Personal Learning Outcomes from Teaching of Composition and Literature

Personal Learning Outcomes from ENGLC0862: Teaching Composition and Literature

     I’ve always had good ideas for classroom practice and after class work, but this class gave me the necessary background information to implement much more effective techniques.  Although many of the texts we read this semester were influential, there were a few that were particularly interesting to me.  This paper is an examination of how, I believe, those specific texts will influence my teaching into the future.

     The first I’d like to mention is Min-Zhan Lu’s “From Silence into Words: Writing as Struggle”.  This essay really layered complexity onto issues of how language is expressive of more than just what gets put down on a page.  Choosing to use specific words or dialects can be a choice, on the part of the writer, to align or distance him/herself from his/her own cultural social, political or racial group.  I don’t think I realized, prior to reading Lu’s essay, the idea that what I may perceive as a lack of proficiency with regard to utilizing Standard American English in a student’s writing could actually be a stylistic choice they are making to convey a deeper meaning.  This new understanding could help me help students to refine that stylistic choice so that their audience understands it as choice which will allow the reader greater access to the writer’s meaning.  I could also introduce the option of code-mixing in a single piece of writing such that the audience grasps the writer’s proficiency in both English language variants.  If the writer can successfully code-mix, readers will hold the writer in higher regard and be more willing to accept non-standard language as a choice made for a specific purpose.

     The second text I’d like to address is “Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts: Theory and Method for a Reading and Writing Course” by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky.  I’ve never encountered such an extensive published curriculum.  This is an excellent resource that can be implemented as a whole or in part in the basic writing classroom.  The activities are heavily scaffolded which, in my experience, is a very good technique to improve overall production and accuracy in writing.  What interested me most was that many of the exercises had a time limit instead of a specified required length.  I’d love to enact that technique in my own classroom.  I’m not exactly sure what the effect would be but it seems like might be a good way to manage student anxiety about production.  I feel that whenever anxiety can be diminished, production will increase and, in many of my classes, a central theme is increased production.  I also agree with the authors that journals that aren’t graded or corrected are an excellent way to provide lo stakes writing opportunities.  There’s also a heavy emphasis on revision, peer review and discussion.  I was a bit surprised by the extensive nature of the reading but that could be modified for classes that have lower, or higher, reading comprehension.

     Finally, I’d like to mention the techniques documented in Christopher Weaver’s “Grading in a Process-Based Writing Classroom” and Frances Zak’s "Exclusively Positive Response to Student Writing".  I’ve always understood that overcorrection or inappropriate correction of student writing can be detrimental to a student’s progress; however, I haven’t always known how to address the problem.  These readings gave me some very good ideas about how to proceed in the future.  I really liked Weaver’s idea about restricting prescriptive corrections to particular formalized assignments rather than correcting all writing for both low and high order concerns. Zak’s article was also enlightening although I think that there would need to be further evidence gathered in order to really prove up her technique of only giving positive response to basic writers.  My own idea is to combine Weaver and Zak’s techniques to give exclusively positive response to drafts, free writing, journals and other writing that is assigned to increase production and reserve more prescriptive corrections for final drafts and assignments that need to have a grade affixed to them.

     Generally speaking, the content of the course gave me a different perspective about the problems that writers face and armed me with new techniques for effectively addressing those issues. I also picked up some very good lesson planning materials for reference in my own classes.

Resources for Teachers of Composition and Literature

excellent resource provided by Amherst College

Online Resources for Writers

Fascinating and useful.  Students can explore language variants both in text and audio.  This site can help with students who speak marginalized dialects.  It can help them understand that Stand American English is not necessarily better than dialects, just different. Could foster inclusion of "othered" students.
DARE

The Library of Congress offers classroom materials and professional development to help teachers effectively use sources from the Library's vast digital collections in their teaching.  The lessons learned here can help students with research techniques for all databases and CUNY libraries.

Library of Congress Education

Fantastic resource!  The website contains a series of short biographical films on New Yorkers.  Really interesting way to introduce ethnographic research.
NYorkers

   This is a website for K-12 but there are excellent resources for reading comprehension exercises and extension activities for a wide variety of texts.  Teachers can use some as is or follow the design with different texts.
Teachervision

Response to “Grading in a Process-Based Writing Classroom” by Christopher C. Weaver

     I really like the ideas espoused in this article.  I think that students are often so focused on their grades that they don’t experiment or feel free to explore different techniques that might improve their overall skill level.  If there’s limited time to work toward an assignment that will be graded, students will probably focus on what they feel the instructor wants and work toward fulfilling that perceived requirement.  While students need to be able to satisfy assignment criteria to progress in post-secondary education, they first need to establish a unique voice, a set of skills to draw upon and increase writing production overall. 

