Visual Images Can Shape Our Students as Writers By Linda Maria Steele, Dean College I remember my very first teaching gig straight out of graduate school at University of Texas, Dallas. I received a fellowship and worked as a Teaching Assistant, which led to my teaching job at Richland College in Dallas. I was hired as an adjunct the semester after I received my Master’s degree from UT. I was offered three sections of Composition. I was full of hope, energy, and enthusiasm. But early on, I wasn’t always clear on how to get students to actually apply the tools I was teaching them and help them become better writers. Developing effective skills as a writer is such a personal task and one tool doesn’t work the same way for each student. Tools are great, but they have to be explored and practiced in practical terms if they are going to be useful and help students grow as writers. It has been close to 20 years since that first teaching gig. Looking back after all of those semesters teaching Composition, I now have a deeper understanding of how important story is as the foundation for our students as writers. Students who grasp how to effectively incorporate story in their essays have a much easier time later on when the types of papers they write become more layered and complex. Story teaches them how to connect with their ideas and what they value, connect with their readers, and gain an understanding of how to structure an essay. I have also come to appreciate the benefits of incorporating visual images into our courses and how both story and visual images can further shape our students as writers. For years, I’ve asked students to read essays with a strong focus on story with a message, introduced them to the dramatic arc, and told them how important it is to write their story with a strong beginning, middle, and end. It wasn’t until I met with a student about a first draft that the need to apply these tools really hit home. The student—I will call her Jessica—chose to write about a dramatic event that had a large impact on her life. She wrote about how the previous year, her house caught fire and burned to the ground. An event with the potential for a compelling story with a point. As dramatic of an event as this was, Jessica was not quite understanding how to tell or write the story in a dramatic way. Jessica’s first draft left out important details and had no clear organization. The essay was difficult to follow. When I gave her feedback and asked her to tell me the story in her own words, she mentioned that she ran back in the house at the very last minute to try to rescue her beloved pet guinea pig named George. I pointed out that one of the problems I saw in her draft was that she didn’t create any tension in the story. And that it seemed to me the guinea pig was an important and interesting detail to include. I reminded her of the dramatic arc we talked about in class and how it is the tension that makes story so interesting and allows us as readers to find meaning—elements that make for a good story. I suggested that she might want to try to highlight, for dramatic effect, whether or not her beloved pet, George, made it out alive. And how that detail was something that would spark interest and curiosity in her reader. I also suggested that she look for any visual images she had of her pet or the house she lost. I suggested by focusing on the images, she might get clearer on what she really wanted to communicate on the topic as she rewrote her draft. The tools we share with our students are valuable. But we also have to seek new ways to get them to understand how to use and apply them in their writing. A tool is only effective to the degree that we find practical ways to put them in practice. When it comes to teaching composition, the task for our students is less about memorizing new material and more about practicing and engaging with themselves as thinkers and writers. Jessica’s final draft was really well written. The final draft began with an introductory paragraph that hinted at the possible loss of her beloved pet. We didn’t learn until the last line that her guinea pig did, in fact, get out in time. The guinea pig served as the tension the story needed. Not only did she write an interesting essay with a strong story arc—she witnessed for herself just how important using the tool of story is to her progress as a writer. Through her willingness to revise, she found a way to tell the story in a way that was interesting and made a meaningful impact. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the way story forms the foundation for developing as writers and how visual images can shape and support our writing skills. ... View more

