First Year Writing at Utah Valley University

Professional Development Meeting Notes from November 8-9, 2011

2011-11-14T08:19:00.000-08:00

1. Announcements

--If you are using FA 742 to meet with students, please let us know so that we can ensure that office space is being utilized for its intended purpose.

--We possibly may be piloting John Goshert's text Entering the Academic Conversation: Strategies for Research Writing for English 2010 and 2020 next semester. If you are interested in participating in the pilot, please let us know.

--The Faculty Center for Teaching Excellence have recently made some funds available to help adjunct faculty pay for travel expenses to give presentations at conferences. (NOTE: This does not apply if you are merely chairing a session.) These funds might not be available next year and they are probably only available on a first-come-first-serve basis so it's best to get your application in to the Faculty Center soon.

--In that same vein, if in the future the English Department offers lecturer positions, all adjuncts are eligible to apply. It will look especially good on your CV if you have recently read a paper at a conference.

--The English Department has added a new Writing Studies emphasis to the English major (in addition to the emphases on Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and English Education that are currently offered). This major will focus on rhetorical theory, preparation for grad school, etc. Please encourage any students in your classes who seem like good candidates to talk to an adviser and pick up brochures in the front office. As part of this new emphasis, next semester the Department be offering Intro to Writing Studies (which requires 1010 and 2010/2020 as a prerequisite).

2. Norming our Grading Criteria

For the remainder of the meeting, we participated in an activity that would help us engage in a discussion about how to evaluate student papers. Gae Lyn handed out a copy of the AACU's rubrics for Written Communication and Critical Thinking. We briefly skimmed through these rubrics. Then we each read 3 different papers: one that was an excellent paper, one that was an average paper, and one that was a poor paper (but we weren't told which was which right away). Working in groups, we discussed which papers were better than others, applying the AACU rubrics to the papers.

Professional Development Meeting Notes from October 12-13

2011-10-13T07:10:00.000-07:00

1. Announcements

Please don't forget to submit your schedule preferences as soon as possible. It will probably take approximately a month to get the schedule ironed out.

2. Introduction to Portfolio Assessment

Gae Lyn began by explaining the history of the 2 year portfolio assessment that ran from 2009-2011. The University had pushed each department to assess how well they were meeting their program's Essential Learning Outcomes (ELOs) for all their courses, but especially their General Education courses. The English Department created the 1010/2010/2020 assessment program in response. 350 portfolios were selected at random from 1010/2010/2020 over the 2 year period and were evaluated by the WPAs to assess student's progress from the beginning of the classes to the end.

3. Overview of the Portfolio Assessment Criteria

John Goshert, the previous program administrator, joined us to discuss the criteria that was used to evaluate the portfolios. The criteria were adapted from the National Council of Writing Program Administrators' Outcomes for First Year-Composition. The portfolios were examined to determine how well they were able to engage in critical thinking (were they able to transition from uninformed opinions to looking at the topic from complex, multiple perspectives), did they use evidence to support and develop their ideas, did they pose research problems (rather than mere topics), did they engage in an academic conversation (did they use scholarly texts as source material), and could they produce mechanically sound writing.

4. Overview of the Findings from the Portfolio Assessment

The results for 1010 were quite positive. Students seemed to experience profound progress in terms of the program's basic writing expectations and intellectual growth. All of the students tended to perform above the average from what the WPAs had expected. Unfortunately, the results from 2010 were not quite as positive in terms of its added value. In some papers, the level of sophistication that the students exhibited toward their source material seemed to weaken in comparison to 1010. The students either tended to use more journalistic sources or, when they used scholarly sources, they only valued scholarly texts for their informational content alone (as opposed to engaging with them as arguments). Furthermore, students who started out in 2010 with weak skills tended to remain weak and students who started out with strong skills didn't seem to improve as much as had been hoped.

5. Discussion of the Assessment Findings

The discussion was then opened up to everyone to brainstorm how to keep the momentum going from 1010 into 2010. John felt that the course textbooks should be taken seriously by all instructors because they help to connect the assignment sequences with the scholarly mindset we want the students to develop. Gae Lyn mentioned that we have pretty high expectations for our students in comparison to other open enrollment colleges. At least one open-enrollment school that she knows of does not focus on the critical thinking component of first-year writing. Rather they focus only on helping students understand and summarize source material. We ask our students to do considerably more. Grant mentioned that the portfolio assessments possibly cannot account for the delay in timing between when students take 1010 and when they take 2010/2020.

***

Feel free to share your own thoughts and opinions about the findings from the portfolio assessment in the comments to this blog.

Starter Activity for Problematizing a Topic Essay (Essay #1, 1010)

2011-10-01T11:58:00.000-07:00

My students enjoyed this short activity to prep their heads for the concept of "problematizing."

1. Take three volunteers and have them choose which side of the topic they will represent (pro, con, neutral) without telling them the topic.

2. Have the volunteers come up to the board. Give them the topic and two minutes to see who can generate the most examples/reasons for their side.

3. Alternately, divide the class into the three groups (pro, con, neutral) and have them fire answers up to the their representative at the board.

4. Possible topics: Is graffiti art? White lies. Joining the military. Road construction in Utah.

Stephenie Swindle

Laptops in the Classroom?

2011-09-15T14:55:00.000-07:00

The comments on this blog post are very interesting, regarding different ways of looking at laptop use in the classroom. What are your thoughts and policies on laptops?

Professional Development Meeting Notes from September 13-14

2011-09-15T13:33:00.000-07:00

The following is my notes from our recent professional development meeting for the adjunct faculty. Feel free to make any corrections or additions in the comments to this blog.

1. Introductions - Everyone went around the room and gave their name and how long they'd been at UVU

2. Announcements

--Make sure you submit your syllabus to Meredith Bennie either via email or a hard copy as soon as you can. As a reminder, you will also need to send a copy of your gradebook (either electronically or a hard copy) at the end of the semester.

--In about a month or so, the Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) will send out the form to ask for your schedule preferences for the Spring 2012 semester. They will use this form to create the teaching schedule.

--There was a typo on the recommended guidelines for the Exploratory Essay. The guidelines are that the paper should be approximately 6-8 pages in length (not 4-5).

--This next semester, the WPAs will try to schedule a time to observe your class, especially if you're new to the faculty this year. This is a good opportunity to get some helpful feedback from the WPAs.

--We were lucky enough to get a room on campus that can be used by the adjunct faculty to meet with students. The room is FA 742 (the Faculty Annex---the stand-alone buildings located in the southeast parking lot). It is occasionally locked, but we'll try to encourage the custodians to leave it open at all times.

3. Discussion about how to make the blog more effective (e.g. what kind of content you want and what would inspire you to add posts to the blog)

4. Discussion of any questions or concerns that have come up in the beginning of the semester

5. Discussion of the pros and cons of using student papers as models in class

--How does peer review function to help students see examples of other students' writing?
--Why do some (of the best) teachers avoid using model papers?
--When teachers use models, how are they best employed?
--What is the Graff & Berkenstein rationale for their "template" approach to teaching writing?
--Can model papers constrain or limit students' creativity and thinking?
--How can we ethically use examples of student writing?
--Should students look at the best writers rather than at the writing of other students?
--How was imitation used in classical rhetoric?
--What are some of the best ways to use model papers in class?

Gae Lyn handed out the first two pages of an article discussing the value of imitation in teaching rhetoric by John Muckelbauer. The article was entitled "Imitation and Invention in Antiquity: An Historical-Theoretical Revision" from Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 21.2 (Spring 2003): 61-88. You can view the full article online in JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.uvu.edu/stable/10.1525/rh.2003.21.2.61

(NOTE: This link will require you to login with your UVLink ID and password.)

Scientific Breakthroughs in Effective Teaching

2011-09-14T11:46:00.000-07:00

Ya gotta love science and its way of replacing assumptions with facts about how things really work. A recent NY Times article describes several such points about teaching methods that we can implement to improve our teaching. Even if you don't take the time to revise your syllabus right now, just being aware of these tips can steer you toward greater effectiveness.

Click here to read the brief article, and I'll summarize the main points for those who don't have time.

1. Quality of homework matters more than quantity.
2. Neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and educational psychologists have made a series of remarkable discoveries about how the human brain learns.
3. Implementing these elements have caused test scores to rise between 13 and 50% (in the incidents mentioned in the article).
4. Technique 1: “Spaced repetition.” Exposing ourselves to information repeatedly over time fixes it more permanently in our minds, by strengthening the [associated] neural networks.
5. Technique 2: “Retrieval practice.” Being "tested" or calling information FROM our brains as opposed to reading, reviewing, making notes, and putting it INTO our brains again is far more effective at cementing that knowledge.
6. "Another common misconception about how we learn holds that if information feels easy to absorb, we’ve learned it well. In fact, the opposite is true." The harder we work at learning something, the better we learn it. Researchers have intentionally made things harder to study (small font, blurry characters, punctuation errors, etc.) with positive learning results.
7. Technique 3: "Interleaving." Rather than having three similar story problems in a row, interleave them with dissimilar ones. When the student doesn't know what to expect next, s/he has to think harder and will learn better.

Creating a Research Space

2011-09-01T10:09:00.000-07:00

Last year at one of our meetings, I shared some information about how I use CARS (create a research space) to help teach students how to write an introduction to their Researched Argument papers.

I had some people ask me again about it this year, so I thought I'd share.

The CARS model was identified by John Swales (Swales, John M. "Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings". Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.). He is a linguist focused on genre. He defined genre as a text type that is ultimately determined by the task and situation and is immediately defined by communicative purpose. He studies speech communities (a group who share the same linguistic identity).

In his study of the speech community of research articles, he noticed a pattern in the article introductions, which he has defined as follows (from page 141 in his book):

Move 1: Establishing a territory

Step 1: Claiming Centrality [the researcher can claim interest or important, can refer to the central, favorite, or classic character of the issue, or can claim that there are many active investigators in the field.]
AND/OR
Step 2: Making topic generalization(s) [express in general terms the current state of knowledge, of technique, etc.]
AND/OR
Step 3: Reviewing items of previous research [relate what has been found (or claimed) with who has found it (or claimed it).]

Move 2: Establishing a niche

Step 1A: Counter-claiming
OR
Step 1B: Indicating a gap
OR
Step 1C: Question-raising
OR
Step 1D: Continuing a tradition [follow the rhetorically-established tradition. This usually means that the researcher takes what is there already and delves deeper (conducts a test with more subjects, compares studies, etc.)]

Move 3: Occupying the niche [this move offers to substantiate the counter-claim, fill the gap, answer the question, or continue the established tradition. Most research article introductions end with Move 3-Step 1. Move 3-Step 3, if it is included, is always at the end of the introduction.]

Step 1A: Outlining purposes
OR
Step 1B: Announcing present research
Step 2: Announcing principle findings
Step 3: Indicating research article structure

According to Swales, the moves show the need for researchers to re-establish in the eyes of the discourse community the significance of the research field itself [this is also part of what we teach regarding academic writing as conversation and could help students understand it better]; situate the actual research in terms of that significance [I've found that students struggle with making their papers their own. The four steps of move 2 help to point out where they can focus their efforts]; and show how the niche will be occupied and defended [this is where I teach them about the role of the thesis statement and of guiding the reader using signposts].

