Additional Best Practices

Copyright Jodie Childers

 

Assigning a Literacy Narrative the First Day of Class

"Rather than force them too quickly and exclusively into critical analysis, I'm inclined to think that teachers might do better, first, to meet students where they are, to learn what their literacy aims and aspirations are as we work to help them learn literate discourses valued in the academy."
--R. Mark Hall, "The Oprafication of Literacy, " College English, July 2003.

 

Asking student to write on the first day of class accomplishes the following goals:

• Sets the tone of the class as a "writing course" as opposed to (just) a reading one.
• Introduces instructors, up front, to the levels of confidence and the "voices" of their students.
• Sends the message that the work of the course calls for participation and engagement; makes passivity an impossibility.
• Tells students that they have something to write about now, as opposed to some future time, after we've given them "real" writers to read, "real" topics to discuss.

 

1. What do you remember being asked to do in elementary school? What kinds of activities do you remember being engaged in as a student in those early years? Particularly think about reading and writing. Do any early experiences with reading and writing stand out for you? Think about this for a minute or two--try to imagine yourself at that time. What was your attitude toward elementary school? Did you enjoy school and learning? Did you feel successful as a student? What would you say was your proudest moment during these early school years? The most embarrassing or humiliating? During your years in elementary school, what was going on at home in terms of your development as a reader, a writer, a learner? Did folks at home spend time reading the newspaper? Did anyone read to you? Did you share comic books with a friend or neighbor?
2. Think for a few minutes about your junior high school years. What were you interested in learning in those years? Does a teacher, a lesson, a book, an idea come to mind? Jot down whatever comes to you. Again, try to think about KEY moments, pivotal moments, incidents that meant something, that shifted something for you, that helped you understand something. Think about experiences in school or out where you learned something important. For instance, did you get involved in one project in one class where you really feel you did your best work? Did you get turned on to a particular author or type of reading?
3. Describe high school from your perspective. Describe yourself as a student over the time you were there. Can you make a quick list of incidents, teachers, classes, and interactions, realizations that meant something to you, that you feel contributed to your growth? Select one of the times on your list and develop it in some detail.
4. Focus on reading and writing for a minute--what would you say about yourself as a reader and writer right now? What recent experiences have helped shape the reader and writer you just described (whether it's positive or negative)?
5. As Oprah Winfrey has gradually revealed her life story on her show, fans have learned how literacy freed her, making possible her enormous fame and fortune. Whether or not you watch the Oprah Winfrey Show or participate in her "Book Club, " from your own experience in reading, comment on her claim that books provide education, friendship, comfort, and a bridge to the past.
6. "I used to feel that educating myself meant to break with my Italian past, but my journey to Italy years ago showed me that I could embrace my Italian heritage. In a similar way, my success in the classroom comes in part from my working class consciousness. I feel this particularly in my conversations with young female students with families who are against their education and who refuse to come to their graduations. Like myself, they are torn between family obligations and desire for a life of achievement. My family feared that an education would take me away and in some ways it did. They were wrong, however, about the disdain I would feel. In my pocket, as it were, I carry a rich treasure: it is rich with the memories of my struggle to be educated, memories of growing up and being Italian, and the memories of being part of a tradition of honest work and toil."
   --From M. Bella Mirabella, "The Education of an Italian-American Girl Child"

 

Managing the Hour and Forty Minute Class

 

For students who are used to 40-minute high school classes, varying the activities in our hour and forty-minute classes is key to the success of each class session. Some combination of in­ class writing, small group activities, whole class discussion, a very brief presentation by the teacher, perhaps a media presentation, should provide the structure for each class. [Note that the 4th (conference) hour is absorbed into the class and not necessarily treated separately.]

 

Below is a suggestion as to how class activities can vary in the pursuit of a single goal:

• Write a provocative statement related to the lesson on the board and ask students to write their reaction
• Ask them to discuss what they have written with others in a small group
• Then, ask students to present their thoughts to the entire class to discuss
• Finally, following the class discussion, each student reflects in writing on what has been said
• The class concludes with students sharing the results of their reflection.
  (The instructor does business last, not first. The instructor does not lecture.)

 

A more specific variation on this lesson is suggested by David A. Jolliffe of DePaul University (WPA):

 

Begin the class by doing something that focuses the students' attention on the intellectual substance that will follow in the next 100 minutes. Write a pithy quotation or challenging question on the board and ask students to write for three minutes silently about it. Solve a quick, illustrative problem and pose another one. Plan to use the material you generate later in the session. Do anything except class business.

 

Let students know your sense of the purpose of the class session--what you hope they will learn--and provide them with an overview of what you and they will be doing during the session.

 

Take care of any business--announcements, distribution of assignment sheets, and so on. Do anything businesslike here except return graded papers. Do that at the end of the class session, unless you intend to teach about the work they have done in the papers.