This post is part of the Campfire Session series from Corequisite Composition Summer Camp 2021. You can find all recorded sessions and resources from Camp here. By Christina Di Gangi, Dawson Community College The Problem: Bridging the Gap between Informative and Analytic Writing In teaching terms, I am a career literature generalist with almost sole responsibility for my college's co-requisite writing model. From my vantage point, I understand that my students struggle to bridge the gap between informative and analytic writing. Close reading is ‘back’ in part due to the CCSS (Common Core State Standards)—but while students may know how to find extensive information on a given topic, they do not always start college fully equipped to write a more analytic research paper using peer-reviewed research writing. This gap becomes especially pressing if the research paper is taught in the first-semester writing class, with students going on to write papers in their major immediately thereafter. My job is to get students up to speed. For this reason among others, reading research articles is a major focus in our co-requisite model writing labs. One Potential Solution: Inquiry Charts or I-Charts (Hoffman, 1992)  In completing ancillary graduate coursework on reading to facilitate my teaching of our co-requisite-model courses, I learned about James V. Hoffman’s 1992 Language Arts article, “Critical reading/thinking across the curriculum: Using I-charts to support learning.” Inquiry charts, or I-Charts, are graphic or cognitive organizers that K-12 students can use to map information from prior knowledge—“activating prior knowledge”—along with their reading from informative sources: This lets students build connections in ways that simply restating information from pre-selected readings does not. Hoffman proposes a model where students work together in class before moving to individual practice, but the graphic organizer concept is flexible and adaptable. Before and during reading, students have space to enter information they already know about a topic, and then space to combine this prior knowledge with additional detail and meaning from other sources that they read. The I-Chart struck me as a flexible tool. Since my first-year writing students face the challenging task of improving their facility with peer-reviewed research articles while at the same time learning how to put together a college-level research paper, I wanted to design a cognitive organizer for them that would help them both to read the research articles that they had selected and then to place those articles in level-appropriate research papers of their own.  I note that instructors can prepare students to use a cognitive organizer like the I-Chart within the natural flow of class, as they teach students to search, organize, analyze, and write about research topics. Within our co-requisite model, I find that students benefit from preparatory instruction both on isolating the content of research articles and on writing about individual research articles before moving to a longer paper. Two preparatory techniques that I would highlight are quizzes and short reviews: For quizzes, I have students practice isolating the methods and findings of abstracts, then of whole short research articles. I pick level-appropriate articles and have them annotate their copies as well as practice writing analytic clusters and paragraphs using page numbers and quotations from the articles.  Writing short reviews of single research articles helps students improve in that genre but also prepares them to write a summative research paper in my class, basically a review of research. Using the I-Chart to Plan and Draft Beginning College Research Papers Preparatory work on isolating the features and key points of peer-reviewed research articles prepares students to complete an I-Chart or similar cognitive organizer, which they can then use to structure and complete shorter and longer research assignments. Students can practice using multiple articles to complete an I-Chart in groups before moving to individual practice; they can then apply the technique to the topic of their own paper, whether that topic be pre-assigned or self-selected. Once the table has been completed, students have a visual that should suggest to most how writing about their chosen articles can be organized in a longer framework such as a research paper. In my first-semester writing class, students are specifically asked to organize their final research papers as a survey of current research using six or more research articles. Again, this is a very flexible technique. I have students write a three-source midterm, more of a ‘sandbox’ for the final paper than a full-length research paper, and then write a final paper using six or more peer-reviewed sources—but the I-Chart can easily be adapted to the needs of your particular class. For example, students could use the I-Chart to organize thoughts about a set of theme-based readings before they get into research writing; if they were more advanced, they could write about six articles for a draft around midterm and expand the number of sources for their final project. Some students may even want to change the organizing categories to suit their thought process a little better, which has certainly worked for students of mine in the past. As I emphasize to students, the goal is to track their personal analysis of the peer-reviewed research sources that they are using, then to place them in the context of their future thinking and writing—rather than to have a beautifully completed chart. An added bonus is that students can learn to detach their analytic process from trying to produce beautiful writing—they can focus on organizing and showing their thought process before they turn to redraft and polish their work.  Given all of these benefits, it is my hope that this use of a graphic organizer to facilitate analytic reading and writing for beginning college students is an honest use of a technique from the teaching of reading, a field from which—in terms of my own teaching, certainly—I still feel that I have much to learn. ... View more