Did You Do the Reading?

March 7, 2013 By 1 Comment

If you’ve taught a College Now course, you know that inevitably, teaching in a program designed to give younger students a taste of college involves explicitly targeting a set of life skills in addition to course content.  College Now is a program through which NYC public high school students can take certain CUNY courses for college credit.  After class, I find myself helping students take the plunge into dialing the number of the tech help desk to troubleshoot a computer login problem, or walking students through the various ways they can find my email address if they’ve misplaced the course syllabus.

And although I generally teach the course the same way I do with undergrads, I do end up bulking up my systems of accountability and scaffolding of assignments.  I require students to do a little more to respond to weekly readings, break larger assignments down into smaller steps, etc.  These little changes have me thinking about how these kinds of accountability systems can be perceived as micromanaging or even condescending, but how if done effectively, they can vastly strengthen learning experiences in many educational contexts.

I’ve noticed I’m quick to assume that the idyllic Midwestern liberal arts college experience I had, in which most of my courses followed the model of “read something and come in and talk about it,” is the educational ideal.  And while I took many wonderful classes, some course titles come to mind from which I remember literally nothing.  As a teacher, I’m often mock (sort of) horrified when friends—people I view as successful, smart adults—dismissively reference all of the assigned readings they didn’t do in college.  But then I remember those long-forgotten books for classes outside my own major that I acquired but rarely opened.  What was in them?

In my last semester of graduate school coursework, I took a class outside of my discipline that turned out to have a tiny student enrollment.  I felt out of my element and awkwardly in the spotlight.  Rather than having to post a discussion question or the equivalent in response to each week’s reading, we were assigned to hand in a more thorough weekly summary/response in writing.  This was more accountability than I was used to in graduate school, and it was uncomfortable at first.  But oh how I read, wrote, spoke, and ultimately… remembered.  The same goes for knowledge I acquired while studying for recent comprehensive exams.  These structures of accountability unquestionably compelled me to learn more efficiently and effectively than I often have.

Although being a student (especially a graduate student) means being responsible for one’s own learning, teacher-imposed structures for recording and responding to course content have a huge impact on what kind of learning takes place.  Systems of holding students accountable for learning come in an infinite array of forms. They are obviously not only for College Now students.  This is hardly a new or unusual idea, but it’s an important one—one that I wish even some of my own teachers had chosen to take more seriously.

Filed Under: Assessment, Education, Low-Stakes Writing, Teaching

Multimedia and Blogging in the Classroom Strategies

October 25, 2012 By 3 Comments

While I was preparing for a Multimedia and Blogging workshop, I came up with a list of strategies that professors can use to incorporate multimedia and blogging in the classroom:

1. Scaffolding:  Professors can use blog assignments to build up students’ skills in preparation for more formal assignments. As a form of low-stakes writing, blog entries can make students’ thought processes and inner debates more apparent.

2. Modeling:  When professors give students a blog or multimedia assignment, it is very helpful to model a successful example of the assignment, perhaps from a past semester.

3. Give Students Roles: Rather than treating blog comments as a free-for-all, why not give students specific roles? For instance, students could be asked to be Peer Reviewers of other students’ posts, or one student could be asked to post a Summary of topics that most often came up over a week’s worth of posts.

4. Set Expectations:  When professors give students an untraditional assignment, the expectations for fulfilling that assignment should be even clearer than those for a traditional assignment. Be clear concerning the style, tone, and format that you expect. Also, including a grading rubric can be helpful.

5. Awareness of Student Population: Professors should plan for the learning curve that they can expect from their students regarding the technologies involved in course assignments. Some students may need some individual assistance, and it would be wise not to overburden students with too many platforms in one semester. That being said, Baruch’s student population is quite tech savvy overall.

6. Learning Goals, Learning Goals, Learning Goals:  Learning goals come first, and the technology follows. Blogging and multimedia assignments must be driven by and fully integrated into the course’s purpose.

7. Use Media Repositories:  The U.S. Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and other institutions offer free and well-documented repositories of media. Working collaboratively as a class with a set group of primary sources can give students invaluable experience.

8. Ask Students to Critique and Curate Sources: An annotated bibliography can turn into a media-rich online annotated bibliography. Before students write their research papers, have them post an annotated bibliography online. If the annotated bibliography can contain popular as well as scholarly sources, then it might present a good opportunity for students to enunciate the differences between a wide variety of sources.