 

Scaffolding

 

Another approach to providing a variety of classroom activities is to scaffold each writing assignment. "Scaffolding gives learners the help they need to move from what they can already do to more complex tasks. Appleby (1984), for example, uses this term to refer to instructional support provided by the teacher but also warns that scaffolding need not be viewed reductively as simply a teacher-centered lesson. Scaffolding also refers to how tasks can be structured and modeled and how the environment for working can be redesigned to support development. Scaffolding is the assistance that proficient members of a community offer to learners. . ." (Carol 91).

 

In scaffolding, then, the faculty member analyzes each writing assignment and breaks the task into component parts and, then, around each part designs a lesson that engages the students in responding to the task. Often, community college students also need the faculty member to ask them what they already know before deciding where to start the scaffolding process. An ongoing literacy narrative or journal can be helpful to both student and instructor if students write each class period about what they indeed know and don't know about the task.

 

Handling the Research Component ... and Avoiding Plagiarism

 

The QCC English Department has made it a policy not to assign a "blockbuster" research project due at the end of the semester but rather distribute research throughout all assignments over the semester. The reason for this policy is that the blockbuster end-of­ semester assignment can lead to frustration and result in students' committing plagiarism or dropping the course.

 

The first three assignments may utilize primary research. For example, the literacy narrative may be revised to include research based on family interviews. Two additional assignments may also be personal writing, such as a memoir or a family history; and an ethnographic study of one's neighborhood. These assignments may engage students in surveys, observations, or reading family letters and other family documents.

 

By the middle of the semester, students can be introduced to library and web-based research and the apparatus that a handbook will explain to them. Learning research techniques also requires scaffolding from the instructor.

 

Here is further advice on the pedagogy of teaching the research component:

Research Assignments and Dealing with Plagiarism

 

• If you give assignments that require students to interview people, make sure the students clearly identify their task and purpose to the people they are interviewing. A written statement, which you previewed and the students give to interviewees, is a good idea.
• Require drafts to be attached to papers submitted for a grade.
• Require a second copy of students' final drafts submitted for a grade, and keep the second copy in your files.
• In writing workshops, patchwriting is not classified as plagiarism unless you have some reason to believe that the student is intentionally trying to deceive you:

 

Patchwriting: When following the language of a source text, students are expected to u. se fresh words and fresh sentence structures. Inadequate paraphrase customarily results in a lower grade for the paper and may also result in a required ungraded revision.

 

• Teach students how not to plagiarize--how to cite, how to quote, how to paraphrase, how to summarize.
• When you receive student work that is submitted for a grade and that is of questionable authorship:

 

1. Do not return the paper to the student. Return papers to the rest of the class when you have finished them. Tell the student that you have questions about the paper and get his or her campus address, e-mail, and phone number. Tell the student that you will get in touch with him or her very quickly to arrange a conference.
2. Read the plagiarism policies in the student handbook and the faculty handbook. (See also page 14.)
3. Make an appointment to talk with the director of composition. When you come to the appointment, bring a copy of the student's work. If it appears to be copied from another source, bring a copy of that source, too. Highlight the similar passages in both texts.

 

Facilitating Class Discussion

MARGARET M. LYDAY - Pennsylvania State University

In the following article from the Penn State University Composition Program Handbook, Margaret Lyday describes some general guidelines she has developed that facilitate productive and dynamic class discussions.

 

Discussion is one of the primary ways to move students from passive to active learners. While passive learners focus primarily on information recall, active learners are able to apply concepts to different contexts and to analyze and evaluate new results.

 

STRATEGIES FOR COURSE MANAGEMENT

• Summarize the major points of discussion with students' examples.
• Ask for questions or reactions to students' comments.
• Give students time to think of responses.
• The other self tracks the activity that is taking place. Writing, in a sense, does not exist until it is read.
• The other self records the evolving text.
• The other self gives the self the distance that is essential for craft. This distance, the craftperson's step backwards, is a key element in writing that is therapeutic for the writer.
• The other self provides an evolving context for the writer. As the writer adds, cuts, or reorders, the other self keeps track of how each change affects the draft.
• The other self articulates the process of writing, providing the writer with an engineering history of the developing text, a technical resource that records the problems faced and the solutions that were tried and rejected, or not yet tried, and the ones that are in place.
• The other self is the critic who is continually looking at the writing to see if, in the writer's phrase, "it works."
• The other self also is the supportive colleague to the writer, the chap who commiserates and encourages, listens sympathetically to the writer's complaints and reminds the writer of past success. The deeper we get into the writing process the more we may discover how affective concerns govern the cognitive, for writing is as intellectual activity carried on in an emotional environment, a precisely engineered sailboat trying to hold course in a vast and stormy Atlantic. The captain has to deal with fears as well as compass readings.