Some examples
Claiming centrality:

Recently, there has been a spate of interest in how to ...
In recent years, applied researchers have been increasingly interested in .. .
The time development ... is a classic problem in fluid mechanics.
Many investigators have recently turned to ...
A central issue in ... is the validity of ...

Topic generalization:

There are many situations where ...
An elaborate system of ... is found in the ...

Reviewing previous research:

X was found by Sang et aI. (1972) to be impaired.
X was impaired (Sang et aI., 1972).

Continuing a tradition:

It is desirable to perform test calculations ...
It is of interest to compare ...

Application for English 2010/2010 (perhaps 1010?)
I use this to help students get an idea for how to start their final paper. We talk about why all those articles that Swales studied would have used the same general organization unconsciously. This could be a good lead-in for determining whether something is an academic source, but I haven't explored that since I usually teach this toward the end of the semester.

I also take the opportunity to focus in on Move 2 and how they need to decide what their purpose is and how they will give a new, different, or unique perspective on the topic.

I also have them bring some of their sources to class and then have them pick out the moves and steps in the introductions. Then, I have them do the same with their introduction (that I had them write and bring to class). Then we work on making those introductions even better.

Finally, I am including here a scan of a page from Swales' book that shows how the moves and steps work in an actual article.

Orientation: Reflective Writing and Portfolios

2011-08-21T21:14:00.000-07:00

Hello to all our new and returning faculty,

As a follow-up to my Orientation breakout session, I'm posting here links to the websites that I'll be showing regarding ePortfolios and reflective writing. The portfolio is a requirement; our program portfolio guidelines are posted on the writing program website. Using an ePortfolio is NOT a requirement, but instructors may be interested in exploring ePortfolios as an option in their classes. We encourage all instructors to emphasize reflective writing throughout the semester to build the final portfolio.

UVU does not have a general education portfolio requirement at the current time, but is moving in that direction. You may want to look at what Salt Lake Community College is doing with their General Education ePortfolio:

http://www.slcc.edu/gened/eportfolio/index.asp

A national organization for ePortfolios is The Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning:

http://www.aaeebl.org/

Also you may want to look at the site for Electronic Portfolio Action and Communication (EPAC)

http://epac.pbwiki.com/

The ePortfolio movement is growing nationally and internationally. Because as writing teachers we know the value of reflective writing, we may want to study this technology and move towards incorporating it into our pedagogy.

Gae Lyn

One Documentation System to Rule Them All

2011-06-22T17:02:00.001-07:00

This morning a student in my English 2020 class was complaining to me about how difficult it had been for him to learn APA this semester. He said he had liked MLA much better when he had learned it in 1010. He asked me: "Why can't there just be one documentation system that is used by all the academic disciplines so that we don't have to constantly learn new systems?"

I gave him my standard answer: "Well, that's like asking why don't we all speak Esperanto? It makes a whole lot of sense to have a universal language that is easy to learn and understand. It's completely logical. But to think of a language as just a system for conveying information is to miss the point. Each of the world's languages were developed independently by groups of people in similar geo-political regions. As such, each language contains that culture's history, their values, their political beliefs, and their most cherished traditions."

I explained to him that most of these documentation systems have a long history dating back to the late 1800s (or sometimes even earlier). The history of these documentation systems is very closely tied to the history of the academic disciplines from which they emerged. In that same vein, these documentation systems can tell you a lot about what is valued by that discipline.

For example, APA wants you to indicate the year that something was published in the body of your text because having current, up-to-date evidence is extremely important in their field of inquiry. Current research is important, but not quite as vital in the humanities and so MLA doesn't stress it as much.

Furthermore, MLA seems to have embraced the realities of doing research in the age of the Internet, whereas APA represents the old guard. Websites are volatile, meaning that their content can change rapidly. Because APA values resources that are static and reproducible, APA discourages using websites as a resource. They do this fairly subtly---by not offering a specific section about how to cite websites in their 6th edition, for example.

When you learn to use your discipline's system correctly, you show the peers in your discipline that you understand their values and practices. I personally prefer MLA over APA quite a bit. But that could be because MLA is what I was "born and raised with" academically and so it's become second nature to me. I've learned to "think in MLA," if you will. It's been much more difficult for me to grasp the internal logic of APA this semester. (Because it's like learning a new language in many respects.)

So I told him that to suggest that we use a universal system of documentation is a politically charged statement. It would be like someone from the United Nations coming in and telling us that our country's official language will be Esperanto now and we're going to all learn it in school. It's not very likely to happen. No matter how logical it may be.

My Course Objective Statement

2011-05-24T09:42:00.000-07:00

I was rather inspired by the UVU Presidential Lecture given by Martha Nussbaum recently. It was entitled: Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. I'm toying with the possibility of having future 2010/2020 students write their rhetorical analyses about her book by the same title.

At any rate, her lecture nicely expressed a lot of the ideas I want to communicate to my students throughout my course. With that in mind, I have updated my Course Objectives statement in my syllabus. Here's my new statement:

Overview and Objectives
This course is intended to prepare you for future college courses, for your future profession, and for your participation as a citizen in a democratic society. Academic institutions, workplaces, and democracies have a strong need for you to become an individual who is capable of: 1) independent thought, 2) developing respect and empathy for people who are different from you and who may disagree with you, and 3) recognizing that nearly every issue is more complex than you initially thought it was before you began to examine it in more depth. Thoughtful, well-researched dialogue (which we refer to as “argumentation” in academia) is generally considered the best means to this end. It can be a messy, even uncontrollable process at times---but it is always educational. Once individuals and societies have gone through the crucible of argumentation, they are nearly always better for it.

To prepare you to be a more effective participant in the argumentation process, this course emphasizes: critical thinking, library research, and academic writing. With that in mind, here are the specific objectives this course ought to accomplish. By the end of the semester, you should be more prepared to join your academic, professional, and social community by:

--Making the transition from learning to write into writing to learn.

--Knowing how to form effective rhetorical arguments that are backed by sound logic and evidence.

--Evaluating the rhetorical arguments presented by others.

--Developing effective research and writing strategies.

--Becoming familiar with the library and learning how to quickly find the resources that are of the highest credibility.

--Learning how to correctly use and cite the resources in your papers using an appropriate documentation system.

--Understanding the most effective way to incorporate research into your own writing.

--Developing a willingness to recognize and wrestle with the complexities of the topics you choose to think and write about on a deeper, more critical and scholarly level.

***

What do you currently have in your syllabus for your Course Objectives?

Response to "Death to High School English"

2011-05-13T11:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday one of our colleagues shared a link to a very thought-provoking article in Slate by Kim Brooks called "Death to High School English." I've had many similar sentiments about my own students' lack of preparation for college writing. And since I have also been a high school English teacher at one point in my life, I decided to write my initial response to the article.

First of all, I completely agree with Brooks that large class sizes and high volumes of students are one of the main reasons why writing is not the primary focus of high school English. I think that I learned how to write in college (as opposed to high school) because I wrote a lot of papers for my degree and I consequently received a lot of feedback from each of my professors on those papers. For that reason, I think that students best learn to write both by practicing a lot and by being mentored one-on-one by a more advanced writer. I try to give my students this same experience by meeting with them individually to discuss their papers. This helps me to show them how the general principles we discussed in class can apply to their papers specifically. I have found that this is one of the best things I can do as a teacher. However, the very nature of high school English works against the mentorship model, as was eloquently expressed in this essay. Providing one-on-one feedback to my students is hard enough teaching 23-69 students here at UVU, let alone the 130-200 high school students that an average high school teacher has here in Utah.

Brooks also mentioned that she is doubtful that reading classical literature is an effective way to develop critical thinking skills. She writes:

They read these works and then they talked about them in class discussions or small groups, and then they composed an essay on the subject, received a grade, and moved on to the next masterpiece. Did their exposure to a few of the great works challenge or change them, did it spur them to read more widely or more critically, or did it make them better writers? Occasionally, I guess. Mostly, they seem to recall struggling with comprehension of these classics, feeling as though they just didn't "get it," and for those students who know they will not major in English, does it really matter, they wonder.

When I was a high school English teacher, I saw the beginning of a trend among my fellow teachers to de-emphasize classical literature in favor of using adolescent literature instead. Their hope was that if they used literature that was more accessible and fun, the students would learn to enjoy reading more and would naturally develop analytical skills because they would read more frequently. While I see a lot of value in this approach, I am beginning to question the merits of a curriculum that myopically focuses on fiction alone.

I think fiction has the potential to teach our kids empathy, to give them exposure to different life experiences and perspectives, and to stimulate their imaginations and creativity. But if we ignore non-fiction texts (especially texts that forward an argument using research and evidence), we do so at our student's peril. It is largely through engaging with argumentative texts that we learn how to critically analyze an argument and form intelligent responses to them that are backed by sound logic and reasoning. When we regularly read and respond to high-quality arguments, we learn how to form more effective arguments of our own. The ability to argue meaningfully is incredibly valuable in college, in the workplace, and in a democratic society---and it is absolutely essential to being a successful college writer. But perhaps the lack of student engagement with argumentative texts has to do with attitudes about non-fiction texts being the "vegetables"---something good for you but not enjoyable. Personally, I think this notion is misguided. For me, argumentative texts offer a different kind of pleasure. They expand my understanding of the world I live in and they cause me to introspectively reflect on how I should think or act in light of new evidence. And there's something fun about engaging in a dialogue with other people about ideas that matter. It just takes a teacher with the right kind of passion and a careful selection of engaging non-fiction texts to help students see that level of enjoyment as well.

Perhaps one might argue that students get enough non-fiction material in their other classes in the form of textbooks. That is only partially true. Although all textbooks contain arguments (for example, a history textbook makes a value judgment on what aspects of history are worthy of study as "history" or not---never mind the spin that a textbook may put on a particular historical event), they are not presented as something that one can reasonably disagree with. Rather, they are presented as something to be passively consumed as "fact" or "truth" or "reality." In other words, textbooks do not present themselves straightforwardly as an argument. Because textbook arguments are too subtle, it is difficult for students to learn to how to parse out the arguments that are being presented in them. It takes a higher level of reading comprehension (and life experience) to draw out an argument from an average textbook and so it is better to begin with texts that present themselves as an argument more straightforwardly.

Another reason students don't learn how to write effective arguments is that they write in a vacuum. In the real world, we write because we are motivated by some important circumstance that demands our commentary. In school, the circumstances for writing are often created artificially by the teacher. Unless students can see how the topic is intuitively interesting or important to them, they may feel demotivated or adopt an attitude that the assignment is a hoop they need to jump through to pass the class. Also, in a school setting we write for an audience of one: the teacher (who only reads our papers because he or she is contractually obligated to). In the real world, we write for larger audiences who may or may not agree with what we have to say---and who will give us feedback whether or not we want them to. This kind of real-world feedback is very important in learning to write because the more perspectives you can get on your writing, the better. The unfortunate disconnect between writing in the real world and writing for school is not always productive to creating good writers and good thinkers.

The final reason why I think our high school students are not learning how to argue/write effectively is because it's perceived as a potential threat to the institutional structure of the school. The current school system rewards students who obediently do their work without making any waves. Students who learn how to argue will ask questions and possibly challenge their teachers. They might begin to question whether what they are being taught is really the truth about the way things work in the real world rather than just accepting what authority figures (teachers, principals, and parents) tell them is true. It could feel to some teachers like opening Pandora's Box. I can empathize with that to a certain extent. I, too, get tired of the student who challenges every single grade I give him/her or every statement I make in class. It can be exhausting and demotivating.

