Instead of a unified post this week I’d like to just toss out several short reactions to the readings, and if I’m lucky I’ll try to work in some thoughts on technology that might find their way into the final. (Actually, after writing the whole thing I realize the ideas fit together pretty well. Hmm - there might be a lesson there.)

The Miller & Shepherd piece first made me realize I need to do more reading on genre theory as it might fit well with my overall research focus. More to the point for this class, though, was their comment that one of the two self-expressed themes of bloggers was “self expression.” M & S link this to Elbow and Foucault (is there anything that doesn’t link to Foucault?), but what struck me was how this fits perfectly with the process model discussed by (among others) Hairston, in which writing is invention. Blogs aren’t about recording ideas; they are about creating ideas. This also ties in with Macrorie’s suggestion that freewriting is an excellent means of getting to an authentic self (though I kind of hate this emphasis on authenticity (how does a teacher have any right to grade on this?) so I’d change it to an original or well-considered idea).

Atkinson offers a tiny snippet of a comment that challenges this process-is-everything approach. He argues that one of the key objections to process instruction is that the assumption that all students will intuitively get things might unfairly favor those with stronger educational backgrounds. As I see it, the question is if we as instructors are just pretending there is no customary structure and so choosing not to teach it, while still expecting the product to adhere to conventions (conventions we haven’t taught). I would note that there is a strongly Socratic element to this approach—a belief that the answers are already in all students, and it’s our job as instructors to draw them out. I like process instruction, but this objection succinctly explains my resistance to giving up all traditional-formalist teaching of structure. I wonder if some happy medium might be found in offering students lots of sample writing and seeing if they could pull the structure out themselves.

Finally, Durst is loaded with information, but I’ll just focus on two small points. First, he discusses early research in collaborative work that “stressed the benefits of paired and group discussion in helping writers figure out what they wanted to say and how best to say it” (p. 1669). This is a lovely pairing with Miller and Shepherd, I think, and suggests to me that the prewriting period of my class should be dramatically expanded, and during this time students should develop and complicate their ideas through writing and through discussion of that writing. However, they quote Nelson (1993) who points out that students want a compact writing process and so tend to subvert or avoid process-oriented steps designed to require more complex thinking (p. 1659). (There’s that underlife again.) What this suggests to me is that these complicating process steps should (must?) occur in class, and indeed this should be the purpose or pre-drafting classes. This also ties in to the dual nature of writing: it is a lonely process that involves (for me) a lot of silent time in front of a computer, but the product is innately social and designed for others’ eyes. And, of course, the stuff I write about is social as well, arising from my interaction with other people (either directly or through their writing). So perhaps the class can serve as a place for the social aspect of writing to be emphasized.

On Usability Testing and Not Finding a Silver Bullet in Haswell

Two years ago at Mayinar, Joyce made an offhand comment to our usability class to the effect that someone ought to do (or maybe had done—I can't remember; it was Mayinar after all) usability testing on instructor feedback to student writing. Apparently the results have been in for a while, says Haswell, and the news isn't good. Of course I've known that for a while, and his comments that students tend to follow only surface, directive, negative comments and ignore global non-directive and positive comments were exactly in line with my experience. So when I saw the title of Haswell's piece, I was ready for The Answer; I wanted to hear the definitively perfect way to comment on essays that would prompts deep thought, stunning insight, and a startling increase in work ethic. But, while I didn't get that, I did get an article that forced me to consider my own "teacher culture" as manifest in my comments. I think here the four instructional types could be linked back to Haswell's discussion of Du Gay's circuit of culture, and in particular to regulation, what Haswell calls "The Epicenter of Response." (Perhaps I'm messing up my Du Gay here, as the four types also echo Haswell's discussion of the 12 types of representation). In any case, my takeaway here is that I need to comment in accordance with the type of instruction I want to do (discipline specific feedback), which seems pretty obvious but I think often doesn't happen. In particular, if I teach process and rhetoric, but I spend my time marking up grammar, then I'm really a traditional/formalist. So how will this change my procedures? Well, tentatively, I think I need to separate feedback. I do still believe that final drafts should be largely error free, but I think it's far more important that they be effective arguments representing real insight. So maybe I just need to have multiple drafts with comments on each geared toward the level of completion (early drafts ignoring surface stuff entirely, etc). Of course this would mean at least doubling my grading load, which would mean abandoning my family and dropping out of TTU (and going entirely batty), so I need a way to do this that doesn't involve stacks of papers and hours at Starbucks.

My solutions here are as yet unformed. Way back when I began I used to have 30 minute conferences with three students where they'd read their papers out loud and we'd have a quick discussion. I'd really love to get peer reviews working well, not only as a time saver but because (and much more importantly) teaching is the best way to learn, and that's a possibility. But the final idea came from Haswell mentioning the teacher doing a think-aloud protocol. In fact, I remember Joyce talking about a conversation she'd had with a rejected applicant to the online program. Apparently she read through his application and simply talked through the mental process that led her to reject him, and he was both a bit stunned and quite grateful. What I love about that is the way it demystifies what is normally such a secret process. We don't want our grading process to be a secret (just the opposite, in fact, right? Isn't that the whole point of teaching?), and we try to write enough to clarify it, but really we can never get it all down on paper, and anyway the act of writing it down is itself an act of invention and revision so we're already removed from the original. So perhaps to get the peer review process going, and to demystify the reality of me as the audience for my students' writing, what I really need to do is talk through the grading process and reveal my thoughts, warts and all.