     The approach to grading that this instructor utilizes seems to allow for both experimentation in low stakes situations and the development of convention based, formalized skills.  While the students’ perception is that the instructor is grading only the formal elements of the writing assignments, I feel certain that there is evaluation of the entire exercise included in the cover letter grade.  This allows the instructor to offer prescriptive corrections related to the students adherence to convention while fostering an environment wherein the student is free to experiment.  It also allows students to work on developing critical reflection skills regarding their own writing and to document, for themselves, trouble that they may have experienced, what they liked or didn’t like about specific assignments and to work on the ability to self-direct their own process.

     This type of methodology can, of course, be modified in a number of different ways if the instructor of a particular class decides that different sets of conventions need to be addressed.  The important lesson here, I think, is that there should always be space for students to explore included in the classroom.     

 Collaborative Assignment Analysis

ENGL C0862

Introduction to Teaching

 Writing & Literature

Professor Barbara Gleason

December 11, 2014

Caitlin Geoghan

Justin Lokossou

      First-Year Composition classes are constructed with the intention of discussing and building certain skill sets that will allow students to become competent writers. WPA Outcomes refer to the set of goals that serve as a standard for which all students should have risen to by the end of the semester. This collaborative project was centered on students creating a narrative in the form of an educational brochure on a subject of their choosing. Students will use Google Drive and email as electronic mediums to communicate with one another and assemble their assignment. Students are guided through the information they want to ensure is in their paper, as well as given instruction on how to access the multimodal aspects of the assignment.     

Asking students to write a brochure stems from an interest in the growth of the student as a writer. The initial goal is for students to work on something they enjoy. When students work on projects that they find interested, they are more likely to perform better than if they were assigned a topic. Having students work in groups also helps improve the confidence of the students working together, particularly if those students have trouble with English as a language or are simply just having trouble transitioning into college. Focusing on subjects of interest and working with someone will take the weight off of the shoulders of many students who are daunted by the idea of having an assignment to do. Selecting the kind of writing a student has to do can also put a damper on or fire up their creativity. There is more room for creative expansion with this multimodal assignment than if students were simply asked to write a paper. Google Drive as the primary multimodal tool is very effective. Google Drive allows students to share information with each other via the cloud. Students could even work on the same paper at the same time by accessing the file via Drive. All changes are automatically saved to the file on Google Drive.

 The WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition requires that students have an understanding of and are proficient in utilizing multiple avenues towards creating, developing, and strengthening writing projects. Students are to learn to scaffold their work through several stages before they even begin the first draft. The primary goal for this assignment was akin to one of the goals listed in the WPA Outcomes statement, which is for students to “experience the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.” By working on this project using email as a main means of communication, students will learn how to both work independently and within a group. They will also be expected to learn to handle certain multimodal outlets. Appendix B helps students visually see how to access templates and upload them to Google Drive. This is particularly effective for those who are not computer literate and may be daunted at the prospect of having to do a multimodal assignment.

The assignment is carefully structured in order to ensure clarity on what the objective is. Scaffolding was a major aspect of this assignment in order to minimize the possibility of confusion and ease any difficult that students may have. A brief of the assignment is the first item that students are shown, followed by examples or possible subjects to use for the brochure. Sections 2, 2.1, and 2.2 are important because of how they guide the student down the various processes that come behind the first page of paper. The evaluation criteria is presented in the form of questions to help them develop independence. By asking these questions as they work on their projects, students will be able to reflect and review their own work, revising where needed.

This multimodal assignment requires students to construct an educational brochure on the subject of their choice. The work has been carefully scaffolded to stretch over the course of three weeks and contains an electronic component in the form of email and Google Drive. In addition to learning to write a well-structured educational piece, students are expected to be competent in working with templates on Microsoft, as well as using Google Drive for the purpose of collaborative projects. Students should also be able to evaluate their own work by using evaluation criteria to question whether or not they have completed every aspect of their project.

