Designer Blends

I have spent two years designing, redesigning, and improving my blend. I have spent an inordinate amount of time making and editing lecture videos, rewriting lessons for asynchronous online days, modifying them for synchronous AdobeConnect days, and scrapping both lessons at the last minute to teach the lesson face-to-face. I have surveyed my students extensively, exhausted my TAs, and pushed myself to the breaking point in getting this blend right--all while simultaneously rewriting my syllabus each semester to incorporate more lessons on information and digital literacy and transform many traditional assignments into digital ones.

From day one, my mission has been not just to maintain but to strengthen the productive, interactive community of learners that is paramount to my teaching. I believe that deep learning is rooted in Dewey's collaborative constructivism: we learn through doing, with each other. Critical inquiry and deep learning is predicated on a safe, supportive learning environment. As such, "going blended" has meant taking advantage of synchronous activities to foster exploration and experimentation in Googledocs and face-to-face classes and asynchronous activities to foster reflection in discussion boards and Voicethreads. My students are free writing, experimenting, drafting, revising, editing, and polishing work that is significantly better at the end of the semester than it is at the beginning. They are collaborating with each other more comfortably. They are writing more on the discussion boards than they ever could speak in class. We know each other better than we did even in my highly participatory, horseshoed-desked, discussion-based traditional classrooms.

The rewards can be seen through my students' writing and self-awareness. If writing is thinking on the page, and my job is to help students think critically about themselves as learners and writers, then my students need to be writing more. They are: My students produce an average of 70 pages of writing every semester, 30 of which are revised and polished. Even in my early semesters teaching blended, my students were making greater improvements in their writing than my students had in my traditional classes. They are reflecting on their digital literacy and media addictions, their research skills, and how well (or not) their high school teachers prepared them for college writing and research. They are providing more and better feedback to each other because they have more time to write careful feedback online. Plus, the online feedback is written, so students can't forget what their peers have said. They just need to go back and look.

If blended learning is seen as a method to save time and resources and increase convenience, then it's never going to gain acceptance among educators, especially compositionists. This does not bode well, for more and more college courses are being offered as blended/ hybrid every year. Resistance from compositionists is warranted if the format is pedagogically unsound, but done well, the format is not simply pedagogically sound: it's pedagogically obvious. Students are writing more, interacting more, and reflecting more. They are doing this by writing more. The net result is that my blended students are making incredible progress in fifteen short weeks, progress that I never would have thought possible three years ago. As a writing teacher, I will take nearly any risk if there's a possibility that it will help my students become better writers. The risks are high. The rewards are real.

Deflation

My class is impossible.

I essentially teach a year-long course in fifteen weeks, and student rightfully resent it. I have spent almost five years refining my class so that it's manageable, so that students won't freak out, so that they won't turn on me when I introduce the first paper. I have designed a logical, perfect sequence from summary to rhetorical analysis to Inquiry paper.

But we still need one more week. Yesterday should have been devoted to invention: to refining the inquiry to a solid research question, to freewriting, to explaining the dinner party, to introducing the quote sandwich. I love the activity K came up with that we didn't have time for: students would pair up and conduct one-minute interviews with each other. Then, we'd introduce the quote sandwich, and then we'd guide students to create a quote sandwich with a direct quote from the person they just interviewed, and then they'd exchange paragraphs to see how their partner represented them in text. It's a really good exercise--paragraph building with each other's quotes.

Yet we didn't have time for it. Instead, we spent forty minutes workshopping the sample Paper 1 as a class--which went well, at least in two of my three classes--and then fifteen minutes going over the paper itself, how it grows out of the Rhetorical Analysis that was due last night, and how the full draft of Paper 1 is due this Saturday morning (which was changed to midnight in my second two classes).

Students aren't ready. They haven't refined their inquiry question. They don't have all of their sources. They have no idea what they're writing about. It's an impossible task.

My class is impossible.

Students have every right to resent it. Yesterday, I watched as their expressions shifted from openness to shock to deflation to resentment. Tomorrow's asynchronous class has them watching three back to back video lectures that were never designed to be viewed in one day. They're all mine--they will be sick of hearing my voice by the time they get to the Voicethread. It's a boring class, activity-wise, but they need all of that content tomorrow so that they have what they need to finish those drafts.

My class is impossible to like, which hurts me deeply.

Lofty Ambitions: How Much Theory Can I Introduce in One Week?

Well, that depends.

What's my objective? To stick to my syllabus? To frontload the theory before students tackle the first major paper? Or to ensure that students are learning the material in a manageable way?

