Monthly Archive for September, 2007

Go to the Writing Center!

Published
by
Jenny
on September 28, 2007
in Writing Instruction
. 1 Comment

Perhaps I stand in a unique position, having worked at several Writing Centers, but I found the following video especially revealing of the disconnects between Writing Centers and assumptions about Writing Centers from students and instructors alike.

Instructors oftentimes think that Writing Centers are “sanitizing centers” or “correctness centers” or (gasp!) “proofreading centers.” Instructors will oftentimes send students there in the belief that the student will turn in a “readable” paper. When the paper is turned in and there are grammatical errors, instructors will conclude, quite mistakenly, that the tutors at the Center are inept.

Students, unfamiliar with Writing Center pedagogy, think that their errors will be corrected for them. I can still see quite clearly the very shocked faces I would get from my tutees when I would tell them, “Let’s just work on your thesis. After we get a good thesis, you’ll go home and rewrite your paper from it.” “But I want to work on my grammar,” the student would say, “because it’s due in fifteen minutes.”

There is a strange culture in our classrooms that equates correctness with success; the culture of Writing Centers equates improving over time and self-efficiency as routes to success. When we tell our students that an error-free paper will earn them an A, we forsake critical thinking, creativity, and eloquence.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXK8Z79NOBk[/youtube]

Disclaimer: The views stated here are not the views of any Writing Center at any institution. The views are of the author’s and the author’s alone.

PowerPoint Comedy

Published
by
Mikhail Gershovich
on September 27, 2007
in Oral Communication and Powerpoint and Presentations
. 0 Comments

For those of us down on PowerPoint, here are a couple of comedians using PowerPoint in their acts. As you can imagine, hilarity ensues.

First, Don McMillan, the poor man’s Edward Tufte, on how not to use Powerpoint. Then, Tim Lee, Ph.D. uses PowerPoint slides and some old fashioned booklearning, to keep his audience in stitches. Enjoy.

How Can We Best Support ESL and Remedial Students?

Published
by
Olga
on September 24, 2007
in ESL, Language and Literacy
. 6 Comments

I was an undergraduate student at Queens College in the late 1990s when remedial instruction was eliminated in four-year CUNY colleges.  One measure to alleviate the rigidity of the new policy was Prelude to Success, the program that allowed students needing remediation to be conditionally admitted to four-year schools.  These students’ determination to succeed in their first crucial semester at Queens was truly admirable.  Working closely with such students, I saw a vast majority of them, ESL or not, successfully exiting remediation and becoming full-time students at Queens. 

At Baruch, ESL students receive strong support in handling the curriculum of English and literature courses.  There are now several sections of Composition and Intro. to Literature courses (2100 and 2150) designed specifically for ESL students who attend a one-hour tutorial every week as a part of their class.  It was interesting and extremely rewarding for me to lead these tutorials as a Writing Center Consultant last semester.  This current semester I learned about the existence of 2800 “T” (Great Works of Literature with a Tutorial).  In fact, a big part of my Writing Fellow work now is 1 ½ – hour weekly meetings with 2800 “T” students.  Even though the population of this class can hardly be called ESL – there has been a registration glitch, and many students who don’t need the tutorial rushed to get into this section because it was open.  In my next post(s), I’ll gladly share my difficulties and pleasures in leading this unusual tutorial.  For now, I want to dwell on the place of ESL students in classes across disciplines. 

Transfer students from foreign schools who “fall through the cracks” and enroll in regular English and other courses with intensive reading and writing; freshmen who struggle in exhausting summer Immersion classes; continuing students who are making gradual progress in learning English – they all find their way into classrooms where they want to “sound American” and eliminate all grammar problems that prevent them from succeeding academically and socially.  They may be afraid to speak in class; they may want to get rid of their accents in speech and writing; they often simplify their thoughts because they can’t find the right words to articulate the full complexity of their thinking. They receive papers with many corrections and sadly agree that they don’t deserve to get above “B” because their “grammar is bad.” They run to the Writing Center or SACC for help, often hoping to get their papers cleaned up and polished.  They are used to hearing “Could you say that again?” or “I’m not sure I understand what you mean by ….”. 

Whether we set out to teach these students in our classrooms or lead workshops for them, we can’t overlook these interconnected issues.   I hope we can all exchange some constructive approaches to dealing with ESL writers and speakers.  I just want to share a few strategies that I found particularly useful: finding and praising a strong point in the writer’s/speaker’s thinking, resisting the urge to eliminate original formulations that do not “sound American,” and finally helping students see that the abundance of red marks in their papers does not mean that they make an abundant number of mistakes — it simply means they make a few recurrent ones. In my work as a tutor, I found it very useful to use a particular color for each type of error.  This way the student knew that he/she had 2 or 3 problem areas and not 20 or 30. 