Is Grad School the Perfect Classroom Environment?

My musings this week begin with a pretty simple observation: graduate classes are incredibly different than upper division undergraduate classes, which are in turn different than intro classes, which are finally different than high school classes. (Incidentally, I don’t think high school is really much different than any previous education, right down to first grade.) The reasons for this are no doubt complex, and so I’ll list a few likely components: student motivation, student skill, teacher motivation, teacher skill. All play a part, I think, though certainly not to the same degree (I suspect student motivation to be the biggest factor, and coupled with student skill it would make the social experience of grad classes into a rather ideal form of collaborative learning). But this week’s readings made me wonder if there might be two other issues at work. First, Brooke’s discussion of underlife made me reconsider my grad experience. For the most part, I think, grad students have less of an urge to defy the “grad student” role. He writes, “the self is formed in the distance one takes from the roles one is assigned” (724), and lists the four most common types of underlife stances taken by students (which by the way is a great encapsulation of the behaviors I see in my classes all the time). Certainly grad students do play information games in an attempt to demonstrate that we are more than just students, but I think the stances we take are much closer to the role the institution assigns. No doubt we complain about instructors or assignments on occasion, but I’ve more often heard praise. In fact, the most common conversation I’ve heard is students discussing which instructor could most help their research. So I suppose grad students are much more comfortable with a very contained underlife that doesn’t so much subvert as supplement our student role, which I think largely creates an atmosphere where success is valued. (That said, it may also mean that instructors who wish to disrupt the students’ acceptance of the role may actually face a much tougher time doing so.)

The other thing I’d bring up is that grad school (at least the two I’ve experienced) in an environment that contains far smaller power differentials. One factor seems to me to essentially undermine all attempts to create a classroom community: grades. No matter how much instructors try to get students to “participate in the conversation” or engage in collaborative learning that creates knowledge, the class will almost always end up being reduced to a letter on a transcript. And frankly, this isn’t really the case in grad school. I’ve heard of a few B’s being handed out, and maybe a C to students who are being quietly asked to leave, but I’d guess that most classes result in 90% or more A’s. So with the letter essentially taken out of the equation, what remains? I think it’s learning. Students who care only about the grade might be happy to take a class that taught them nothing but ended with an A, but without the letter grade the only reason we’re doing all these readings and writing all these papers is because we believe they’ll help us. (And to those worried about a glut of ignorant TCR Ph.D.s, I’d suggest the TTU online model, where selectivity is largely handled in admission rather than in weed-out classes seems to do the trick. Plus, there’s that whole dissertation and defense process.)

So the big question is if we could replicate the graduate school experience in lower level classes. I’d suggest that while it may not be entirely possible, we could get a lot closer by getting rid of many presumed-necessary features of education.

Creating Student Experts for Collaborative Learning

As always, the readings were provocative and forced me to revisit my instruction, though this week I found myself mostly nodding in agreement. I was grateful to see Hartwell because I've long despised the notion of teaching grammar, and though I knew there was a theoretical foundation for my opposition, Hartwell spelled it out nicely. (In the interests of full disclosure, though, I should admit that I generally mark up at least one page of each student's assignment in the much-denigrated formalist approach, so while I hate teaching grammar, I also hate grammar errors.) What struck me most, though, was Bruffee's discussion of collaborative learning. I've long liked the idea of collaborative learning, and often try to add more of it to the class, but Bruffee's discussion of the socially-constructed nature of knowledge made me vow to be much more diligent. In particular I was struck by his idea that "reflective thought is public or social conversation internalized" (549). The old chestnut of instruction is that we are trying to teach critical thinking, but so often we (or at least I) imagine that such thinking can exist without the conversation--that students can think critically without having ever conversed critically. That said, I think one key component of such conversations is the notion that knowledge is not created by just any social interaction, but by communities of knowledgeable peers (per Kuhn). As such collaborative learning in the classroom needs not only to foster collaboration, but also to foster the students' sense that they are knowledgeable and worthy of critical participation in the conversation. I think this second point is why a lot of peer reviewing of student writing degenerates into either empty praise or minute discussions of misplaced commas. My most recent attempt at a solution is to work to change the concept of peer review utilizing a rhetorical approach. Instead of asking the students to act as writing experts, I would like them to act simply as an audience, and every rhetorical audience is automatically expert because moving the audience is the point of the rhetoric. Coupled with this might be a move to have the peer-review process take place over multiple drafts, with the first "drafts" being entirely oral. Students would simply make their case to their review group, and the group would respond, all in conversation. The major flaw in this approach is simply that students aren't idiots, and if I'm grading the paper then all the talk about their peer group being the audience is simply hot air, and they will know it. And that's a problem that still stumps me.

Ahhhh! Schema Theory and Shaughnessy

Just a very quick note on a moment of insight--

I was reading about schema theory (as discussed by Doug Brent, and also Richard Anderson, but as is rooted in Piaget) for another project, and all of a sudden it really clicked with Shaughnessy. Anderson suggests that teachers often view mistakes as mere "blemishes" when in fact they may be evidence that the student posesses a entirely different schemata.

I'm still not entirely sure what Shaughnessy's approach would look like in concrete practice, but it seems to me it would mandate a lot of conversation as a component of draft reviews.