Hm, I don't know. The last one seems like a laudable goal. Some might say it's the only important goal up there. In fact, I'm one of them.

Look: the stuff I teach is harder than students expect. It's harder than most people imagine when I tell them what I teach. First-year college writing: two parts process writing and one part research skills blended with peer review and served with a slice of grammar and punctuation?

Sure, I do all that. I also teach argument theory, digital literacy, and rhetorical awareness and analysis. That doesn't happen quickly, as I am grudgingly remembering this week.

The first two weeks were devoted to rhetorical context and summary. As I stand here at the end of Week 3, I'm rethinking that unit--I'm asking them to summarize an argument before they even know how an argument works. Whatever--I'll revisit that at some point. I need them writing within the first week, and the articles I choose at the top of the semester are easy enough to digest:

We start with two sample summaries of Gabriel's 2010 Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age. Then, groups of students summarized either Steve Kolowich's 2011 What Students Don't Know, Peg Tyre's 2012 The Writing Revolution, or Josh Keller's 2009 Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers. 

This past Monday, they submitted an individual summary on either Carr's Is Google Making us Stupid, Shaahin Cheyene's 2012 How the Internet is Changing our Brain or Clive Thompson's 2012 Is Google Wrecking Our Memory, which they'd already discussed in a Lyra Classic: an overcomplicated discussion board prompt that asked them to put their article in conversation with Eli Pariser's Ted Talk on Internet Filters (everyone needs to watch this--everyone--and assign it in class. Do it because we all need to know this, and do it because the discussion that this generates is brilliant).

I asked them to submit these summaries as an ungraded assignment. I've never done this before--it's usually associated with maybe ten lousy points--but I like it. I told them that this was their chance to receive feedback from me before handing something in for a grade. Makes sense, right?

Back to my dilemma: I introduced stasis theory last Monday, which is easy enough to do in fifteen minutes. The trick is to follow up with it well in the next class. This went okay yesterday, but I was more distracted by the fact that students clearly didn't grasp rhetorical context--that thing I've been pounding every day for three weeks now--and had to. I spent more time on that by tying it in with the other big piece of yesterday: simple online research skills. It was an online synchronous day in AdobeConnect, so we all hit Google and searched for a few things. We got to reinforce Pariser--"Who has a different results page than I do?" and then go over simple things like using quotation marks and filtering for dates (2011..2014). And then we got to the good stuff, which I hadn't even planned on:

"Okay, before I even click on this link--what do I know about this article? Here's my results page, and I've taken three nanoseconds to decide I want to click on this one. Why? What am I looking for?"

The most important clue: "Where is it published? What can we detect from the website? That's the first step. What else? Date. Okay. Let's click on it. Here's the link in the AdobeConnect chat box so that you can go to this article on your own computer. Alright, let's check this out. I've never read this article before. Let's pretend that we've all been assigned a short, 750-word assignment about blended learning in college. A basic expository piece to be published in The Diamondback next week. Take a few seconds to scan this. Would you use this source?"

This was not in my lesson plan. But this was the perfect way to introduce (introduce?!! Then why didn't I do this on Day 2?) rhetorical context. Now they get it (I hope. I should still reinforce it Monday so that it totally sticks...). But in essence, they've got it. Great. So then the trick was to bounce from there to stasis theory, picking up from Monday, which I thought they could nail as preparation for...

...Toulmin theory this Monday?

I must be Out. Of. My. Mind.

Stay tuned for Major Syllabus Adjustment #1 in Spring 2014.

Incredible Voicethread!

Okay, I've only listened to two slides so far in just one of my sections, but what I've heard is incredible! These are the moments that make all of the hours it takes to prepare an asynchronous day--a *good* asynchronous day--worth it. Voicethreads don't necessarily take too terribly long to prepare, but because this was our first one of the semester, I had to add a couple of slides just about what Voicethread is and how to use it.

The longest preparation time was designing and explaining the prompt. This is definitely a "Lyra Classic": A hyper-organized, hyper-specific prompt with assigned summaries to comment on and elaborate points to cover. Each student had to respond to two summaries--one on the article they did their own summary on and one on an article they did not read. The prompts for each response were different. I had to write that all out, make sure I assigned groups to the right summaries, and record myself on my webcam walking them through all of the prompts. On a couple of them, the amount of times I say "um" is horrible--absolutely horrible--but because it took me about six hours to put all of this together, I did not rerecord those slides. I did have a script for some of the slides, but not all of them. Yes, scripts help to cut down on the "ums." More later--I just wanted to quickly shout out how impressed I am with my students on only their fourth day of class!