One particular article has been especially helpful in my work with ESL students: “Editing Line by Line” by Cynthia Linville (ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors.  Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth, eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2004.  84-93.).  Linville explains that there are “[s]ix error types that are treatable and are often frequent or serious in ESL college compositions”; these include subject-verb agreement, verb tense, verb form, singular/plural noun endings, word form, sentence structure.  When we focus on what’s treatable and teachable, we will help students to learn English more efficiently, build their confidence and preserve their unique voices. 

Writing Diagnostic Assessment Project

Published
by
David
on September 20, 2007
in Assessment, Baruch College and Communication Intensive Courses (CICs)
. 1 Comment

As most readers of CAC.OPHONY already know, we are in the process of delving into the Writing Diagnostic data that BLSCI has been collecting over the past ten years. My work, as a first-year Writing Fellow, is to help organize and make sense of this data. In order to keep the dialogue about this project ongoing and public, I will be posting periodic updates and I welcome feedback in the form of questions, comments, and suggestions. In this first post, I would like to provide readers with an overview of the data and the project more broadly as well as some initial ideas Mikhail, Suzanne, and I have for analysis.

Starting back in 1997 and ending last spring, fellows at BLSCI have done a tremendous amount of work collecting writing samples from students at Baruch enrolled in Communication Intensive Courses (CICs) across a variety of schools and disciplines. As part of an ongoing assessment of the effectiveness of CIC curricula in improving students’ writing, fellows scored students’ writing samples at the beginning and end of each semester. Specifically, fellows scored each writing sample in terms of students’ expectations for the class (i.e., development, tenor, and range of expectations) as well as the quality of their writing (i.e., ideas and development, organization and coherence, spelling and vocabulary, syntax and punctuation, and grammar).

We are currently in the processes of organizing and cleaning the data. So far, we have data from 1,395 CICs and 31,408 students entered into electronic format and (almost) ready for analysis. These data are primarily from 2000 – 2006, so we can expect the size of the sample to almost double when we are finished entering the early data and as fellows continue to enter remaining diagnostic data.

I can honestly say that I have not yet had the pleasure of working with such an extensive and impressive sample, despite having been a part of several large-scale research and assessment projects. The data are very exciting, because of the many lines of analysis we can potentially follow. For example, we have the ability to look across all of the students’ work to see if their writing has been improved by CIC curricula. We can also focus on the effectiveness of CICs within specific student populations (e.g., ESL students) and compare the effectiveness of CICs across schools and disciplines. We can also follow students who have been enrolled in multiple CICs, to see if and how their writing has changed over their entire career at Baruch, not just during one semester.

As with any “good” assessment project (see Luke’s posting from 9/12/07), we will be meeting with representatives from the Zicklin School of Business, Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Public Affairs early next week to determine how to best use the data. Our goal is to identify each school’s unique concerns and questions and push forward with an analytical approach that satisfies the needs of each stakeholder as well as our internal curiosities as BLSCI.

I will continue to post updates as we make progress with this project. We welcome your thoughts and suggestions at any stage in the process.

A Workshop That Professionally Develops

Published
by
Yukiko
on September 18, 2007
in Writing Instruction
. 1 Comment

The first session of this year’s CUNY Writing Fellows orientation/professional development series was more of a success than last year’s. It is still true that each Fellow’s experience might be different, just because each campus’s program is so different from each other, but I feel like I learned more this year.

I attended an afternoon workshop run by Jason Tougaw, a WAC coordinator at Queens College, on some of the ideas for in-class workshops. After looking at a useful glossary compiled in Gordon Harvey’s “Elements of the Academic Essay” (can be downloaded from QC’s student resources page here), we experienced three activities that they actually used in their in-class workshops. The three separate reading activities focused on thinking about what writers are actually ‘doing’ through their writing (describing? analyzing? claiming? arguing?), how writers express their attitude towards the source they are integrating (i.g. “X argues/believes/acknowledges/emphasizes/implies/observes….”), and, finally, what the writers’ ‘motivating moves’ behind the text are.

The beauty of the ideas presented in these activities, I thought, was that they are concrete and yet flexible enough to be incorporated in different forms in our actual in-class workshops. It could be used in a workshop on analytical reading, but it could also be introduced as a revision strategy by using a student paper as a sample (as done in this workshop), or as a writing strategy by throwing in a writing exercise.

Even though my work for the Institute this semester, which I will talk about in my next posting, does not seem to involve workshops on reading and writing, I appreciated this workshop not only because I enjoyed his good teaching, but also because it presented ideas that are concrete enough for Fellows to immediately put to use in their actual work at a campus, and, for that matter, their upcoming teaching career during or after our graduate work. I walked out of it feeling like I had been ‘professionally developed’ a bit. After all, isn’t it what these orientations are about?

On Assessment

Published
by
Luke
on September 12, 2007
in Assessment
. 1 Comment

As Mikhail noted at the first BLSCI sandwich and cookie-fest, we’re being encouraged to develop new assessments of our work. I thought it would be good to try to get a discussion going here on Cacophony where we could share our thoughts about assessment.

