Archive for the 'Low-Stakes Writing' Category

EduTweeting

Published
by
Mikhail
on March 7, 2008
in Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education, Low-Stakes Writing, Pedagogy, Technology and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

Here at the Institute we’re just starting to think about experimenting with microblogging, 140 character posts called “tweets” within a social network or out in the wilds of the Internet. Just in time, here’s a short video from the Chronicle of Higher Education in which a Professor describes using Twitter, a microblogging service, with his students.

This video is a follow-up to an earlier article in the Chronicle on the use of Twitter in education. For other takes on Twitter, see see this academic article and Howard Rheingold’s discussion of why he’s hooked on microblogging via Twitter. Links via Chris Lott.

Assigning Journal Writing

Published
by
Olga
on December 18, 2007
in Low-Stakes Writing, Process and Writing Instruction
. 1 Comment

 In my freshman composition class, my instructor required that we fill up a certain number of pages in our journals by the end of the semester.  He specified that we could write “Don’t Read” across the pages with things of very private nature.  Once I taught a composition class to a group of older students who had been out of college for a long time and froze every time they needed to write a paper. I thought it would be useful for them to keep a daily journal for a couple of weeks at least.  And, yes, I did something I probably wouldn’t do now - I said they could write “Don’t Read” over certain pages.  The things I did get to read revealed great thinkers and writers.  Many who were against journal writing at first continued writing in their journals till the end of the semester.  They shared personal, not necessarily private things; they shared things that could be easily put in and add tremendous depth to their essays.  Journal writing became a great extension of the writing they produced in class, not an appendix to it. 

I think journal writing can be a great learning tool and not just in a composition classroom.  We know that many professors do not see the value in encouraging students to relate their personal experiences to the readings.  And, journal writing is certainly not a common practice outside of the composition program.  But it is no news that the making of new meaning is always connected to the previously gained knowledge and experience, to the things that go on in the students’ lives currently.  Why not let our students make that connection not always on the spot in the classroom, but in their personal writing space? 

Making the Process Work

Published
by
Olga
on October 12, 2007
in Blogs and Blogging, Cross-Cultural Communication, ESL, Low-Stakes Writing and Process
. 2 Comments

Inspired in many ways by Luke’s post, I asked students in my Great Works tutorial whether they would want to share their thoughts and questions on our Blackboard discussion board.  To my slight surprise (this class is already very demanding of their time - they come to the 90-minute tutorial every week and often attend the Writing Center) they overwhelmingly agreed.  I see that despite the product-oriented writing instruction or perhaps because of it, students long for a safe space to share their thoughts in.  They really seem to understand the need for a process to take place before any product can be put out.  For this reason, I think it’s a great idea to have the tutorial in the first place, as it provides plenty of room for that process to develop.  In a similar way, the Writing Center with its “I Write” campaign, which seeks to give student writers a sense of empowerment, is also a comfortable Baruch venue where academic professionals serve as facilitators not judges of their writing efforts.

  I hope that Blackboard discussions would be valuable for my group of Great Works students.  Some of them need a lot of support in language areas, and they are the ones who would probably benefit most from these online discussions.  However, I’m afraid they would also be the least forthcoming participants.  Can those of you who have experience initiating blogs suggest ways to reach out to most diffident participants? 

Great Works Faculty Development Seminar

Published
by
Kate
on September 5, 2006
in Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Faculty Development, Low-Stakes Writing and Technology
. 1 Comment

Last semester, Communication Fellows assigned to the Great Works program at Baruch designed and facilitated at a three-session faculty development seminar. We met three Friday afternoons during the semester, with about 12 faculty members. The group explored ways of using communication across the curriculum (CAC), and participants shared ways of constructing communication-intensive assignments (including writing, speaking, and computer-mediated communication), techniques for responding to student writing, ways of using low-stakes writing to enhance the learning experience (as well as to enhance writing skills), and other topics of interest. I can only speak for myself, but I found the sessions to be engaging, useful, and fun.

This semester, there will be a new Great Works Faculty Development Seminar. You can get all the details and fill out an application here. As the application states,

This semester, we would like to continue the program by bringing together Great Works faculty members again to explore and share strategies for using written, oral, and technology-facilitated communication activities in their classrooms as tools for learning.The program will again function as a semester-long seminar, facilitated by the Institute’s Great Works team. Participants will meet three times during the semester. Between sessions, we will maintain contact via a blog, and participants will be asked to do some reading and preparation for each session. Each of the meetings will be three and a half hours long, including two 90-minute working sessions and a half-hour working lunch. We will conduct each meeting as a roundtable discussion and will rely upon the faculty to lead by sharing their experiences and expertise with others in order to generate ideas for teaching with communication-intensive methods.

Last spring, the Great Works Faculty Development Seminar participants communicated between sessions via Blackboard–in part, so we could talk about the usefulness of the medium in our classes. I’m pleased to report that this year, as the description states, the group will be keeping in touch via a blog. In addition to sharing ideas and methods that work, faculty willl also have a chance to try out blogging and see how the medium might work for their classes.