 Works Cited

"Council of Writing Program Administrators." WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition, Approved July 17, 2014. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2014.

Response to Min-Zhan Lu's "From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle"

     Min-Zhan Lu’s treatment of language in “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle” is interesting in that she describes a process during which acquiring language leads to a deepening silence. Lu depends heavily on code-switching to communicate alternately in her bourgeois home and in a school run by the state, Communist China; the language of each place prohibited in the other.  It’s interesting that as Lu folded association and meaning into her words she became less and less sure about the proper way to use them.  In addition, to her dismay, she discovers that she is conflating two incongruent ideologies in a way that makes communication even more difficult.

     Lu describes the process of reading and writing as progressively more conflicted, “My parents and home readings were the voices of an opposing group…these voices struggled to dominate the discussion , constantly incorporating, dismissing, or suppressing the arguments of each other…” (444) Lu internalizes this conflict and is drawn toward tendencies to suppress her ideas because she’s unable to craft a message she’s confident about for her dissimilar audiences.

     In a way, I think many students experience a similar experience.  Of course, the stakes aren’t quite as high -- in communist China there could be serious repercussions for espousing unpopular ideas – here, the students just lose the opportunity to complete post-secondary education (which is serious enough, I think.) Many students struggle to produce work in Standard American English—required by institutions—which is so different from their heritage languages. In addition, there is censure for being unwilling or unable to produce the required language in a form prescribed by institutions. This instills a sense that writing is a barrier rather than a means of communication and an extremely effective method of self-advocacy.  I think that basic writing teachers need to change the notion that writing is what holds students back and illustrate the ways in which it can advance education and communication.

     In all, I believe that basic writing and freshman composition teachers initially need to accept whatever language is used and work toward increasing output through positive response.  Students need low stakes opportunities to practice writing as expression rather than seeing it always as a chore. Min-Zhan Lu regained her voice after a struggle and our students need to do the same.  

Response to "Exclusively Positive Response to Student Writing" by Frances Zak

         I was so pleased to read this article because it provided some much needed information about what I have believed for many years: that it's not necessary to correct "errors" in student writing. I've long believed that students that positive reinforcement and response is all that's necessary to facilitate an improvement in student writing.  Or rather, students should learn to correct their own writing through an ongoing process of revision. I feel that the best way to get students to improve their own writing, at least initially, is to get them to increase their output and to reflect critically on their own work.  Critical reflection will drive them into attempts to clarify and refine the content of their work which can lead to fewer mechanical errors in and of itself.

     I also think that positive feedback confers upon the students a much needed boost in confidence and the feeling that the stories they have to tell are meaningful and worthy of being told and heard.  If someone believes that their story isn’t worth telling, how hard are they going to work to tell it properly? If we can, we should instill in students who have been underserved the idea that underserved doesn’t equal unimportant and that if no one listened before, we’re ready to listen now.

     Frances Zak notes in her article that students that receive traditional responses to their writing improve as much as do students who receive purely positive feedback.  The difference seems to be that students who don’t have their mechanical errors corrected have improved without the intervention of the instructor.  We can infer from this information that through the process of clarifying meaning, students will be able to reduce mechanical errors on their own.  It can be really difficult to look at a paper full of errors and not correct them; however, what’s important about the writing is the story not the punctuation.  A well written story is organized, has a sense of chronology, uses a variety of descriptive language and rhetorical techniques and uses dialogue among many other things.  Our focus should be on these high order concerns and not on commas.

A Report on My Observation of ENGL21002: Writing for Social Sciences

     I arrived at the classroom, NAC 6/122, to observe ENGL 21022: Writing for Social Sciences at 6:15pm on Monday September 29, 2014. The room was small with individual desks that were curving in rough semi-circles around the instructor’s desk, facing the chalkboard.  There was a movie screen pulled down on the right side of the room but no other technology was apparent. There was likely mobile technology that could be provided at the instructor’s request.  There weren’t any windows and the room was a bit stuffy. The instructor, Jennifer Horne, hadn’t yet arrived; there were six students in the room when I entered.  The students were all relatively young; the age range seemed to be early twenties to early thirties.  There were five female students and one male.  The women were a racially mixed group; they wore modern, casual clothing; one of the women was wearing a hijab but otherwise wore modern clothing. Over the next 10 minutes, students continued to arrive. The early group was a fair representation of the whole class.  There were many more women than men in the class; the majority of the students were African-American or Latino.  The students were well dressed in a casual modern way. Prior to the scheduled meeting time, the students discussed information relevant to the class.  Some comments I heard were associated with past and future group work sessions; the students were clearly used to working communally, there was a friendly feeling in the room and people were sharing information unreservedly.

