This opening prompt wasn't hypothetical: it's exactly what had happened in my 101 class the day prior. Well, perhaps I exaggerated the student reactions; I don't recall seeing outright anger or fear on my 101 students' faces. Still, the Inquiry paper has come quickly. We haven't emphasized narrative enough. Or the writing process. Or refining the core research question. Not enough, anyway.
My 388V students offered a range of suggestions to this scenario, one that is all too common in our writing courses that easily pack two semesters' worth of learning outcomes into a mere 14 weeks:
- extend the deadline
- cut an assignment later in the semester (to make more time for the above)
- add extra UTA office hours
- contextualize the assignment as one piece of a larger whole
Note that each solution speaks to a different need. The most common one--extend the deadline--gives students more time on their own. The second one acknowledges an overly ambitious syllabus that covers too much for the deep learning and transfer we all aspire to foster. The third affords more opportunities for students to seek and receive direct feedback. The fourth has the most to do with direct instruction: how we frame what we ask students to do.
Extending the deadline is the most obvious, and arguably the easiest, solution, though I don't think it's the best one. First, it's likely to cause problems later on, as the whole semester is tightly packed. More importantly, if the problem is that students are underprepared, the solution is not that they have more time. They don't need more time. They need more guidance. They need more direct instruction, more practice, and more feedback.
Before continuing, I need to give my 101 students their due credit. They are a particularly smart, self-motivated bunch. Several of them will figure it out on their own; our course site is teeming with tips, guides, and examples. The assignment prompt is explicit. They'll likely work it out.
Yet there's a time and a place to throw students to the wolves and have them figure things out on their own. I know this: I do it all the time in the earlier stages of a new unit. Students need to know what they don't know in order to value my instruction, the readings, the exercises, the activities. But this is different. We're past the early stages. They need to practice and get formative feedback. They'll get feedback from each other in the draft workshop, but they need my--and my UTAs'--feedback, as well.
This anecdote speaks to several pedagogical issues; the one I am most interested in at the moment concerns "getting students to do the readings," as Linda B. Nilson puts it in Teaching at Its Best. I recalled Michael Bunn's "Motivation and Connection: Teaching Reading (and Writing) in the Composition Classroom" (2013), which my 388V students recently read, as well. Yet neither Nilson nor Bunn are addressing the particular type of reading that I am this week in 101: instructional texts. The main reading I want students to read--and own--this week is a mere six pages out of Wysocki's and Lynch's DK Handbook (4th edition): summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting. To most students, this is something they've been taught before. Likely several times.
If I were a student in my own class, I'd open the book to those pages, see what they're about, and skim them in approximately 17 seconds. I'd see no reason to do any more than that.
So, instead of doing what I usually do--assigning the pages and pleading with them in bold, red font to read the pages carefully--I didn't assign them as an isolated task. I wove the reading into a brand new, ridiculously convoluted activity. One of my "Lyra Specials." I cringed as I reviewed it in Google Docs. When I shared this new "Using Sources Activity" with my own UTAs, I asked them if students would be plotting my death. To my surprise, they said no. I had written it so that it was the only homework task between Tuesday and Thursday, and I explicitly stated that the end product--a paragraph--could be inserted directly into the upcoming draft. "This is good to mention," one of my UTAs said. "Yeah, this will give them an incentive." A purpose for doing it.
The activity has several purposes:
- to understand--truly understand--the difference between patch writing and paraphrasing, which I'm fairly certain is impossible without practicing both. In this exercise, students are only doing one of these (paraphrasing), but it's better than just reading about it. I have no reason to ask them to practice patch writing individually--it wouldn't be something that they can use. That's an in-class, collaborative exercise, not an out-of-class, individual task.
- to connect the "instructional reading" to their writing assignments (and, more importantly, of course, the writing they will do in all of their classes)
- to apply what they're learning in a low-stakes activity
- to receive prompt, formative feedback on a core skill prior to finishing their drafts (should I choose to do so, which I will. I only have one 101 section this semester, so I can do it. In other semesters, this would be much more challenging).
The real student learning objectives are here:
- Distinguish between summarizing, patch writing, and paraphrasing
- Evaluate which source would be best for a given task
- Read scholarly sources efficiently
- Analyze arguments at a college level
I've read just a couple of the students' paragraphs so far, and I am ecstatic--these are exceptionally strong draft paragraphs that engage scholarly sources. To more thoroughly address the issue of adequate preparation that I open with in this post, I plan to update next week's homework schedule to incorporate more direct (read: forced) revision tasks.
Ultimately, I don't want my awesome students to create and submit mediocre-to-decent Inquiry Papers, the first major--and arguably most important--assignment of the semester. I want awesome students to write awesome inquiries. And that means doing more on my end to help them do that.
Note: This Google Doc link to the Using Sources Activity allows for comments, which I warmly welcome.