If you’re a Great Works faculty member (full-time or part-time), please apply. The deadline is Friday, September 8th (though obviously, if you see this later, please contact us via the links on the application anyway). There’s a stipend to compensate you for the time spent in meetings (three 3.5 hour sessions, with lunch provided) and doing some preparation in-between the sessions (reading, thinking, blogging). We hope you’ll join us!

Success with in-class writing

Published
by
Diana
on July 18, 2006
in Communication Intensive Courses (CICs) and Low-Stakes Writing
. 4 Comments

Earlier this summer I taught a class where I used in-class writing assignments extensively and was surprised by how effective it was as a pedagogical tool. 

Each day I brought in a list of questions for students, although they were free to write about whatever they wanted as long as it somehow related to our readings.  Most of their responses showed thoughful engagement with the texts and it was enormously helpful for me to read what they wrote.  It provided immediate feedback on the kinds of things that they liked as well as on what they were not getting.  I also had students bring in their own questions and asked them to talk about why they wanted to address that issue.  In this way, the writing assignments helped shape class discusssion.

The questions I gave them were helpful in a number of ways.  Writing them helped me prepare for class in general and it consistently reinforced to students the ways in which I wanted them to be reading and thinking.  But I think the biggest success of the in-class writing was demonstrated at exam time where they had to write four essays.  The class was very nervous and disgruntled about having to take an exam, but in the end most of them did extraordinarily well.  I think this is because they had been writing off the top of their heads about the material on regular basis, which reinforced their knowledge and their thought.

So, I know that most people reading this blog are already well aware of the benefits of this type of assignment, and in a way I am preaching to the converted.  However, I couldn’t resist sharing my success and encouraging educators to continue to integrate in-class writing into their pedagogy.

Can an Essay a Day Keep One’s Life from Decay?

Published
by
Chihping
on December 9, 2005
in Language and Low-Stakes Writing
. 0 Comments

Can writing have any therapeutic effects? As I am researching on ”literature and science,” a scientific research on the use of language fascinates me–it makes me consider writing from a seemingly unrelated context. A study which was allegedly “the first to test the effects on medical conditions of the writing exercise” appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association and was reported in “Can an Essay a Day Keep Asthma or Arthristis at Bay?” in The New York Times (April 14, 1999: A21). The results of the research show that “writing about traumatic experiences measurably improves the health of some patients suffering from chronic asthma or rheumatoid arthritis,” so reported Erica Goode in the Times.

What I find most interesting is a comment Goode makes in the opening of her article, that the study powerfully demonstrates “how intimately mind and body are linked” and writing serves a big purpose in their interactions. According to the study, the asthma patients in the experimental group were instructed to write about their “deepest thoughts and feelings’” about traumatic experience, while those in the control group wrote down their daily plans, for 20 minutes per day and three days in a row. Reseachers found that

. . . of the 70 patients who wrote about traumatic events, 47.1 percent showed significant improvement in their health at the end of four months, 48.6 percent showed no change and 4.3 percent got worse. In the control group, 24.3 percent showed improvement, 54.1 percent showed no change and 2.6 percent got worse.

It was further noted by the researchers that many patients whose conditions “might have been expected to worsen” unexpectedly improved after writing about stressful experiences.

Four-month length … is about one semester in school. Are we able to observe some sort of ”healing” or improvements in our students, even though we definitely are not treating them as ”patients”?

However we want to ”treat” our students and writing, the implications of the study seem to me to be many-fold. In terms of pedagogy, it makes me re-consider that teaching composition may need to be perceived and designed in a more realistic, human context. That writing is able to change one’s life and it’s just that I have yet to find a way to effect that change. And I imagine that the consideration may also help us guage the level of our attention to and concentration on mechanical and rhetorical aspects more effectively. That is, all kinds of reading assignment and writing exercises will serve a certain purpose that we set forth initially, be it a healing, organizing one’s life, elevating one’s soul, writing for writing’s sake, etc.

On the contrary, after reading this research and writing this blog, I also wonder when do (or will) I transfer the attempt to organize ideas in an essay to actual actions of organizing my life in general? Can I organize my life as the way I organize my writing, to have a thesis? Or better yet, will I have to, since a paper is a paper, life is life? In any event, will the moral of this study be: the more we write, the longer we will live? What would the poet John Keats have to say?

Speaking of Low-Stakes Writing . . .

Published
by
Cristina
on November 15, 2005
in Low-Stakes Writing and Technology
. 3 Comments

Michael Leddy’s entry on How to Email a Professor made me think of when, way back when I was teaching, I somewhat irritatedly clamped down on how students emailed me. After the first few “hey prof,” “im ur student,” or “IM CONFUSED. HOW DO YOU CALCULATE GDP PLEASE HELP ME” volleys of the semester, I’d come to class and insist to students that I was not their chat buddy and that therefore their emails should reflect our professional relationship. While they did not need to overdo the formalities, at a minimum they had to sign their emails (haironfire@xxxx.com leaves no way of identifying the student, let alone course and section) and attempt to use proper punctuation and grammar. Students might as well use emailing professors as a dress rehearsal for future workplace communication, where they might be more harshly judged. Whether or not the course is a CIC, students can practice trying to carefully phrase questions, articulate positions, and apply common rules of courtesy. Having professors set minimum email standards seems like a low-cost way of getting students into the habit of thinking about what they write. What do others think of this?