9. Work in a Lab Setting: Setting one or two classes aside for lab work can help you to work with students and give them feedback in real time.

10. Build a Critical Vocabulary: In-class discussions, modeling, and the online sharing of student work and the professor’s comments can all work toward building a critical vocabulary, both in terms of disciplinary knowledge and the competent critique of various types of sources.

11. Scale Your Expectations:  Dramatically switching topics (from gender issues to environmental issues, for example), assigning many untraditional assignments on top of traditional assignments, and using many different types of technology are all sure ways to frustrate and overburden students. Sometimes less is more.

As I think about the literature and composition courses that I’ve taught, these are the major mistakes that I’ve made:

1. Expecting non English majors to understand and effectively incorporate academic articles, especially without any in-depth class discussion.

2. Assigning too many small assignments.

3. Pacing the course too quickly and/or expecting to cover an unrealistic amount of content.

4. Not including enough specific guidelines on untraditional assignments.

5. Not thoroughly pretesting technology.

Those of you reading, what is a teaching mistake that you or someone you know (without naming names) has made? It may or may not involve blogging and multimedia.

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, EdTech, Feedback, Low-Stakes Writing, Media, Teaching

Baiting the Hook

September 25, 2012 By 1 Comment

Every other week during the semester the Institute staff meet to discuss the various projects and initiatives of the Institute, and the responsibility and concerns of the Fellows. But before those bi-weekly meetings, we Fellows — in desperate hope and ragged solidarity – also informally exchange techniques for moving our dissertations along, share strategies for carving out time to write, and commiserate over the slow growth that conjuring words often is, all whilst shoving as many free sandwiches into our faces that the boundaries of respectability allow. As Lauren, former vaunted Fellow now making her mark elsewhere, reminded us: writing is hard work and must be practiced. Amen, sister. But what if you have a problem sitting yourself down to write? Ok, forget sitting, but what if you are the sort of person who despite the best dissertational advice given, still resist engaging the writing process? And let’s be honest, every one of us has at times, been this person.

I am quite often a reluctant writer, always an anxious public speaker, and an ever unsure academic. So how then do I manage my responsibilities as a Communication Fellow and doctoral candidate? Anxiously and uncertainly for sure, but also strategically, using the tools that I have learned as both a Writing Fellow and now as a Communication Fellow. I detail here a few of the strategies that have been most useful to me in the long process of transforming my dissertation into a solid, nearly breathing, stack of words.

First, some things that haven’t helped move my writing along: panic and fear; frantic consultation of books on writing your dissertation in minutes a day; renewed, but ever-weakening, resolve; deadlines whether short or long term; contracts, bribes and ultimatums.

What has helped are those approaches (typically WAC based) that  involve manipulating the “stakes” attached to my writing – while both lowering and raising the stakes can move writing along, the trick is knowing when to use which strategy. Unsurprisingly, when my anxiety is at its highest (typically in the early stages), lowering the stakes works best. I have found that moving away from the blank screen to be a crucial part of dialing down the stakes. It is a lot easier to tell yourself, though, that the initial quality of your dreck writing doesn’t matter, than it is to actually believe it, especially when you must procedurally “save” your work somewhere in the computing environment. To help convince myself of truly lowered stakes, I often begin new chapters or sections, by writing my thoughts and notes long hand. Scribbling on a notepad, especially in pencil, offers some freedom for thoughtful exploration and eases me down winding conceptual paths that still feel private and protected.  Later transferring these notes to the screen then eases me into the revision stage (another stage of writing I tend to avoid like the plague). And apparently, I am not the only one.

Another low stakes strategy I rely on involves “speaking onto the page” as Peter Elbow advises in his latest book and recent Symposium talk. I also use this technique in the workshops I do in BPL courses to illustrate the directive role of the audience (e.g., asking students to write a letter or email to a close friend or family member). One specific exercise asks students to answer a question drawn from their assignment multiple times, but for two different audiences of their choosing (e.g., investors, shareholders, consumers, job seekers, management, their mother), and then we compare/discuss their responses. I highlight the diversity across and within those audience categories and the ways students do and don’t tailor their responses to a specific audience.

In the early stages of my own work, mentally shifting the audience away from an academic discipline or department, has also helped me make conceptual headway by both reducing the mental and emotional stakes attached, and by engaging the processes and benefits, associated with unplanned speech.