 

Most students learn successful discussion patterns early in the course. A teacher, like a coach or a director, must be willing to wait, sometimes as long as a minute, for the first brave student to venture a response. Most students are all too happy to let the teacher take over the discussion, and we should simply refuse to supply the pat answer. Sometimes, providing questions for students to write about before class or during the first few minutes of class gives them a head start. Another strategy that is particularly helpful at the beginning of the semester is to group students in twos or threes to share their individual answers and then have someone give the group report. Listing important ideas from each group and then asking for examples or exceptions often will prompt individuals to ask questions of other students and elaborate on their own experiences.

 

Students need to learn that seldom does one answer or model fit every situation and that a successful writer in any environment is one who can present and support a point in a way that engages and excites the audience. Discussions, then, can develop active learning and critical thinking skills, skills we all need in order to write successfully in ever-changing life situations.

 

MAKING EFFECTIVE USE OF THE TEACHER/STUDENT CONFERENCE

 

Excerpts from

"Teaching the Other Self: The Writer's First Reader"

By Donald M. Murray

 

The act of writing is inseparable from the act of reading. You can read without writing, but you can't write without reading. The reading skill required, however, to decode someone else's finished text may be quite different from the reading skills required to chase a wisp of thinking until it grows into a completed thought.

 

To follow thinking that has not yet become thought, the writer's other self has to be an explorer, a map-maker. The other self scans the entire territory; forgetting, for the moment, questions of order or language. The writer / explorer looks for the draft's horizons. Once the writer has scanned the larger vision of the territory; it may be possible for him (or her) to trace a trail that will get the writer from here to there, from meaning identified to meaning clarified. Questions of order are now addressed, but questions of language still delayed. Finally, the writer / explorer studies the map in detail to spot the hazards that lie along the trail, the hidden swamps of syntax, the underbrush of verbiage, the voice found, lost, found again. . .

 

I think we can predict some of the functions that are performed by the other self during the writing process:

 

This retroactive understanding of what was done makes it possible for the teacher not only to teach the other self but to recruit the other self to assist in the teaching of writing. The teacher brings the other self into existence, and then works with that other self so that, after the student has graduated, the other self can take over the function of the teacher.

 

When the student speaks and the student and the teacher listen, they are both informed about the nature of the writing process that produced the draft. This is the point at which the teacher knows what needs to be taught or reinforced, one step at a time, and the point at which the student knows what needs to be done in the next draft.

 

Listening is not a normal composition teacher's skill. We tell and they listen. But to make effective use of the other self the teacher and the student must listen together.

 

This is done most efficiently in conference. But before the conference, at the beginning of the course, the teacher must explain to the class exactly why the student is to speak first. I tell my students that I'm going to do as little as possible to interfere with their learning. It is their job to read the text, to evaluate it, to decide how it can be improved so that they will be able to write when I am not there. I point out that the ways in which they write are different, their problems and solutions are different, and that I am a resource to help them find their own way. I will always attempt to underteach so that they can overlearn.

 

I may read the paper before the conference or during the conference, but the student will always speak first in the conference. I have developed a repertoire of questions - what surprised you? what's working best? what are you going to do next? -but I rarely use them. The writing conference is not a social occasion. The student comes to get my response to the work and I give my response to the student's response. I am teaching the other self. . .

 

The students will discover, as the teacher models an ideal other self, that the largest questions of content, meaning, or focus have to be dealt with first. Until there is a clear meaning the writer cannot order the information that supports that meaning or leads towards it. And until the meaning and its supporting structure are clear, the writer cannot make the decisions about the voice and language that clarify and communicate that meaning. The other self has to monitor many activities and make sure what the writing self reads that is being monitored in an effective sequence.

 

Sometimes teachers who are introduced to teaching the other self feel that listening to the student first means that they cannot intervene. That is not true. This is not a do-your-own­ thing kind of teaching. It is a demanding teaching; it is nothing less than the teaching of critical thinking.

 

Listening is, after all, an aggressive act. When the teacher insists that the student knows the subject and the writing process that produced the draft better than the teacher, and then has faith that the student has another self that has monitored the producing of the draft, then the teacher puts enormous pressure on the student. Intelligent comments are expected, and when they are expected they are often received. . .

 

The most effective learning takes place when the other self articulates the writing that went well. Too much instruction is failure-centered. It focuses on error and unintentionally reinforces error.

 

Again and again the teacher listens to what the student is saying - and not saying - to help the student hear that other self that has been monitoring what isn't yet on the page or what may be beginning to appear on the page.

 

This dialogue between the student's other self and the teacher occurs best in conference. But the conferences should be short and frequent. . .

 

 

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