     My attendance in the class serves a double purpose.  First, I am here to fulfill a requirement for my class, ENGL C0862: The Teaching of Composition and Literature. The second and, perhaps, more important reason that I’ve come to observe this class is because, in my opinion, there’s no better way to improve your teaching skills than watching another teacher work. This fact remains true as long as you’re working; learning is as important part of teaching as anything else.  I think it’s important for teachers to keep open minds, try new techniques and be willing to admit that they don’t know everything, which is difficult for teachers. If you consider yourself always a learner as well as a teacher, you’ll better serve the other learners around you. 

            The professor, J. Horne, entered the room at 6:30pm and started the class immediately by requesting the students turn to page 68 in their text -- FieldWorking: Reading and Writing Research, 4th Edition by Bonnie Stone Sunstein and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater – and asked for a volunteer to read a paragraph from the text.  After the student read the paragraph, J.H. focused the discussion by asking directed questions such as: How old is the writer? What was her first entry? Is this believable? What is this writer’s purpose? The students were very responsive and appeared, as a whole, prepared for the class. The instructor had a friendly manner; she was dressed professionally in a wine-colored blouse and black pants.  She spoke confidently, made eye contact with students and really listened to the answers the students gave.  She responded positively to some comments, asked questions if a point needed clarification and gave positive feedback if a student was creative like when a students used a word he’d formed, notebookist, to describe a person that keeps a fieldwork notebook.

    The class continued in this vein. There were several more short readings which different students took turns reading aloud, after which the professor elicited responses from the students. The professor continued to expand the theme with questions like what is the writer’s purpose? What is the writer trying to communicate with their descriptions? And, she expanded on the theme by asking about the editor’s intent.  In other words, why would the authors of the text include these particular selections in the text? The students continued to respond in a focused way and appeared familiar with the subject matter. The professor was respectful of the students’ ideas and used positive language to acknowledge their comments.  For example, after one student’s comment, she said, “I really like that idea….” and then asked a different student to respond to the first.  In this way, she really kept the students’ attention focused both on what she was saying and on what their peers were saying.

    At approximately 6:45pm, 15 minutes after the scheduled start of the class, two students entered the classroom.  The room was small and relatively crowded, and the door squeaked so the late entrance was quite noticeable.  Despite the interruption, the professor did not comment on the students’ lateness.  However, approximately three minutes later, the instructor directed a question at one of the two women who had arrived late.  When the student wasn’t prepared to answer -- she hadn’t yet taken out the appropriate material for the class or found the paragraph the class was discussing -- there were a few seconds of silence as the student attempted to orient herself before J.H asked another student to “help her out.”  The episode was very quick, only about 15 seconds, but the message was very clear.  The professor, without any explicit statement, communicated that she’d noticed the interruption and expected that students be on time and prepared for the class session.

     After about three paragraphs, read aloud and followed by short periods of directed questions and answers, the class moved into a fourth reading.  The fourth reading was a bit different from the prior three.  It was much more clinical than the initial readings.  The paragraph described the interaction between a professor and a student of natural history.  The professor directed the student to look at a specimen -- a fish, gave the student explicit instructions on how to care for the specimen and then, before he left, told the student he would ask later what the student had seen.  The piece describes time passing and the student following a repetitious system of steps to care for the specimen.  After the reading, the professor once again led a short focused discussion. This time, the professor’s questions focused more on the mechanics and linguistic choices the author had chosen for the piece. She asked the students if they could remember a term they’d previously discussed that would fit the piece; one student came up with the correct answer: process.  

     J.H. affirmed the answer and focused the discussion around the theme.  She used the board to note important information such as where process could be identified and how students could parallel the author’s technique in their own fieldwork notebooks. She mentioned double note taking, which the students had practiced, and asked their opinions of the technique.  In addition, she pointed out the authors use action verbs to make the description more effective.  She did a quick activity during which she mentioned an action verb – moisten – and asked students to call out whatever words came to mind.  The responses were varied but included repetitive, wet, water, cooking, soil, first-aid and sweaty socks.  