But at the end of the day, I think that having students who can think for themselves is a necessary price to pay for a little loss of control. I'd rather have students who are capable of making an effective argument backed by sound logic and research---even if that means they will turn the tables and use that knowledge against me. I may resent it at first, but if they can make a good argument, it will lead me to make necessary changes to my curriculum that benefit everyone in the end.

Well, that's my two cents on the piece. What was your response?

Summer 2011 Schedule Requests

2011-03-14T08:46:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

As I mentioned in our meeting Tuesday evening, we've had to postpone fall 2011 scheduling until the first week of April or so. In the meantime, please go ahead and let me know if you're interested in summer teaching. Please include in your request your interest in:

A, B, or either block

1010, 2010, and/or 2020

available times (most, if not all courses will be MWF)

available locations (most, if not all courses will be on the main campus)

Unless you responded on or after FRIDAY MARCH 11, I did not file your earlier requests, since this is the first call for people to express their interest in summer teaching. Please get your requests (email response is fine) by Monday March 21, and I expect that Gae Lyn, Grant and I will turn the schedule around rather quickly.

Administrative Changes, Program Evaluations Requested

2011-03-14T08:45:00.000-07:00

For those of you who missed last Tuesday's meeting, at the end of this academic year I'll be stepping down as writing program administrator and leaving the program in the capable hands of Gae Lyn Henderson, who will be equally capably assisted by Grant Moss and Joy Santee. Just as a reminder (and copying from last month's followup email), since your observations and opinions are important to us, some time before the end of the spring term, I'd like to ask each of you to spend a few minutes reflecting on and evaluating the past three years including:

1. the direction the writing program has taken;

2. effectiveness and/or weaknesses of course texts, assignment sequences, pedagogical advice, and so on;

3. your experiences with administration (support on disciplinary matters, plagiarism, student complaints, etc.)

Of course if you've been with us for less than three years, we want your observations as well!

Also, please take a few minutes to anticipate future directions for the program:

1. how you would like to spend time during annual orientation and monthly meetings;

2. new directions for course texts, outcomes, assignments, pedagogy, etc.

If you would, please write up your reflections, evaluations, and anticipations in a short letter submitted to the department (you can place it in my box or the department chair's). That way, your observations and advice may be shared with various stakeholders and used to help guide the program in the coming months and years.

Thanks for your work, support, and contributions over the past three years. As always, see you in the halls...

My Grading Philosophy

2011-03-14T01:38:00.000-07:00

My youngest sister is currently taking English 2010 at the University of Utah and I'm feeling quite frustrated with her instructor these days. She received a B+ on her first graded paper (I would have given it an A-). I figured he was just a tougher grader than I was, so I promised her I would help her to get her second graded essay up to a higher standard. As she was preparing to submit her second essay (which was an Analysis/Synthesis paper), I made her re-read the two essays she was responding to several times until I felt satisfied that she had fully comprehended their arguments. I also made her substantially re-write her rough draft nearly five times until I felt satisfied she had created a solid paper. I would estimate that I conferenced with her for approximately 7 hours helping her to improve her paper.

The results? Although I thought the paper was a solid A, she received a B. According to her instructor, she got a B because her thesis statement was "unclear," she misused commas a few times, she needed to discuss the first essay's analogy in more depth, and he felt she needed to discuss the essays "against each other" in the same paragraph (rather than in two separate paragraphs). He probably has a good point about some of those criticisms, but I hardly feel that those minor foibles justified a B grade. When my sister shared her instructor's comments with me, my inner mother hen started to cluck loudly that his grading style was arbitrary and unfair. In my opinion, her comprehension of the two essays was superb, she made good points about how the two essays differed in their approach on the topic, and the argument she made in response to the essays was intriguing and well-reasoned. I respect that her instructor and I might have different grading criteria, but it's difficult to tell since he never clearly articulated what that criteria was.

And so this incident has inspired me to articulate my own grading system and philosophy. Fundamentally, I feel that the grade he assigned her was unfair because 1) he didn't provide a grading rubric to his students, 2) he didn't provide clear instruction or examples of what he considered "good" writing to be and 3) he didn't allow for a rough draft option. (He did have a peer-reviewed rough draft option, but not an instructor-reviewed one, which is crucial to fairness.) In my opinion, these are three very important elements that must be in place in order for a student to feel empowered and to continually improve as a writer. Allow me to explain why.

1. The Importance of Grading Rubrics

Grading papers has the potential to be unfair because it is such a subjective process. But a grading rubric can help to create a more objective standard of measurement that you can use to assess your students' writing more consistently. If you don't have a clear grading rubric in place, then you are probably only grading your students based on your gut reaction to their paper alone. It's inappropriate to grade students based on your gut feelings because this reaction has the tendency to be arbitrary. While I feel that there is an element of the student's grade that should be influenced by your initial impression of the paper (more on that later), it is generally a very unreliable evaluation method because it can be easily influenced by your own biases (such as your personal feelings toward the student, whether or not the paper aligns with your personal political beliefs, or even just the mood you were in while you were grading). Furthermore, it's difficult to defend a grade that came from your gut reaction when a student presses you for more specific information about how he or she could improve the paper.

By contrast, if you can provide your students with a grading rubric, it not only makes your expectations for the assignment clear, but it ensures that you will grade your students consistently and fairly. Rubrics help to make your grading more objective because it forces you to weigh your students' papers against a set criteria rather than some indefineable, subjective gut reaction.

Here's an example of the basic grading rubric that I used for the Summary/Strong Response paper:

Mechanics and Formatting (minus up to 20 points maximum)

Length (4-6 pages)

Page numbering

12 pt Times New Roman font

Standard margins

Double spacing/spacing between paragraphs

The Thesis Statement (20 points)

How it is phrased

Correlation between thesis statement and what is discussed in the body of paper

Topic Sentences and Paragraphs (40 points)

Overall quality of the topic sentences

Overall quality of the paragraph development

Discussion of the Ideas in the Text (30 points)

Summary of the text

Quality of response to key ideas and central meaning of the text

Concrete examples from the text

Use of Quotes (30 points)

Use of attributive tags, follow-up discussion

Quoting mechanics

Balance between quotes from the text and the writer's own prose

Overall Quality of the Argument (30 points)

Overall quality of the student's level of critical thinking

General quality of the argument

I then provide a 5 page point-by-point breakdown of each element which clarifies exactly what I mean for each of these different point elements. For example, here is the grade breakdown for grading element 4a (the initial summary of the text, worth 10 points of their final grade):

Excellent 10	The summary of the text in the introduction to the paper was above average. The writer had an excellent grasp of the argument presented in the original text. The summary cut right to the core of the main ideas of the text. It was neutral and unbiased. The summary also provided the perfect context for the rest of the writer's argument.
Good 9	The paper provided a summary of the text it responded to in the introduction to the paper. The summary only included the main ideas of the original text and left out the details. The summary was fair and balanced.
Average 6-8	The paper provided a summary of the text it responded to. The summary perhaps got a little bogged down in the details of the text. The summary could have perhaps framed the rest of the argument a little better. The summary could have perhaps framed the rest of the argument a little better. The summary may have been somewhat biased or may have slightly misrepresented the original argument. The summary may not have been in the introduction of the paper.
Poor 0-5	The paper provided a summary of the text it responded to but it may have been too long-winded or awkwardly stated. It may have had little relevance to the paper and may have been obviously biased. The summary may have been missing from the paper or difficult to find.

Using this rubric, I have a one-page sheet that has a breakdown of the points I assigned for each of the different grading criteria. That way, my students can compare the score I gave them to my rubric and see exactly what elements of their paper I thought were weak and which were strong.

The main advantage of grading rubrics is that they help you as an instructor to get clear and specific about what you consider to be important for that particular essay. It allows you to assign heavier values to the more important aspects of a student's essay (such as the quality of their argument) and keeps you from over-emphasizing less important aspects of an essay (such as grammar). They also help you to clearly communicate your definition of good writing to your students.

To be fair, I do find my initial impression of the student's essay to be helpful in some ways. First of all, my gut reaction is reflected in the score I give them for element #6 (the overall quality of the argument). Secondly, my gut reaction helps me to judge how accurate my grading rubric is. I compare their final score with the grade I would have given them based on my gut reaction to see if my rubric is accurate. If my students are collectively getting higher or lower grades than I think they deserve, I make notations to myself about modifications I need to make to the grading rubric for the next semester. With trial and error, my grading rubric eventually begins to take the shape of an objective standard of measurement.

2. The Importance of Providing Instruction and Examples

Another benefit of having a grading rubric is that it also helps me to create an outline for my day-to-day class instruction. It would be unfair of me to grade my students on a particular element of writing when I haven't given them specific instruction about it. So, I make sure that I give instruction about each of the different elements that I will eventually grade them on.

For example, for grading element 4a (initial summary of the text), I spend a full day discussing how to write summaries (see my lesson plan about summary writing for reference). At the end of the lesson, I make sure I provide several examples of both good and poor summaries. We discuss together as a class why the samples are effective or ineffective. Then, I end the day's instruction by talking about how the things we discussed in class will affect their final grade for the Summary/Strong Response paper. We go over the grading rubric for element 4a and I make sure they clearly understand what is expected of them.

I also think that it's very important to provide a sample paper for students to use as a model along with an explanation of why I think that paper is effective. One of the things that I like about the Allyn and Bacon text is how they have a meta-commentary off to the side of their sample papers that explains the effective elements of the paper (sort of like a play-by-play analysis). I find that method to be quite helpful to my students in explaining my expectations and in demonstrating the different "moves" that an academic writer makes in a Summary/Strong Response paper.

My sister's instructor never provided her with a sample paper. When he first gave her the assignment, she texted me asking if I had any sample Analysis/Synthesis papers and email it to her if I could so that she could get a feel for the genre. It makes it much easier for students to understand your expectations when you provide them with a good sample paper. Otherwise, it turns into a game of Take-a-Wild-Guess-What-Your-Teacher-Wants, which is not fair to students.

3. The Importance of Allowing for a Rough Draft Option

Lastly, I feel that it is very important to provide your students with a rough draft option. Although I give them detailed grading rubrics, clear in-class instruction and sample papers, some students turn in papers that are way off in left field in terms of my expectations. Maybe it's the student's fault for not paying enough attention, but I ultimately feel that it is unrealistic to expect all students to get it right the first time. It's therefore reasonable to give students a second-chance to try to improve their paper once they have a better sense of my expectations. Furthermore, I think that students learn a great deal about how to be a better writer when they make revisions with guided feedback. It helps them to apply the principles we discussed in class when they have a better idea of how the grading elements apply to their paper specifically.

The only drawback of having a rough draft option is that it means more grading (ick!). The way that I've resolved this issue is to make the rough draft mandatory, but the final draft optional. If students are happy with the grade they received on their rough draft (low as it may be), they are welcome to keep that score if they so choose. Or they are welcome to make revisions based on my comments and feedback. I find that only 30-40% of my students opt to turn in a final draft, which helps reduce my grading load.