On the other hand, these coaxing methods are usually only strong enough to get me out of the early writing stages, but not bridle me to the revising and editing tasks, the last 100 miles that I am walking now. Stay tuned for part two of this post in which I discuss, and solicit, more walking strategies. But for now, what are your strategies for baiting the writing hook?

Filed Under: BLSCI, Low-Stakes Writing, Symposium, Uncategorized, Writing, Writing Across the Curriculum

FRO12: Now Much Artier

September 24, 2012 By 1 Comment

This summer Mikhail Gershovich and I re-wrote the three blog prompts required of all Baruch College students taking Freshman Seminar. The previous prompts, which we wrote a few years ago, were way too formulaic. When crafting assignments, you get what you ask for. We had asked students to tell us “this,” and they responded by writing “this.”

One of the goals of the freshman blogging initiative was to get a sense of who our students are. Instead, we were getting a sense of who our students felt we wanted them to tell us they were. Very few posts integrated media, and students responded to them as though they were a burden rather than an opportunity.

We feel these new prompts are much improved:

Post One, due by mid-September Create a two minute video, an eight image slideshow, or a ten song musical playlist that represents who you think you are to your classmates. Embed your creation in a blog post and then write no more than 500 words that explains how what you’ve created speaks to who you are.

Post Two, due by mid-October For this assignment, you must 1) post the self-reflective monologue you’ve developed in your seminar workshop AND 2) embed a self-portrait, which can be a photograph, an image, a cartoon, a drawing, or some other depiction of how you see yourself.

Post Three, due by early December Create or find a photograph or some other image (a meme, an animated GIF, etc.) that represents in some way your experience at Baruch thus far. Embed your image in a blog post in which you reflect, in no more than 500 words, on your impressions of your first three months at Baruch. Your response should be personal and creative. If you use an image that you did not create yourself, be sure to credit the source with a name, if possible, and a URL!

We trained the Peer Mentors who run Freshman Seminar in how to guide students through producing these posts, and gave them a range of tools that students can use. We also talked to them about the “why” behind these assignments. Each creates an opportunity to talk with students about intellectual property issues, about citation, about public and private publishing (students can password-protect their posts if they want), and about the network of publishers that’s emerging on our campus. In their coursework, we ultimately want students to break down artificial boundaries between the tools and ideas they use and engage outside of their schoolwork and what happens in school. We want to give them permission to apply the skills that power their hobbies to their academic pursuits. We want them to make some art, dammit. And we want them to learn how to do all this in a way that generates both specific expertise and “generalizable knowledge.” Doing so in a low-pressure setting like Freshman Seminar is a crucial first step.

We’re already seeing the fruits of this change in the first six hundred + posts that have come in. Want to see what college freshmen at public, urban university are listening to these days, and how they write about those tastes? Want to see New York City through the eyes of 18 year-olds? Want to see our students’ facility with the moving image (only a few have used video so far, but, this is great)? Then check out the 2012 Baruch Freshman Seminar Motherblog. This space aggregates feeds from around fifty individual sections of the course powered by the work of over a thousand students. That space will be filling up with work over the next few months, and we’re excited to keep looking at, listening to, and watching what our first year students come up with.

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Originally posted on my personal blog. 

Filed Under: Baruch College, EdTech, Education, Low-Stakes Writing, New York, Pedagogy, Teaching, Technology

The Academic Crisis of Audience

September 12, 2011 By 3 Comments

When a tenure-track faculty member in English at George Mason publically remarks that “The student essay is a twitch in a void. A compressed outpouring of energy (if we’re lucky) that means nothing to no one,” we as educators get a sense that we are in trouble.

In “What’s Wrong with Writing Essays,” from the open-access Hacking the Academy, Mark Sample goes on to advocate for more public forms of writing as well as for repurposed essays–that is, assignments which involve critical thinking in the form of different, often mingled media.  Sample envisions his students not as “miniature scholars” but as “aspiring Rauschenbergs, assembling mixed media combines, all the while through their engagement with seemingly incongruous materials, developing a critical thinking practice about the process and the product.”

My immediate response to his derision of the essay form is ambivalent.  On the one hand, I agree that the traditional academic essay often feels alienated from audience and from author–it has a sense of being projected into the void.  On the other hand, I have written and read many well crafted essays which made me ecstatic, proud, even joyful.  There can be some great moments of discovery in the void.  However, thinking back on these, I wouldn’t call them authorless, audienceless, or monotonous.  Rather, they were all written by a student deeply engaged with the material, and they were directed to a caring faculty mentor.  The question that I would like to pose, then, is whether this is a real crisis, and if so, what are its parameters and pressures.