     The instructor pointed out and noted on the blackboard, how action verbs could be used to expand or condense time by either noting all the steps for an audience that wasn’t familiar with the content or summarizing/eliminating steps for an audience that was familiar with the content. The discussion turned to how this information could be useful to the students in keeping their own notebooks.  JH reminded them to keep in mind both their respective purposes and audiences when taking field notes. The class also discussed the importance of specificity with regard to dates, times, numbers, places, insider language, dialogue and details when documenting real people and events.  

    The learning objective of the lesson was to introduce and/or review the types of information, language and note-taking techniques the students would use to maintain authenticity and credibility in their notebooks while doing their semester long survey of a subculture of their own choosing.  The class wrapped up with a directed 10 minute free-write focusing on one feature of the students’ field sites.

The class I observed was teacher-centered but there was a lot of evidence that that was not the usual case.  The professor spoke frequently; she directed the flow of conversation extremely well; she questioned students, affirmed opinions and focused student comments with follow-up questions.  She had a friendly manner, was respectful of the students’ opinions and was exceptionally good at keeping the students’ focused on each other’s comments as well as her own.  There were several times that she called on students who weren’t prepared to answer -- in my opinion -- either because she’d noticed that they weren’t paying attention or because they’d arrived to class late.  A couple of these students were unable to answer the questions. If they weren’t able to answer, the professor waited a few beats before asking a different student to “help them out” by answering the question.  This technique seemed to me exceptionally effective on a number of levels.  It allowed the professor to communicate displeasure about certain lapses without explicitly administering a correction or openly displaying a disapproving manner.  It also alerted the students as a whole about the unwanted behaviors and kept people paying attention to the discussion.  The message seemed to be received by the students who were initially unable to answer questions because they all volunteered to answer questions very shortly thereafter.  This technique seemed to perform double duty, equally effective as a classroom management tool and as means of prompting the students’ attention and participation.

     The class was fast-paced and transitions between topics were very smooth.  The instructor had 
a plan and had different questions for each section of reading.  The questions that followed a reading also elicited information that the students would be encountering in and discussing after the next reading.  For example, the instructor led a mini-discussion on the students’ impressions of the importance of note taking prior to the reading about the fish, a selection wherein it becomes apparent how important note taking is.   

     They covered a lot of ground, moving from one short reading to the next; the professor drew attention to different features of the passages, asked questions and circled in on what ultimately seemed to be the learning objective -- the techniques and information best suited for fieldwork and documenting that information.  She gave examples of all relevant features and continually checked back with the students for comprehension of the material.

    What struck me most about the professor’s method was her use of positive reinforcement with her students.  Her disapproval was, as stated before, implied; however, her approval was explicitly stated.  I liked the way the instructor used silence then focused attention to communicate her disapproval without stating either the reasons for the disapproval or who had perpetrated the unwanted behavior—even though both of these answers were very clear to everyone. Direct confrontations can make the classroom an uncomfortable space; I think they should be avoided whenever possible. She complimented ideas that were creative or well stated; she drew other students’ attention to those students who’d had good ideas, she asked students to comment on other student comments and asked whether they agreed or had a different opinion.  In all, I think that this professor simultaneously set the bar high for the students (they covered a lot of ground in one session and had significant after class work) and let them know that she appreciated the effort they put in to the learning process.  

    Finally, although this particular class session was teacher-centered with desks arranged so the students faced the front of the room, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that this class did a lot of group and/or pair work, work shopping of ideas and other student-centered activities.  When I first entered the classroom, the students were discussing group work and checking with each other about what was necessary for a future group work session.  The students also spoke with each other in a comfortable way as if accustomed to sharing information with each other.

    Observing this class session was extremely informative. There were many ideas and techniques that I’d like to try to enact or adapt for future sessions of my own classes.  The most impressive feature, in my opinion, was the focused nature and pace of the lesson.  There was a really fluid feeling to the whole class and an accumulation of pertinent information as the lesson progressed.  There was never a moment when the lesson veered away from the learning objective and the pace of the lesson made the time fly. The lesson proceeded seamlessly; each activity related to the both the activity that preceded it and the one that followed.  New concepts that the students were going to encounter were introduced inductively prior to the event, and then discussed in greater detail following the event.  It was an excellent example of how effective teaching can be when time is spent planning and activities vary throughout the session.