Conclusion

I think that these three elements (grading rubrics, clear in-class instruction accompanied by examples, and a rough draft option) are essential to writing instruction. They help to minimize potential grading subjectivity and they provide students with the tools they need to become better writers. When a student feels he or she is being graded based on an ineffable, arbitrary standard of measurement, they can easily become demotivated and discouraged about their ability to improve as a writer. For that matter, subjective grading systems only reward students who were already talented, experienced writers to begin with and do nothing to help the novice writer to find specific, practical ways they can improve their writing. I can't imagine a system that would be more unfair than one in which you are assigned a grade based on some teacher's vague impression of you, without any clear instruction on what was expected of you or without a second chance to make changes to your writing once you have a better idea of where you could improve.

I just wish there were some way I could communicate that to my sister's instructor.

What Is Needed In Order to Have a Scholarly Dialogue

2011-02-23T07:20:00.001-08:00

I recently listened to a lecture given by William Wilson. He provided a definition of what it means to have a scholarly dialogue. I liked his definition. I made some additions to it [in brackets], and I figured I would share it with you:

Simplistic as it may sound, the chief requirements for [scholarly] dialogue may be courage and honesty.

By courage, I mean:

The individual scholar's willingness to put his or her ego up for stakes,

[Diligently and objectively searching all possible perspectives and information on the topic,]

Abandoning long-cherished positions when necessary,

And acknowledging how and why one's mind has changed.

By honesty, I mean:

Citing other scholars accurately in context and crediting one's sources fully,

[Ideally using only those sources which are of the highest quality and credibility,]

Refusing on principle to distort the evidence or another scholar's view,

And not pretending to have an expertise one does not possess.

What do you think? Is there anything you would add or revise about this definition?

Teacher-Centered vs. Student-Centered Philosophies

2011-01-12T12:47:00.000-08:00

Most of you are probably familiar with the concepts of teacher-centered classrooms vs. student-centered classrooms. Here's a quick refresher of the concepts:

In the teacher-centered model:

The teacher is an expert on the subject matter and the students are there to learn from a "master," if you will.

The teacher is in full control of the course. He or she selects the projects/texts. The work is produced for and graded by the teacher.

The teacher dispenses wisdom and the students absorb it.

The students are motivated by their grades and other extrinsic rewards. They are graded by how well they match up to a pre-determined standard of excellence.

In the student-centered model:

Power is decentralized in order to make room for everyone's empowerment. Everyone learns from each other---including the teacher.

The students actively shape the direction the course will take. They select the projects and texts based on their interests.

Knowledge and learning is created synergistically by the class.

The students are motivated by their own curiosity and intrinsic desire to learn. The students' work is produced for a real audience and for real purposes. The students may be graded by their peers.

Classrooms have historically followed the teacher-centered model. Most universities are pretty much set up to follow this model. But recent research about teaching methods have led to the growth in teachers who use the student-centered model. Although they were a little more rare, I had a few professors who followed the student-centered model from time to time when I was an undergraduate.

It's important to remember that these are not binaries. I find that many teachers use a combination of these two models, some falling closer to one end of the spectrum than others. During my undergraduate studies when I was being trained pedagogy and educational philosophy, the student-centered model was strongly advocated by most of my professors. I don't think it's because the student-centered model is definitively better (although it does have a lot of research to back it up). I think it was because these professors assumed we were already familiar with the teacher-centered model and wanted to show us the benefits of the student-centered model in the hope that we would give it a chance.

For me personally, my native impulse is to be more teacher-centered. I supposedly have a red personality, which means that I have a strong need to feel that I am in control. For that reason, the teacher-centered model appeals to me on an instinctual level. But I have also found that the more I introduce student-centered elements into my curriculum, the more beneficial I find it to be.

This semester I'm experimenting with a fairly student-centered approach when it comes to my class policies. I have a neighbor who is a psychology professor at UVU and he's been bugging me for a very, very long time to try letting my students determine the policy. I've finally caved in and I'm giving it a chance---reluctantly giving up a little bit of that sense of being in control for the sake of the experiment.

Basically, on the second day of class, I had the students engage in a class debate about what our policy should be for absences, tardies, and late assignments. The debates were fairly interesting. When discussing absences, one class spent the bulk of the time talking about how missing class was its own punishment because it causes you to fall behind in the course. (They ended up opting for just letting people attend as needed with no penalties for poor attendance.) One class decided to allow 4 absences and give 5 points extra credit for every unused absence. Another class decided to give 30 points extra credit for having less than 3 absences and -30 points for having more than 5.

In the first two classes that I taught the discussions went fairly smoothly. It surprised me how quickly they reached a consensus. However, the last class had me second-guessing whether I was ready to give up control just yet. Many of the student started talking about how coming to class was just a hoop to jump through in order to get a grade. Their cynicism towards their education admittedly made me feel a little defensive---and it started to bubble over in my tone during the discussion. At one point I asked them why they weren't just taking an online class (which only required you to do the work and didn't require attendance or strict deadlines). I was hoping someone would talk about the value of coming to class, and a few of them did, but not very powerfully. I honestly began to wonder if any of them would end up attending the class at all. Finally, when I told them that I really didn't think I could be an effective teacher if only 3 students showed up because I had planned lots of group work and in-class discussions, that seemed to shift the discussion a little bit. (They were the class that opted for the +30/-30 policy.)

Anyhow, it's been really interesting. I hope I haven't damaged my rapport with my third class because of my defensiveness. My sense is that it's not a lost cause, but we'll see how it all plays out by the end of the semester. I'll let you know how it all turns out when the semester is over.

Copyright Law for Dummies

2010-12-28T10:51:00.000-08:00

My New Year's resolution is to be in full compliance with copyright law. And frankly, I've found that it is much more difficult to comply with this law than I ever imagined. I've been sending out dozens of copyright requests all week and crossing my fingers that everything is going to work out for the best. It has me incredibly nervous!

I used to believe that it was okay to copy just about anything as long as I was using it in a classroom and for educational purposes. Unfortunately, that's not true. Like me, I think that a lot of us may potentially be ignorant of how copyright law applies to us as educators, so I thought I'd write a blog entry about this topic in the hopes that we all can be more compliant.

According to my research, use of copyrighted material for educational purposes falls under the category of "fair use" under the copyright law. There are four criteria that must be met in order for something to be considered fair use:

1. Purpose of Use
It is okay to copy something for educational use, but it is only appropriate if the copies are used spontaneously. For example, let's say I decide to copy a copyrighted article to share with my students in the classroom the day before one of my lectures. That is clearly spontaneous. However, if the next semester comes along and I say "Hey, that lesson plan worked great and that article was perfect!", I no longer have the same rights. If I copy that article for my students the next semester, it is no longer spontaneous and I am guilty of copyright infringement. It is okay to use an article temporarily and spontaneously. But an article should not be put into an anthology of any kind or distributed to students for more than one semester until you receive explicit permission from the copyright holder.

2. Nature of the Work
I'm not totally clear on what this means, but it has something to do with whether the work contains well-known facts and ideas (which are not copyright-able, but are part of public domain) vs. how much of it is the author's own insights and expressions in it. This is something I'll probably need a lawyer to explain to me some day.

3. Proportion/Extent of Materials Used
This refers to how much of the work you are using (e.g. what percentage of the work you are using). For example, there was a case where a teacher was found guilty of copyright infringement for copying 11 out of 24 pages from an instructional book. If you copy a paragraph from an article or a book, you're probably okay since it's just a very small portion of the overall work. However, copying a chapter or more from a book becomes questionable and can get you into trouble.

4. The Effect on Marketability
This is by far the most important of the four tests for fair use. If copying and distributing the materials will result in a reduction of sales for the copyright holder, it's illegal. For example, let's say I decide not to use the Allyn and Bacon textbook in my class because I don't feel I use enough of it in my curriculum to justify the expense to my students. If I decide to copy a few graphs or pages from the book and give that to my students, I essentially reduced the sales for the Allyn and Bacon textbook. That could get me into hot water.

One other thing I didn't know is that you must include the copyright notice whenever you copy something for a student. It is not enough to give attribution.

If you want more information, check out this helpful website: A Teacher's Guide to Fair Use and Copyright. Also check out UVU's Course Reserve page to see the copyright laws in action at our school.

***

Yikes! I don't know about you, but this stuff just floored me when I learned about it a few months ago. This week I've had to send out copyright permissions to: the Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Scientific American, the journal Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, Disney's Wondertime magazine, and W.W. Norton who publishes They Say/I Say. (By the way, that last one is a long shot, but one can always hope.) I've also rewritten many of my handouts so that they are purely in my own words and using my own original ideas. It's been quite a mammoth task. Wish me luck!

P.S. The image above comes from Gideon Burton's Flickr photostream. I'm pretty sure that since we're friends, he won't sue me for it. :)

True Story

2010-12-22T17:45:00.000-08:00

My husband purchased the video game "Uncharted" last week. We made a deal that I would grade every night while he played the game until it was time to go to bed. We did this every evening for a week. The video game took him about 10 hours to complete and that's almost exactly how long it took me to grade my big pile of Exploratory Essays and Final Portfolios. Wow. No wonder I'm exhausted! :)

Some Links and Some Logical Fallacies

2010-11-16T09:15:00.001-08:00

I recently stumbled across a few interesting links that you might find interesting.

First of all, since the WPAs have long proclaimed that English 1010/2010/2020 are about teaching critical thinking, at their core, I thought I would share a fun link on Wikihow entitled How to Think For Yourself. I think it's a good starting place for a discussion about critical thought. Since it's a wiki and since this is something we think a lot about, it might be interesting to see how we as teachers would add or expand to this definition (it is a wiki, after all). I'm sure there's a lot we could add to step #4, in particular.

As for my second link, all I have to say is: I got scooped! I've had the dream of creating a visual graph of logical fallacies for a long time and now the Fallacy Files have beaten me to it. Check out their Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies. It's pretty amazing.

Do you teach logical fallacies in your class? I have a class period devoted to it early on in the semester because I think it's helpful to begin a discussion of sound logic by talking about what is not logical. I actually have a 35+ guide to logical fallacies. It's kind of becoming my magnum opus. I based it on Kip Wheeler's Logical Fallacy Handlist, making heavy edits using additional content and examples from Wikipedia and the afore-mentioned Fallacy Files (among others). All three of these sites grant copyright permission for non-commercial use, which is nice. Normally, I would share my entire guide with all of you, but I'm working on getting some copyright permission for some of the images I use and it makes me nervous to distribute it to anyone but my students right now. However, I might be willing to let you read it just for your own personal reference, if you'd like. Just contact me for the file.

When I teach about logical fallacies, I do a little introduction to Logical Fallacies by reading Max Shulman's "Love is a Fallacy" (with a heavy disclaimer that it's a very chauvinist text) and then I divide them into groups of 3 and assign them 3 logical fallacies to present to the class using my guide.