First of all, I would like to point out that we, at CUNY and nationwide, are in an atmosphere where higher education is increasingly being looked at in terms of its value in the job market.  Part of the reason for this is that, despite adjunctification, the price of higher education has risen quite dramatically while average wages have stagnated.  When students must break the bank to fund their education, the life of the mind begins to look like this:

In this environment, departments which don’t offer a high real world value struggle to stay “relevant.”  This has played out in particularly ugly ways as foreign language programs have been shut down and the graduate Fulbright-Hays program has been defunded.  However, it has also played out in rather positive ways as humanities scholars have woken up and realized that it is no longer enough to ventriloquize one another’s arguments in closed-access journals.

At the same time as higher education is being questioned from a financial standpoint, the ways in which knowledge is produced, evaluated, and disseminated have undergone revolutionary changes, at least for those highly fortunate ones who are literate and who have free access to the World Wide Web.  The question then becomes why people should bother going to school when they might design their own curriculum and test it out in life’s laboratory.  I would thus read Mark Sample’s provocation as a symptom of this rather painful moment–as a move to regain cultural relevance.

Communication across the Curriculum presents opportunities for students to master, interrogate, and modulate between different literacies and modes of communication.  Low and middle stakes writing in the form of private reflections or public blog posts give students the chance to situate themselves in relation to a number of different, often overlapping, networks.  Unfortunately, in academia and in life, not every task can be completed in the form of a Rauschenberg combine, a pastiche of different elements.

Yet, I would like to suggest that behind every polished product is a smoothed-over assemblage of seemingly disparate elements.  In a strong sense I agree with Sample.  As educators, one of the most valuable gifts that we can give students is the space to work through some of the tensions they feel between their own intellectual expression and the different communicative forms imposed upon it.  For example, I believe that if I am teaching a basic composition course, I do my students a disservice if I don’t teach them the standards of the college essay.  I also do a disservice to them if I reify the college essay, if I fail to discuss and critique some of the reasoning behind said standards.  In the end, though, I disagree with Sample’s final assertion that text, or specifically the college essay, cannot be ambiguous or woven from different elements.  By rejecting the essay Sample risks imposing his own hierarchy of modal value, his own idea of multimodal form, on student expression.  Although he is staging the conflict as a drama between forms, what is really at play is a drama of audience, the dramatic question being “Who will read my boring old essay?”  Behind that question lie insecurities about who is paying attention to scholars in the humanities.

The crisis of audience with regards to faculty publication is expressed in John Unsworth’s “The Crisis of Audience and the Open Access Solution” in the same Hacking the Academy collection.  Unsworth states that the “humanities scholar…has an imaginary audience” and offers hope that this imagined audience might materialize through open access publishing.  Our urge to publicize and “make relevant” our own work to wider audiences has been catalyzed by the demands and skepticism of students; as a result, many faculty members have begun to craft lesson plans and assignments involving analyses of popular culture and appeals to non-academic audiences.

Are public, repurposed, or popular culture assignments a solution to the ennui of academic writing?  Yes, inasmuch as they guide students in the development of their intellectual identity and in their comfort with different modes of communication.  Ideally, such assignments would help students develop their voice and situate themselves in various forms of communication so that they might forge their own purpose, their own message.  Only when that work has been done can the traditional essay form be fruitful for both faculty members and students.

One final thought:  as educators, we should strive to at least be conscious of and explicit about what pressures we are transferring onto our students, lest our own anxieties fall upon them too heavily or without explanation.

Filed Under: Education, Higher Education, Low-Stakes Writing, Pedagogy, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction

“They just won’t do the reading!”

October 2, 2009 By 2 Comments

I recently tried to do a writing exercise with two groups of students that wasn’t as successful as I’d hoped, largely because I naively expected the students to have done the reading that their professor had assigned, and had based the exercise largely on this false assumption. “Whoa, I am really out of practice,” I thought to myself. “How could I forget that you can’t rely on students to do their homework?” Although these weren’t my own classes, I viscerally flashed back on the frustration I often experienced as an adjunct, when my own students came to class not having done the reading. I hear this all the time from instructors: “They just won’t do the reading!”