At the CUNY Writing Fellows Orientation, I attended a breakout session where we looked at a compilation of the surveys given to all of the WAC-WID Coordinators at CUNY. We learned a few lessons. Each program is drastically different in structure, oversight, and activity. In some ways these differences reflect the particularities of the CUNY campuses; in other ways, they are just the products of local bureaucracies. Nearly every program has some element of faculty development, though with varying incentives for participation. Most programs have a web presence, and a few are experimenting with new media as an instructional tool. The writing-intensive requirements vary wildly across the campuses, and nearly every campus expressed concern about constant change and limited resources. Finally, a question on “How do you measure the work you are doing?” garnered responses that effectively said, “we assess,” without much exploration of what that meant.

I reference this survey because I think that when doing assessment, it is necessary to first understand the role of your program within the whole institution. The BLSCI (of which the Writing Fellows are only a small part) has a unique challenge because while we are committed to improving communication-intensive instruction, this means very different things in each of the disciplines. Such a situation complicates assessment, not least of all because it depends wholly on the input of a group of individuals who are not necessarily the best-positioned to design and perform assessment: fellows. We’re mostly temporary employees who are completing our degrees and applying for full-time gigs. At the same time, we work for an Institute that is the closest thing to a Teaching and Learning Center that Baruch has, so we should have something to say about how assessment works.

This situation exists in tension with some of the “Nine Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning,” as outlined by the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment at Indiana University-Kokomo. I found the following points of particular interest: “Assessment works best when it’s ongoing, not episodic;” “Assessment fosters improvement when representatives from across the educational community are involved;” and “Assessment is most likely to lead to improvement when it is part of a larger set of conditions that promote change.” In addition to exploring our work within our narrow assignments, then, assessment is needed of the environments within which that work takes place: the curricula of the Weissman and Zicklin schools, the functioning of the Institute, and the mission of CUNY. Assessment should be done of administration as well as of courses and special programs, and our input, as fellows, should be integrated with a larger, systematic approach where the utility of assessment is clearly stated. Too often I fear that assessment is done merely for self-justification. An assessment that maintains the status quo is difficult to get on-board with, while an assessment that will yield improvements at the college could be exciting.

One idea dominated the breakout session I mentioned above: that Writing Fellows and WAC/WID programs at CUNY would benefit greatly from the centralization of information (though not of the administration of WAC/WID programs). The Office of Undergraduate Education is making strides in structuring support for the provincial programs that can be shaped to local concerns, particularly by promising a central digital archive that organizes and distributes the knowledge being generated on the campuses. What other campuses do for and with assessment would be a component of this, which is great.

What other questions might we ask and information might we seek as we begin to assess our path to assessment?

The Best American Academic Essays

Published
by
Jenny
on September 10, 2007
in Writing Instruction
. 0 Comments

Our culture values the best, and when it comes to writing, the best is no exception.  The Houghton Mifflin Company publishes a “Best American Series,” which promises to bring the reader a portmanteau of the best of the best, lest busy readers miss out on the creme de la creme of what they should be, but do not have time to read.  (FYI: The Best American Poetry series is published by Scribner–this is a distinction that I have often felt strongly about for no particular reason other than my acute concern for trivial details that everyone else seems to overlook.)

What is missing in all of this best! writing are academic essays.   We want our students to write well; we want them to write better; we want them to write best!, but we don’t provide any models for them to emulate.  When I was studying poetry, I learned more from trying to emulate poets than I did from reading criticism; similarly, during my undergraduate years, when I couldn’t break out of my A- philosophy paper slump–you see, I wanted to write the best! philosophy papers–I very shyly, but slyly, asked a classmate who was getting As if I could see her papers.  The A’s started pouring in for me.

Without best! models to work from, I really don’t know how we expect our students to write.  After all, the writing that they are reading isn’t the type of writing we want them to write.  This is very confusing.  Calculus students have examples in their textbooks that guide them to problem solve; writing students don’t have this step-by-step guidance.  Even in a class where personal essays are read, we don’t want for students to write in this essayistic mode.  (We occlude the true meaning of essay when we talk about essays.)  I’ve never assigned reading in a composition course that looked anything like the writing I needed for my students to write.  I say “needed” because what my department wanted and what I would have liked to have read were, unfortunately, two very different things.

Whenever I get a particularly creative or top-notch piece of student writing, I always ask the student for a “clean” copy of the piece for my “brag file.”  The student is always flattered and always happy to comply.  When showing these works to future students, I just black out (or, if you prefer, white out) the names of the students.  After a few semesters, you will have enough best! student writing to compile your very own Best Academic Essays.  You could, if you wanted, have these writings made into a course packet each year instead of making photocopies yourself.

I often find that it is best! to go over these best! essays in class.  That way, your students will know what you value and what they should too.   I can’t promise that you’ll get the best! essays with this method, but you will get better essays; I do believe that better is better than what you would have gotten had you not given your students best! models from which to work.