As a follow-up to the lecture, I have them write online forum posts identifying logical fallacies in 1 of the 4 common film texts they view for my class. I heard an idea for another possible follow up that I used to use, but I stopped doing it because it made my classes run out of time. I got the idea from an Academic Evolution podcast featuring Kathryn Cowley. I still think it's a great idea. Here's the directions I used to use for it:

Now you’ll get to use your creativity to apply your logical fallacy to an argument. Choose one of the two passages on the following pages (Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" or "America Recycles Day"). Your group is going to pick one of the logical fallacies you learned about together and you’re going to "doctor" this piece of writing so that it has your assigned logical fallacy in it. For example:

From a section of Kennedy’s Inaugural Address:
To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Doctored Inaugural Address with the "Ad Hominem" logical fallacy:
To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required--not because those stinkin’, lyin’, no good, evil, God-hating Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

I then had them doctor the text of either The Gettysburg Address or an editorial that used to be available on the America Recycles Day website. (You can contact me if you want the text.) Back when I did it, I sometimes got some pretty creative responses. It's a fun activity if you want to give it a try.

Harry Potter and Scholarly Texts

2010-11-02T19:56:00.000-07:00

I thought Alyssa's post last week was great and a good way to help our students see the bigger picture of academic research. I just wanted to share an activity that I tried that seemed to go well. First, I did a search of full-text, peer-reviewed articles on Harry Potter in EBSCO. I got about 300 or so hits. I printed off six very different articles from different journals (one was in a law journal about bureaucracy and government in the books, one from a social work journal about parenting in the books, one was about using Harry Potter in the classroom for teaching Latin roots, one was a feminist literary critique of the books, one was from an economics journal about the marketing of the books, and one was about moral education). Actually, since some of the articles were long I just printed the first few pages and the last page or so (for the references). I then divided the students into small groups and gave each one an article to analyze. They had to answer the following questions:

Who is the author of the article and what are his/her credentials?
What is the name of the journal that published the article? What other types of articles do you think might be found in this journal?
Who is the intended audience for this article?
What is the main idea/thesis of the article?
What kinds of sources are listed as references for this text? Based on their titles, what do you think they are about?

After each group had about five minutes to familiarize themselves with their articles, we discussed each one as a class (I had the PDFs on my computer so we could all see them, but that's not necessary). My goals for this were two-fold: first, to familiarize the students with journal articles and how to understand what their main points and context are; second, to help them see how to take a scholarly approach on a subject, even one that was seemingly non-academic like Harry Potter. I think this activity worked really well for my students. They were mostly able to get a feel for what each article was about and who the intended audience was. Many of them also expressed surprise that scholars were discussing Harry Potter in so many different ways, and it helped them understand better what a scholarly approach to a subject is.

One Way to Encourage Students to Engage with Scholarly Articles

2010-10-29T07:54:00.000-07:00

I've been spending the last 3-4 weeks in my class discussing how to develop a research strategy, how to conduct library research and how to evaluate sources to determine if they are credible and authoritative.

I thoroughly enjoyed John Goshert's presentation at the beginning of the semester about deepening the level of our students' critical thinking through scholarly articles. I don't want to sound like a brown-noser or anything, but I genuinely thought it was inspiring. As a result, I've made some modifications to my curriculum this semester in order to emphasize scholarly texts a lot more.

I added an extra day to my curriculum to "champion this cause," if you will. Since I taught my lesson about engaging with scholarly texts last Wednesday, I decided to blog about how I approached it in case it could possibly be helpful to you.

I introduced the lesson by showing a brief PowerPoint presentation to kind of get my students thinking about the big picture of why they should do scholarly research. The presentation was based on a blog entry by Matt Might at his blog http://matt.might.net. It is called The Illustrated Guide to a PhD. Might has given permission to reproduce this blog entry for non-profit purposes as long as they give proper attribution to him and follow these requirements. Here's a reproduction of the presentation, with my additional comments in [brackets]:

Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge.

By the time you finish elementary school, you know a little.

By the time you finish high school, you know a bit more.

With a bachelor's degree, you gain a specialty.

A master's degree deepens that specialty.

Reading research papers takes you to the edge of human knowledge.

[I modify the original text for the above slide to say that reading scholarly articles takes you to the edge of human knowledge. And then I tell them that this is why the English department stresses peer-reviewed, scholarly articles so much. Scholarly articles are where the truly deep, critical thinking is taking place. They're at the edge of human knowledge. So, if you want to improve your critical thinking, you need to read scholarly articles.]

Once you’re at the boundary, you focus.

You push at the boundary for a few years.

Until one day, the boundary gives way.

And that dent you’ve made is called a Ph.D.

Of course, when you’ve reached this point, the world looks different to you now.

So don’t forget the big picture.

[On the above slide, I talk about how this is the purpose of research and scholarship: to expand the circle of human knowledge. All of us are benefited directly or indirectly by this process. I mention a story I heard on NPR's Planet Money about economist Tim Taylor who asks his students rather they'd prefer to be a middle income American living on $70,000 a year or a super-wealthy person in 1900 living on $70,000 a year. Approximately 2/3 of his students choose to be middle-income Americans because imagine all the things you'd do without: no antibiotics and other important medical procedures, no airplanes for easy travel abroad, no movie theaters or TV or Netflix or iPods, etc. The point is that the circle of human knowledge has expanded quite a bit in the last 100+ years. And we all benefit from those tiny little dents.]

[I then add something which wasn't in the original blog entry, but was a post script. I preface it by saying: "To put it a different way..."]

If you zoom in on the boundary of human knowledge in the direction of genetics, there’s something just outside of humanity’s reach. [The author of this has a son who was born with a rare, fatal genetic disorder. He discusses that he and his wife started funding graduate students after they learned about this.]

So... Keep pushing.

***

As for the rest of the lesson, I had required my students to bring a scholarly article to class this day and we spent the day talking about how to read scholarly articles, what their format is like, the best methods for reading them, etc. I then gave them about half an hour to read through their article and then we had an in-class discussion in which the students respond to what the experience was like.

For those students who were frustrated with the highly technical language, I go over some strategies for learning how to process what you read in scholarly articles better. (For more of my lecture notes---including strategies---or for the PowerPoint I created with the images above, feel free to email me.)

One of the awesome comments I got in class on Wednesday was from a student who said that reading his article was "surprisingly refreshing." He was reading some of the scholarship about Constitutional law and talked about how it was nice to actually read directly many of the things he hears glossed over in the mainstream media. I used that as a jumping off point for discussing how when you are reading scholarly articles, you're often reading primary research. So you're getting information direct from the source, free from mediating forces that interpret the information for you. You get to make up your own mind about the topic when you read scholarly articles.

I hope some of these ideas are helpful to you as you work on encouraging your students to engage with scholarly texts! Any pointers you have to share?

Defining Plagiarism

2010-10-11T09:42:00.000-07:00

Over the summer our colleague Christopher Bigelow shared a link to an interesting article in the New York Times about plagiarism. If you haven't already, you should check it out. It's about how the Internet is causing students to become confused about exactly what plagiarism is (or at least complicating it).

Tonight I'll be teaching my lesson about how to cite sources in MLA. For the first part of that lesson, I spend some time talking about plagiarism since that's what we're trying to avoid when we cite our sources. I was inspired by this New York Times article to create the following activity for my students. I'm going to put them into groups of 3-4 and hand out the following exercise for them to do together:

***

What is Plagiarism?

Suppose you wanted to define the concept of "plagiarism." Working in groups or with a partner, try to reach a consensus about whether each of the following cases is an example of plagiarism or not:

1. A student buys a paper online and turns it in as his own work.

2. A student buys a paper online and changes most of the wording so that it is in her own words, then turns it in as her own work.

3. A student is writing a paper about Columbus’s voyage to America. He writes "Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492." He does not cite what source he got that fact from.

4. A student is writing a paper about the Great Depression. She used information from Wikipedia in her paper. Because Wikipedia is created by unnamed authors and written by a collective group, the student did not provide a citation for the website in her paper because she thought it counted as common knowledge.

5. A student is writing a paper about homelessness. While researching the topic, he found a website that featured a really good FAQ page about homelessness. He copied and pasted information from this page directly into his paper. The website was anonymous (meaning it did not indicate who wrote the information), so the student did not provide a citation for the website in his paper because he thought it was unnecessary for something anonymous.

6. A student is asked to write her own analysis of a painting for a class. The student consults an analysis about the painting in a textbook written by a Humanities professor. The student uses the essay to spur her own thinking about the topic. She writes the analysis in her own words, using some of the ideas written in the article about the painting.

7. A student is asked to write a research paper for his History class. He realizes that the assignment is very similar to an assignment he did in his English 1010 class and he decides to turn in the old paper he wrote for 1010 for his History assignment.

8. A student is asked to write a research paper for his History class. He realizes that the assignment is very similar to an assignment he did in his English 1010 class. He does some additional research about the topic and makes some revisions to the paper before he turns it in for his History assignment.

9. A student is writing a research paper. Nearly 85% of her paper consists of quotes from other sources about her topic. All of the quotes are cited correctly, meaning that the student clearly identified where each quote came from.

Based on your decisions, create a working definition of "plagiarism." Specify what general criteria you would use in order to determine if something is plagiarized or not.

***

I'll then have the class share their definitions as a class. We'll use that as a jumping off point to discuss some of the ideas presented in the article and what really counts as plagiarism or not. We can also discuss unconscious vs. conscious plagiarism, since the English Department's policy makes a distinction between those two types of plagiarism.

I figure that this exercise could be helpful because, while some of these examples are clear cut, most of the examples are not. They'll have to debate and engage with each other to figure them out. It can also help them really begin to think about what plagiarism means on a more personal level using real-world examples.(By the way, almost all of these examples are real examples that I've encountered in my own experience---and two of them come directly from the New York Times article.)

Side note: Michael Wesch's lecture An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube (given to the Library of Congress) is good supplemental viewing for the New York Times article because it talks about the complications of authorship on the Internet. (And, dang, it's just a really great lecture for its own sake.)

Edited 10-12-10 to add: I wanted to follow-up on how this lesson plan went in my class. I liked it a lot better than what I had done previously (which was just to define plagiarism in a lecture for them). This was much more engaging---in fact, one of my classes ended up having a very robust discussion that lasted 10-15 minutes about this topic. I found that it was helpful to ask them which scenarios they weren't sure about after they gave their definitions and we wrote them all on the board. One thing that surprised me about this activity was that I realized that there is a gap between what the students considered to be plagiarism and what I (or at least other professors) considered to be plagiarism.

For example, most students do not consider #7 to be plagiarism (incidentally, neither do I; I just think it's a little unethical), but I've heard professors at UVU saying that it is plagiarism to re-use an old paper and I thought it was important to let the students know about it. (I encouraged them to talk to their professor before they re-submitted an old paper or to revise it in some way.) Some of the students debated about whether #9 was plagiarism, but I've had a discussion with Psychology professors who feel that it is plagiarism if most of the ideas in your paper are not your own---even if they are cited. Some students thought that #4 or #6 were not plagiarism (and I do think it's plagiarism, even though I think #6 is probably unintentional plagiarism)---but that might have something to do with the way I worded the questions. Anyhow, it was really illuminating. I think it went relatively well.

Podcast Resources

2010-09-22T08:29:00.000-07:00

Dag... Two blog entries in two days? I'm on fire here! (This is actually the calm before the storm. I'll have many papers to grade in a few days.)

I wanted to write a quick blog entry to share a couple of great resources I've found recently. I'm a big fan of podcasts because they really help the time go by when I'm doing menial household chores. Most of the resources I'm sharing are from some great podcasts.