Although part of the problem of students not reading may be attributed to their busy schedules, poor time management, or mere laziness, when I try to put myself in my students’ shoes, and think about the times when I have slacked off on doing all of my reading, what it often came down to was that I did not do the reading when it seemed like it was a waste of time. I remember being frustrated when lectures seemed to merely repeat what the texts said, as well as when the readings seemed irrelevant to class discussions, exams, and assignments.

As an instructor, my gut instinct is to say, “But, but, it’s good for you! Trust me!” Or to explain the pedagogical relevance of all the readings on the syllabi. I’m not sure if that is the best strategy, though. I wonder: how can we better convey to our students that there is a reason why doing their assigned reading is important? I have a sneaking suspicion that the answer lies in the creative writing mantra “Show, don’t tell.” That is, rather than painstakingly explaining to your students why it is important for them to do their homework, teach in such a way that your students see for themselves that the texts you have assigned them to read have value.

In my duties as a Writing Fellow, I’d like to make a push for instructors to use writing as a means of “showing” the benefits of reading. According to WAC philosophy, there are numerous reasons why we advocate for students to be writing more frequently in all of their classes. Here’s just one: by writing about what they are reading, students will feel more invested in the texts their professors have assigned, and professors will have written proof that the time they spend putting together a syllabus is not a waste of their time.

Filed Under: Low-Stakes Writing, Pedagogy, Writing Across the Curriculum

Confronting Tom Cruise in the Classroom

September 15, 2009 By 5 Comments

The Cruiser
Creative Commons License photo credit: xrrr

My course on the history of the Vietnam War necessarily contains a great deal of visual media, most often in the form of newsreel footage and clips from documentaries. However, since the Vietnam War has inspired dozens of fictional Hollywood films, I also have students watch clips from several of the most canonical films on the subject.  As any instructor knows, showing a “movie” in class has its advantages and pitfalls, the latter most often expressed in a sort of collective disengagement from an academic mindset, as students naturally fall into the more passive role of viewer.  How do we break through that passivity and get students to engage critically when watching a form of media that they are accustomed to consuming as entertainment?

Oliver Stone‘s 1989 film Born on the Fourth of July often ends up being a critical text in my course, simply because the narrative (and the ways that director Oliver Stone presents that narrative) engages some of the war’s most fundamental historical issues. The film also, however, stars Tom Cruise, a celebrity with a considerable amount of pop cultural baggage whose name often elicits rounds of giggling from students.  Since my goal is to avoid having them fall into the passive receiver role of pop culture consumers, I find it is useful to play along with the jokes for a bit before subtly steering the discussion into more “academic” areas.  In a matter of  five minutes, a joke about Cruise jumping on the couch on Oprah can become a conversation about  American male celebrities, which leads us to John Wayne, which leads into issues of American masculinity and directly into the critical aspects of the film we are about to watch.

Despite these pre-watching efforts though, students often can’t help but get caught up in what they are watching, particularly when it takes the form, essentially, of an action film.  This is why I think it is vital to avoid turning on the movie and letting it run for more than five minutes at a time.  After all, if you are asking students to consume this text in a different way than they are used to,  it is important that you present the text in a different way.  One way that I found effective is to break the film up into tiny clips that are watched and then written about (or discussed) in low stakes exercises.  This way, students are constantly forced out of the role of viewer and back into their role as critical thinkers approaching a text.  Even if that text includes Tom Cruise and machine guns.

Here’s a quick clip from another Oliver Stone film, Platoon (1986), followed by an example of the kind of free writing prompt that I have found useful for stimulating discussion and leading into more complex writing assignments.  By limiting the viewing experience to this short scene, one that has been selected carefully for its density of critical material, I hope to focus the students’ attention on just a few important elements.  As you can see from watching the clip and reading the prompt below, assignments like this contain more than enough historical, sociological, and ethical issues to keep everyone busy and, more importantly, to demonstrate how to begin unpacking the complex mechanics underlying popular culture:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in_dNxlnFKA&feature=related[/youtube]

Exercise

The character Barnes is presented as the ultimate cynical warrior, immune even to death, and his character is contrasted with Taylor and Elias, who are ostensibly “good” warriors.  What makes a soldier “good” or “bad” in the context of this scene?

Barnes’ statement “there’s the way things ought to be, and the way things are” seems to apply to the Vietnam War and history in general.  Do you agree with his attitude?  Why or why not?