Last month, my all-time favorite podcast Radiolab put out an hour-long episode called "Words". In the podcast, they explore scientific studies that show the relationship between one's language abilities and one's cognitive abilities. (Hint: there's a really close relationship.) I found it very inspiring because that's exactly what 1010 and 2010 are really about. It's not just about writing; it's about beginning to think in a different way---and language unlocks the door. I'm planning on sharing the story that begins at 43:00 about a school for deaf children in Nicaragua in which scientists were able to watch a new language being born. As the language progresses and becomes more complex, so do the speakers' abilities to process more complex thoughts. It's a short little piece that can be tacked on at the end of the lesson to help students see how learning to write (to better use language) is relevant to their lives. So, check it out! (And then download the rest of their catalogue, because it is seriously that good.)

Skeptoid is another podcast I listen to. It's a weekly podcast in which host Brian Dunning applies scientific logic and critical thinking to disprove a lot of myths in pop culture. Here's a few episodes that might be helpful:

Episode #50 - How to Identify a "Good" Scientific Journal

Episode #73 - A Magical Journey through the Land of Logical Fallacies Part One

Episode #74 - A Magical Journey through the Land of Logical Fallacies Part Two

Episode #217 - Some New Logical Fallacies

Plus, every now and then one of my students picks a (cough) New Age-y type topic and it can be helpful to point students to some of his intelligent discussions about those kinds of topics. It's my polite way of telling them they should probably choose a more academic research topic.

Also, just as an FYI, last semester I discovered that you can hook up an iPod (or other portable music player) directly to the media consoles in the UVU classrooms. All you have to do is get a male to male stereo cable, plug it into the console, and switch the console to "Computer" mode and it will work great. I use a lot of music and sound clips in my class, so it's pretty handy not to have to lug my laptop onto campus with me.

Lesson Plan: Teaching Summary Writing

2010-09-21T14:53:00.000-07:00

WARNING: This blog entry is going to be incredibly long!

I've taught 1010 almost the entire 3 years I've been here at UVU (with only one semester off). And the way I've taught about summary writing (for the Summary/Strong Response paper) has evolved dramatically from semester to semester. My first semester I think I only mentioned summaries briefly on the day I discussed quoting mechanics. (I think I falsely assumed it was a "simple" concept.) Then, I began to realize that my students desperately needed more intense instruction than this. After a whole lot of trial and error (and positive and negative feedback from students), I think I've finally got my lesson plan into the state where I feel good about it. As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of "open source teaching," so I've decided to share it with all of you.

NOTE: In preparation for this lesson, I relied heavily on a chapter entitled "The Art of Summarizing" from the book They Say/I Say by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. I don't use this textbook in my class, but I think it's a great resource nonetheless. I also used some of the teaching ideas on a website called TV411.

ALSO NOTE: I'm using the "Concept-Hook" teaching model that I blogged about earlier this year.

Lesson Preparation

Objective: Students will be able to write effective summaries.

Materials Needed:
-- Several sets of the "Summary versus Details" card game (see details below)
-- Handout: Key Points from Writing Summaries Lecture
-- Handout: Sample Summaries
-- For your reference: Making the Grade

Lesson Directions

Warm-up/Anticipatory Set:

Ask the class: What is a summary? (Basically a shortened, condensed version of the original text.)

This assignment is called the "SUMMARY/Strong Response," so obviously that means that one of the tasks that you need to accomplish in this paper is to provide a summary of the film that you are responding to. The overall summary is typically the very first thing that you put into a response paper such as this one. That’s because it provides an overview of the text that you are going to be discussing. Your summary helps provide a context for the rest of the paper. So, in this paper, the summary is basically your introduction to the paper.

Now, besides this paper, why do you need to know how to write a summary? How are you going to use summaries in the rest of your college career or maybe even in your personal life? Build on student responses to bring out the following:

--You’ll need it in college: it helps with note-taking (because it helps you to process what you've read) and you often integrate it into other papers you’re writing.

--To have conversations with other people, especially if they haven’t read or seen the original text that you’re talking about.

--Demonstrates that you understand a text. That's because summary writing is about READING COMPREHENSION. (Isn’t that sneaky? You thought this class was just about writing, but we snuck in some reading comprehension on you, dangit.)

So, even though summarizing may seem like a simple thing, that’s actually not true. Writing an effective summary actually involves several different tasks. So we’re going to go over what those tasks are today.

NOTE: I provide my students with an overview of my lecture. You can see the handout Key Points from Writing Summaries Lecture to follow along.

Concept #1:

Write on the board "Elements of a Good Summary" and "Skills Involved" on opposite sides of the board:

Under "Elements," write:

1. Good summaries only include the main ideas of the original text; they leave out the details.

Let’s pretend that you walked up to me and asked me how to get from UVU’s campus to the Orem Public Library. What would you do if I answered this way:

Well, first you start out at the UVU campus. Utah Valley University was founded in 1941 as a vocational school. Today it is a full-fledged publicly funded state university offering 58 bachelor degrees, 60 associate degrees and a handful of advanced certificate and master degrees. Then you need to turn left on University Parkway.

You’ll know that you’re headed in the right direction because as you travel down University Parkway, you’ll see the Krispy Kreme doughnut shop on your right. Krispy Kreme is part of a national chain of doughnut shops, featuring 15 varieties of doughnuts. This particular shop was opened in the year 2000. It is 4,400 square feet in area and is built around a doughnut-making machine that is capable of making more than 200 doughnuts an hour. For the first several months after it opened, there was at least a half hour wait to get doughnuts.

Next you will want to turn left on State Street at the corner of University Mall. The University Mall was first opened in 1973. It was named because of its location on University Parkway, which is one of the main thoroughfares connecting roads between Orem and Provo. With 1,191,574 square feet or retail space, it is currently the largest shopping mall in the state of Utah.

As you travel on State Street, you’ll know you’re headed in the right direction when you see the SCERA theater. SCERA stands for Sharon’s Cultural, Education Recreational Association. For those of you who don’t know, the city of Orem used to be named Sharon until 1914 when the name was changed to honor Walter C. Orem, a railroad operator in Utah who the citizens hoped they could entice to build a railroad there. The SCERA was a non-profit organization founded during the Great Depression to lift the spirit of the community through the arts. One of the programs they started was to have regular movie nights for families. The popularity of the program led the LDS church to donate land for SCERA to build a movie theater, with the stipulation that they never show movies on Sundays.

A few blocks after the SCERA theater, you’ll come to the Orem Public Library on the right located at Center Street. The Orem Public Library’s Children’s Wing features a beautiful stained-glass window depicting various fairy tale characters and other famous scenes from children’s literature. The stained glass window was commissioned by The Ashton Family Foundation as a tribute to the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival, which is sponsored by the library and is considered one of the best festivals of its kind in the nation.

Okay, what would you say? (Get student responses. Normally they complain very loudly about having to sit through that. Then I ask them why they had that response.) What you really wanted was a summary:

From the Utah Valley University campus, turn left on University Parkway.

You’ll know you’re going in the right direction if you see a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop on your right.

Next turn left on State Street at the corner of University Mall.

As you travel on State Street, you’ll know you’re headed in the right direction when you see the SCERA theater on the right.

A few blocks after the SCERA theater, you’ll come to the Orem Public Library on the right located at Center Street.

Unfortunately, too often students give me the first kind of "summary" rather than the second kind. Students often go into too much detail in their introductory summaries in their papers. You only need to give your readers just enough information to understand the original text so that they can then jump into the meat of your argument where you’ll go into more depth.

So the task involved here is (write on board under "Skills Involved"):

Being able to distinguish between the main ideas and the supporting details.

Next, have students brainstorm an ad-hoc list of how they might distinguish between main ideas and supporting details. I write their ideas up on the board.

Hook for Concept #1:

I then divide students into small groups for a class activity. NOTE: In my class, the students are responding to 1 of 4 possible film texts for the Summary/Strong Response paper, so for this activity, I have them get into groups according to which film they are responding to in their paper. If your students are writing about texts they chose themselves for this paper (as opposed to a common text), you may want to assign them to read a short article before this lecture so that you all have a common text to build from.

Give each group an envelope containing 10 "Summary versus Details" cards. Each card has a statement from their film text and their task is to sort out the main points from the supporting details. Mention that there’s not an equal amount of main ideas to supporting ideas (just like in actual texts). Also tell the groups that when they have finished sorting the cards, they should discuss what criteria they used to make the distinction between main ideas and supporting ideas. What would they add to what we already wrote on the board? What other ways can you use to distinguish between main ideas and supporting details?

Here's an example of the set of cards for the film An Inconvenient Truth:

1. There was a massive study of every scientific article in a peer-reviewed journal written on global warming for the last 10 years. They took a sample of 928 articles. There was not a single article that disagreed with the scientific consensus that we’re causing global warming and that it’s a serious problem. By contrast, a similar study was conducted of articles in the popular press. Of the 623 articles reviewed, 53% cast doubt on the global warming theory.

2. Mosquitoes are one example of disease-carrying pests that are affected by global warming. Many cities were built on mountains because they were just above the mosquito line. As temperatures have increased, the altitude of the mosquito line has climbed. In the United States, mosquitoes carrying the West Nile virus have spread across the United States in only 6 years, which is a very short space of time.

3. One of the misconceptions that people have about global warming is that there is not a scientific consensus about whether global warming is real or not. This is not true. This misconception has been deliberately created by a small group of people with financial interests in oil and gas companies.

4. Bark beetles are an example of insects that used to be killed off by cold winters. Because there are fewer colder days, more of them survive. Collectively, they have killed more than 14 million acres of spruce trees in Alaska. The pine beetles in the continental United States have had a similar effect.

5. In the last couple of years, we have seen a lot of big hurricanes. Hurricanes Jeanne, Frances, and Ivan were among them. In the same year we had that same string of hurricanes, we also set an all-time record for tornadoes in the United States (1,717). Japan, again, didn’t get as much attention in our news media, but they set an all-time record for typhoons. The previous record was 7, here are all 10 of the ones they had in 2004. Science textbooks have had to be rewritten because they say that it’s impossible to have a hurricane in the South Atlantic, but this was the same year the first one ever hit Brazil.

6. Global warming has potentially devastating consequences to natural ecosystems because the summer lasts longer and there are less days in which there is frost. Because there is no frost to kill them off, many invasive insects and rodents survive longer than they used to.

7. Recently in Mumbai, India, they received 27 inches of rain in 24 hours, which was an all-time record. Water levels reached 7 feet. The death toll reached 1,000 people.

8. Philip Cooney, an aide for President Bush, deliberately edited a memo from the Environmental Protection Agency regarding Climate Change reports. Although he had no scientific expertise, he made substantial edits to the memo that cast doubt on the facts regarding global warming. When this was discovered, Cooney resigned and went to work for Exxon Mobil.

9. In a study conducted in the Netherlands beginning in 1980 to the present time, it was determined that the average peak arrival date for migratory birds was April 25 in 1980. Their chicks hatched on June 3, which directly corresponded to the time that caterpillars emerged. Today, these caterpillars emerge 2 weeks earlier because of warmer weather. The chicks still hatch on June 3 and more of them are going hungry than is normal, which could significantly reduce the bird population.

10. Warmer temperatures result in storms that are more intense. As a result of the increased temperature in the atmosphere caused by global warming, the number of major storms has increased dramatically.

When finished, give the students the correct answers: the main ideas are numbers 3, 6, and 10. (In one of my classes, students actually did a huge cheer when they found out they were right!)

Have the students talk about how they were able to figure out the difference between a main idea and a supporting detail. Add any additional insights they gained to the list written on the board.

At this point, I also usually mention that when I was preparing this "game" for them, I noticed that main ideas tended to be opinions (e.g. they were debateable) and supporting details tended to be facts.

Concept #2:

Write on the board (under "Elements of a Good Summary"):

2. Good summaries are neutral and unbiased.

From They Say/I Say: "To write a good summary, you must be able to suspend your own beliefs for a time and put yourself in the shoes of someone else. This means playing what the writing theorist Peter Elbow calls the ‘believing game,’ in which you try to inhabit the worldview of those whose conversations you are joining—and whom you are perhaps even disagreeing with—and try to see their argument from their perspective. This ability to temporarily suspend one’s own convictions is a hallmark of good actors, who must convincingly ‘become’ characters who in real life they may actually detest. As a writer, when you play the believing game really well, readers should not be able to tell whether you agree or disagree with the ideas you are summarizing." (29)

Ask the class: Why should a good summary be unbiased and neutral? Build on student responses to bring out the following points from They Say/I Say>:

--"If you cannot or will not suspend your own beliefs in this way, you are likely to produce summaries that are so obviously biased that they undermine your credibility with readers."

--"Readers need to be able to assess the merits of the original text on its own, independent of you." Shows respect.

--"When a writer fails to play the believing game, he or she often falls prey to what we call 'the closet cliche syndrome,' in which what gets summarized is not the view the author in question has actually expressed, but a familiar cliche that the writer mistakes for the author’s view." This is the STRAW MAN FALLACY. (By now my students have learned about logical fallacies, so we review this concept briefly.) "Whenever you enter into a conversation with others in your writing then, it is extremely important that you go back to what others have said, that you study it very closely, and that you not collapse it to something you have already heard or know. Writers who fail to do this end up essentially conversing with themselves—with imaginary others who are really only the products of their own biases and preconceptions."

So there are two tasks involved here (write on board under "Skills Involved"):

Basic reading comprehension and the ability to remain fair-minded.

This is what I mean when I say that summary writing involves good reading comprehension. It means really trying to understand the point of the view of the person making the argument.

Hook for Concept #2:

For this hook, I share a personal story in which I was drastically misquoted/misrepresented in a Daily Herald newspaper article. It's my own story, so I'm not really going to recite it here for everyone else to use. I would just encourage you to go find your own example. There's plenty of examples of the Straw Man Fallacy out there which are humorous and engaging. (See what qualifies as a good "hook" by looking at my earlier blog entry about this topic.)

Concept #3:

Write on the board, under "Elements":

3. Good summaries only include information that is relevant to what you (the writer) want to discuss.

From They Say/I Say: "Even as writing an effective summary requires you to temporarily adopt the worldviews of others, it does not mean ignoring your own views altogether. Paradoxically, at the same time that summarizing another text requires you to represent fairly what it says, it also requires that your own response exert a quiet influence. A good summary, in other words, has a focus or spin that allows the summary to fit with your own overall agenda while still being true to the text you are summarizing." (31-32)

So, the skill involved here is (write on board under "Skills"):

Being able to see the relationship between the main ideas and the focus of your own argument.

Hook for Concept #3

Working with their same groups, students go back to the cards they were given. Besides what was written on the cards, now they need to brainstorm a list of other points (main ideas) that were brought up in the film besides the one on the card. Students have a contest to see who can come up with the most additional "main points." (If you're using a common text, you could also possibly list these points on the board.) One thing that I like about this activity is that sometimes students get caught up discussing the main ideas together that they actually forget about the "contest." I like that they begin engaging with the ideas in the text.

After a certain amount of time, discuss with the class how each of the filmmakers talks about a lot of various subtopics in their argument. I then ask them: do you think you're going to have the time to discuss every single main idea that they brought up in a 4-5 page paper? Of course not! You need to decide what you really want to focus on in your paper. Therefore, you should only include the main ideas that you want to use in your paper. The summary should lead them into what you have to say.

"Writing a good summary means not just representing an author’s view accurately, but doing so in a way that fits your own composition’s larger agenda."

Concept #4

Write on the board, under "Elements":

4. Good summaries are in your words rather than the author’s words.

You need to say it in your own voice. This skill is more important when you’re doing something like a research paper because it helps you to avoid plagiarism, but it’s worth noting here. It also helps you avoid the temptation to quote too much.

So, the skill involved here is (write on board under "Skills"):

Reverse the sentence structure, use synonyms, indicate any direct quotes with quotation marks.

Examples:

illness = medical problem
exchange views = talk to others
medical topic = medical subject
available to = open to
despite = in spite of
news items = news reports

(In the future, I think I might design an activity to help them brainstorm synonyms for a few terms. It might also work as some sort of competition.)

Some last things to mention:

Parts of a summary
--Introduction – Introduces the text to be summarized (title + author), gives any pertinent background information,

--Gives the topic and the main thesis of the piece. (Different from your thesis.)

--Main points.

--May possibly include one illustration.

A summary is usually about 1/10th the size of the original.

Summaries use the sandwich principle too.

Practice/Reinforcement:

Look at a sample of a poor summary in the handout. (FYI, this is a summary of an article called Making the Grade that you may consider having your students read.) Mine come to it cold.

Have students discuss why this is a poor summary. Build upon the student's observations to bring out the following points:

--Doesn't give the essay context by giving the essay title and the publication that it appeared in.

--Uses the author's original wording a little bit too much.

--Doesn't put quotation marks around the parts that were directly quoted.

--Doesn't use neutral attributive tags.

--Hard to distinguish where the summary is and where the author is interjecting their own opinions.

--Doesn't really capture the essence of the essay. Picks out kind of random stuff to focus on.

--Isn't a really coherent piece of writing anyway.

Then read the improved summary on the next page, talking about why it is better in a discussion with the students.

I then discuss how I grade their summaries in the Summary/Strong Response paper.

Motivating Oneself to Get the Grading Done

2010-08-26T17:15:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of research that goes into the relationship between grades and motivation. But what about the motivation to grade? It's something I think about because I honestly hate grading papers. If I were to rank the things I have to do as part of my job in the order from most liked to least liked, grading papers would be at the bottom of the list. It's pure drudgery for me.

It's not because the papers are "bad." (Although I do think my enthusiasm would be slightly higher if I knew that my students were all Jane Tompkins and Malcolm Gladwells in embryo.) It's not because the papers are boring. (On the contrary, I usually learn a few interesting and thought-provoking things I never knew before.) I do know that when the number of papers I have to grade increases, so does my dread in facing the task. But beyond that, I have no idea why I dislike it so much.

With that in mind, I'm wondering if anyone has any helpful strategies for motivating oneself to grade papers. I tend to procrastinate grading until the last possible minute and then pump myself full of caffeine and pull a late-night to get it done. I'm not particularly happy with that strategy. In an ideal world, I would grade the papers the instant I got them and turn them back so quickly my students would all sing praises to me about my remarkable initiative. But even though I fantasize about doing that every single time, I never actually go through with it in the end.

Am I the only one with this problem? Can you commiserate? If so, do you have any additional theories about why it feels like such a joyless task? And on a more practical level, what are your secrets for slogging through the grading? Any tips you have for making it easier on yourself?

Teaching Resource for Angle of Vision & Wallowing

2010-07-12T17:48:00.000-07:00

I thought all of you might be interested in something I am doing for my 1010 classes in B block and fall term. To give students an in-depth understanding of angle of vision and wallowing in complexity, I am having them watch the narrative film Vantage Point outside of class. This PG13 film is highly complex and very entertaining. It deals with the vantage points of a handful of people on the shooting of the president of the United States. The angles of vision depend on with where the characters are at the time, what their social and political motivations are for being there, how they respond to the shooting, and the ways they intentionally and inadvertently influence each other’s actions. On top of the angle of vision and wallowing benefits, the movie offers an excellent extended metaphor for the complexities of research and the demands of sorting out old and new as well as reliable and unreliable information.

In my classes, we are spending between a half hour and an hour discussing the film and how it plays into their needs to wallow in complexity and understand angle of vision. We’re also covering the importance of skillful use of source material.

If you choose to do this, you may put Vantage Point, and any other film for that matter, on two-week, electronic reserve in the UVU library, so your students can watch it at home. I have been informed, however, that you must show at least some of the movie in the classroom in order to satisfy requirements stipulated by the provider. The circulation desk can help you sort out the details.

If you decide to use Vantage Point, I’d be interested in feedback, particularly how you chose to implement it.

Brain Rule #4 : We don't pay attention to boring things

2010-06-11T15:43:00.000-07:00

I'm in the middle of listening to the audio book Brain Rules by John Medina. Medina is a developmental molecular biologist focused on the genes involved in human brain development. His book discussed what he calls the "brain rules" that need to be followed in order to have a better brain, to be a better teacher and a better boss. His book is based on peer-reviewed neuroscience, mostly from the Journal of Applied Neuroscience. It's very accessible and is as entertaining as it is informative.

Rule #4 is: We don't pay attention to boring things. At the end of the chapter about this rule, he gave his formula for getting the brain's attention and keeping it during a standard lecture. Because of this formula, he was named the Hirsch Marion (sp?) Teacher of the Year. I thought it was worth sharing.

The basic principle behind his formula is that, based on proven research, the brain cannot pay attention to something "boring" for more than 10 minutes. Most students tune out of a lecture after that space of time. With that in mind, Medina divides his lectures into discrete 10 minute segments (so a typical college lecture would have 5 segments).

Each segment covers one concept. The concept has to be large, general, and significant. It must be easily explained in 1 minute. The other 9 minutes are used to provide a detailed description of that concept, complete with lots of examples. You need to make sure you explicitly explain how the detail connects to the general concept.

At the end of the 10 minutes, you need to "buy" yourself another 10 by using what he calls a "hook" or an ECS (emotionally competent stimuli). The hook should trigger an emotion of some sort: fear, laughter, happiness, nostalgia, incredulity, etc. Narratives can be especially apropos.

The hook must also be relevant and it needs transition in between the two modules. It can either relate to the previous concept that you just finished explaining or introduce the next concept that you will discuss. You can't just throw in something random or else the audience will begin to distrust your motives (e.g. that you're just trying to entertain them, not inform them) or feel patronized.

He says that he has found it to be wonderfully successful in his own lectures. After a while, he can skip the 4th and 5th hook because the students are still engaged and retain the information much better.

He also mentions that you should explain the lecture plan at the beginning of the class and regularly point out where you are in that plan throughout the lecture. That way the brain doesn't have to "multi-task" (which isn't effective) and try to figure out all the concepts relate to each other while you are speaking.

It's an interesting idea. I think I might try to incorporate the 10 minute principle in my upcoming classes. I would also add that giving the class time to discuss a concept with each other can help to give the brain a rest too.

If you want to know more about the science behind his formula (e.g. why it works), feel free to check out the Brain Rules book. I'm a little more than halfway through and I'd say it's been very worthwhile so far.