Filed Under: Low-Stakes Writing, Pedagogy Tagged With: , ,

How do we deal with writer’s block again?

February 10, 2009 By 2 Comments

Students often approach me to get advice on how to overcome this writing disaster. I got bored with my old explanations and ‘googled’ it only to find an extensive and impressive list of solutions on Wikipedia. “Challenging negative thoughts about one’s skill or ability to write” – isn’t this a good one? This ‘challenging’ can be immeasurably difficult if one’s experience with writing hasn’t been very positive in the past. Let’s rethink again the amount of red ink we spend on each paper and the tone of our comments!

The last thing I want to do in this post is pretend that I never question my writing abilities. What can and in my case does effectively dissolve this negative thinking is reading. Somehow, as I move from sentence to sentence, even in the most familiar of pages, I’m made aware of my skill to think, to feel, and to formulate my thoughts and feelings in language. Once I’ve consciously gone through this process, I feel inspired to write.

The Wikipedia page includes a list of “dramatic depictions of writer’s block,” among them Shakespeare in Love and Stranger than Fiction. I’d add another list – literary depictions of writer’s block. And, perhaps, one more – professional writers’ strategies for overcoming writer’s block. Here is how it goes for Hemingway: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” How is this for a first-day low-stakes writing activity?

Filed Under: Feedback, Language, literature, Low-Stakes Writing, Writing Instruction

The Frame Strategy

November 11, 2008 By 1 Comment

In Engaging Ideas, John Bean discusses “the frame strategy” for use with small groups. “Using this strategy, the instructor gives students a mapping sentence that predicts the shape of a short essay but not the content. Students have to create content topic sentences to head each predicted section and develop a supporting argument for each one. Often the instructor can include in the task a blank tree diagram or an outline indicating the slots that students’ ideas must fit”

This sounds very interesting to me, but rather challenging. Even though he provides an example, I still can’t quite envision how to actually do this. It seems like it would require a lot of prep before hand: envisioning a full essay and mapping it out. I also can’t quite picture how students I’ve worked with would take to the task.

Has anyone done this before? Could you let us know how you prepped the task, what it was exactly, and how it worked out? Thanks!

Filed Under: Group Composing, Low-Stakes Writing, Pedagogy

Teaching Writing Intensively (and Often)

September 19, 2008 By 7 Comments

It happens at the beginning of every semester. Tucked into my tiny mailbox are a stack of about fifty blue and white student evaluations. The scantron sections of these evaluations, where students “rate” their professors in several categories on a scale of one to seven, never seem especially helpful to me. After all, it is inevitable that some classes will go better than others from semester to semester. And even when the students are responding to a specific prompt, such as “was the course material presented clearly” it is only natural that many of them are going to respond to their overall sense of the course, which is not limited to my instruction but includes their relationship to the course material—whether or not they “like” poetry, for instance—and the experiences, good and bad, that they have had with their fellow classmates. These evaluations, more cynically, as has been shown by many studies, are also often informed by the students’ own sense of whether or not they will receive the grade they wanted or feel they deserve. Because I am a demanding instructor and a moderately tough grader I often feel like I am actively sabotaging my student evaluation scores, which regularly tend to be on the cusp of the departmental average.

As most of us would agree, however, school is not about teaching, but about learning, and I have a feeling that many a “good” teacher is not necessarily helping their students to be good learners, and often the students themselves are the last ones to realize this, especially in classes like literature where quantitative measurements are impossible. How many times, after all, have we heard our students say to each other: “you should totally take a class with professor so and so, he’s a really cool guy”? For me, the point of teaching has always been very simple: make sure that the students think and learn, and it is the open response sections of the student evaluations that I actually find most helpful when re-evaluating the methods I use to achieve this goal. Sadly, most students skip this part of the evaluation, but those who do respond often offer a constructive view of their own experiences and struggles in the class. Many students say nice things, some occasionally complain, and others less frequently express anger. I have come to realize that those expressing anger are usually unhappy about the fact that the course was too difficult, that the reading was too boring, and most often, that there was just too much writing. In fact, one of the most common laments I have heard from my literature students (who are generally required to write two 10 page essays over the semester and regular 1-2 page informal responses for each class) is that it is unfair for me to require so much writing in a class that is not writing intensive.

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Filed Under: Higher Education, Literacy, Low-Stakes Writing, Oral Communication, Pedagogy, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Instruction
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