A World Without Teacher-Assigned Grades

2010-05-07T13:26:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be taking on a heavier course load this Fall and I've been brainstorming possible changes I might make to my course as a result. Up to this point, I've been able to give my students a lot of individual feedback by meeting with them individually to discuss their rough drafts for every major paper. However, I'm not sure whether I will be able to keep up with this intense schedule in the Fall when I take on an extra class.

Another thing that continues to haunt me is Katherine Cowley's idea that the classroom should ideally function as a "proto-public space" in which students become each other's audience (see my earlier blog entry about this subject for more details). This is especially apropos in a writing class. I see a tremendous amount of value in getting students to actively read, respond and engage with the ideas written by the other students. In the real world, writing is motivated by the need to express an idea and the merits of an essay is entirely judged by your peers---not by some arbitrary rubric created by a supervisor.

That's why I was kind of turned on by an article entitled No Grading, More Learning in which a professor at Duke University tested out a system she calls "crowdsourcing" in which all grades were determined purely by the fellow students in the class. The way it worked is the students were required to complete weekly writing assignments and post it to a class blog. The fellow students then "graded" the assignment by determining whether they thought it was satisfactory or not. Basically they gave it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. If the student received a thumbs-down they had an opportunity to rewrite the essay in order to get a thumbs-up from their fellow students. Meanwhile, as the instructor, she made a point to comment on every students' essay and monitor the blog.

Here's what I like about the system:

Getting students to honestly evaluate each other's work and respond to each other's ideas.

By having to write for a "jury of their peers," they might be more likely to work harder. I like that it kind of gives the peer-review process some teeth, if you will.

Here's some reservations I have about the system:

The logistics are difficult. With a larger class of 24 students, they probably aren't going to have time to read every single essay written by their fellow students. Plus, if we're doing longer essays such as the Exploratory Essay, that would also make them take a lot of time reading.

I wouldn't be able to do it for every single assignment, but maybe for a small group of assignments.

Part of me worries that students would be either too easy or too hard on each other. I also feel like it needs to be anonymous somehow, so that students don't make it a popularity contest. Plus, I'm not a big fan of thumbs-up/thumbs-down critiques since they have the effect of flattening out the worth of an essay.

So, we'll see. I'll let you know if I decide to use this system in my class. If so, I'll report to you about how it goes!

fall 2010 available and other news

2010-04-27T09:12:00.000-07:00

A few pieces of breaking news:

1. Tentative fall 2010 schedules are in your mailboxes. Please pick them up and return the signed portion to Samuel in the front office to confirm. We're making one or more new tenure-track hires and may have the usual schedule movement over the summer, so if you need adjustments, please return your schedule with a note indicating your needs.

2. We may be able to offer additional summer sections, so if you haven't yet sent a summer preference, here's another chance. Please include the following information:

Availability for A block, B block, or both

Time availability: MWF, MW, TR; day or afternoon/evening

For everyone already scheduled for summer, I'll let you know if there's a good fit for a second class. If you do not wish to be assigned to a second class, please let me know.

3. Pay increase for part time faculty begins summer A block. The increase is $250 per 3 hour course, so we should see some additional increase in first year composition compensation. We'd certainly like to see this number grow, but it's a gesture from university administration that indicates their knowledge that adjunct pay is woefully low.

Thanks for your work. See you over the summer or in August for orientation.

Fall 2010 preferences, and other news

2010-02-21T14:38:00.000-08:00

Attached on the listserv version of this message is a preference form for fall 2010 teaching. You'll see a couple of changes from previous years, including the split between MWF and MW sections. Starting in fall 2010, we're going to try aligning MW afternoon sections with the TR schedule, so beginning at 1pm MW sections will be 75 minutes; 50 minute MWF sections will continue to be held from 7-12. As expected in my previous email, we will not be able to assign fourth sections to any of our part time instructors, so three sections will be the maximum.

Please take a moment to fill out BOTH preferred days/times (middle) and availability (bottom) sections of the form to help us make the best fit between schedule openings and your preferences.

Please return your form by email or to my mailbox by Friday March 5; let me know if you neeed a hard copy to fill out. If you know you won't be returning to teach for English next year, please tell me at your earliest convenience to help us anticipate hiring needs as soon as possible.

On that note, as a reminder, if you know of anyone who is interested in part time instructional work, please encourage them to apply through the HR website or contact me with questions. We're going to try doing most of our fall hiring as we write the first draft of the schedule to avoid undue pressure on last minute hires.

In other news, Meredith told me that she only has spring syllabi from about half of you. I'll try to get a list together this week and start chasing you down--but this can be avoided by simply emailing a copy of your syllabus to Meredith or putting it in her box.

We may be able to hold at least one face to face meeting during spring, probably the April 13 meeting which we had scheduled at orientation. There have been a number of good suggestions for meeting topics over the past few months, and I'm sorry we haven't been able to get to them yet. I'm especially interested in having a discussion, as suggested by one instructor, on dealing with students who depend on arguments of faith/belief in their academic writing courses. We've also had suggestions to address more explicitly concerns of teaching ELL students, defining and dealing with plagiarism, and so on. We may not get to all of these this semester, or have time to only touch on one or more of these issues, but I am trying to keep track of your interests so we can get to them as time allows.

Finally, whether face to face or via the listserv, we will have some news about new 2010/2020 texts, updated assignment sequences, and other important matters later this semester, so please keep your eyes open for notification of that decision and news. Those of you who teach 2010 and/or 2020 should anticipate shifting away from using the Allyn and Bacon Guide and adopting a new text; and we want to give you as much time as possible over the summer to prepare. I'm less sure about the future of Norton Field Guide, but will have more to tell you after deliberation with Grant and Gae Lyn, and your colleagues who are piloting alternative texts this term.

Thanks for your work--see you in the halls.

Copy center codes, and other news

2010-02-10T22:11:00.000-08:00

A note especially for those of you who are teaching in multiple departments (i.e. English along with Basic Comp, Phil/Hum, Foreign Languages, etc.): please make sure when giving work orders to the copy center in SC to use the copy code that corresponds with each particular job, so that each department gets charged appropriately for its jobs and no other's.

We should be able to start on the Fall 2010 schedule soon, so start thinking about your availability. There's a new option in the works to hold classes MW afternoons, during the same periods as TR classes. I believe we'll keep the MWF hourly schedule through early afternoon (like 1pm), then shift over to 75 minute blocks for the remainder of MW afternoons; MW evenings will remain the same as in past semesters. I'll get a revised schedule preference form out once I'm sure of the new schedule system.

We'll be interested in hiring new instructors to fill in slots left by instructors who move, go on to graduate programs, and find other employment over the summer. We'll also anticipate continued enrollment growth and the need for opening additional sections. If you know someone who would make a strong first year composition teacher, holds a Masters-level degree (preferably in English or related field), and has some classroom experience, please encourage them to contact me or simply fill out an application through human resources.

Some of you have already expressed interest in summer teaching. We're not yet prepared to make assignments, but I'll certainly send out a notice to the list a couple weeks before scheduling so that you can get your preferences in the mix.

Amy passed on some documents (attached through the listserv) from a seminar held by FCTE on plagiarism. I've heard good things from a number of our group about the value of these seminars which cover teaching strategies, integrating technology into classes, etc. Contact Anton Tollman if you're interested in attending their events.

OK. Keep your eyes on your email for preference forms soon and let me know if there are any questions or concerns in your individual classes.

See you in the halls.

Spring 2010: First Week in Review

2010-01-09T13:02:00.000-08:00

I hope your first days of class--Wednesday, Thursday, or today--went well.

We finally got the schedule finished Friday the 1st, so thanks to everyone for your continued patience and willingness to accommodate an unusual number of shifting needs for full time faculty as this term came into focus during December.

A couple of notes as we get started:

1. I know that for many of you the logistics of your schedule are less than ideal. As a reminder, the master schedule is produced by articulating class size to room size, with little to no consideration of other factors (like pedagogical needs), so our classes pay for smaller size with smaller (and typically less desirable) rooms.

Second, like many of you, full time faculty members have also been scheduled to rush too far across campus in too little time. I've also spent my first couple of class days figuring out how to get from Trades to LA in 10 minutes; it may take a couple more days, but I think we can all figure out ways to make it work.

Third, there's also the challenge of having to deal with unpredictable resources in the classrooms--like going from a fully wired room in LA to one with a chalkboard and overhead only in Trades. Again, this is a situation that's shared by full time faculty as well (myself included), and we simply have to make do. Please do though try to take advantage of media resources available for checkout in Trades and other more remote campus locations. You can get a key card for the media closet on the 6th floor of Trades from the circulation desk in the library.

2. We were unable to assign any part time instructors to fourth sections. Not only were some of you hoping for that possibility, I was as well, since it's an option that's been instrumental to our successfully completing the schedule in past terms. This change has been burdensome all around, and I hope to see the fourth class option return in future terms.

3. For the time being, we will not be able to offer monthly professional development meetings. I'll be working to get those reinstated some time in the semester though, since I enjoy being able to see you all and I believe the meetings are an essential part of a successful program. In the meantime, we'll use the listserv and blog to distribute information, and I hope more of you will become contributors to the blog. More online participation will help us at least to use that resource to share successes and share strategies for addressing challenges.

4. Please provide Meredith (Meredith.Bennie@uvu.edu) with electronic copies of your syllabi as soon as you can--let's say by the end of the second week of classes. We have to increase the rate of participation, so you'll probably see me more aggressively pursuing you to turn in your materials earlier in the term than in the past.

On that note, the same goes for portfolios. Thanks to those of you who did turn in portfolios from fall 09, and I'm sure that more of you will be able to get your in now that we're all back on campus (there's a drop box on Meredith's desk). We are committed to building a successful assessment instrument for our program, and as Gae Lyn showed last year, the portfolio is, according to the field's best practices, the way to get this started. Please ensure that you will be able to provide end-of-term portfolios for all of your first year writing courses for all students randomly selected. If you need a reminder on required portfolio elements, let me know.

5. Finally, we're expanding the piloting of two possible texts for Engl 2010/2020. We'll keep you informed of the progress of the pilot and the plan for shifting to a new text in the coming academic year.

That's probably enough information for now. My thanks to each of you for all of your work and contributions to the program and the university. See you in the halls.

portfolio selection launch

2009-12-04T19:56:00.000-08:00

We launched the portfolio request last night and completed sending out notifications this evening, so please check your email inbox to find out which of your students have been selected to participate in portfolio evaluation.

If you have students who were selected but are no longer attending class, or who fail to submit a portfolio, please let Meredith know. Also, don't hesitate to let me know if you have any other questions or needs as we proceed through this first run of selections. Just as a reminder, the portfolios should include the following documents:

An informal piece of diagnostic writing (first day or between the first two class meetings)
The first graded writing assignment (in 1010 the problematizing essay; in 2010 the informative/surprising essay)
The final graded writing assignment (in 1010 the exploratory research project; in 2010 the formal research project)
A reflective essay.

Since so many of us use multiple email addresses, I included a list of selected instructors in the version of this posting that went out over the listserv as a way of helping you cross check. Meredith has made good efforts to send notifications to multiple addresses, but it also strikes me as a reminder of the importance of checking--or, better, auto-forwarding to a preferred account--your UVU email.

spring 10 schedule and meeting notes

2009-11-24T20:06:00.000-08:00

I think we have the spring 2010 schedule wrangled into shape--at least enough so that Samuel will place notifications in your mailboxes by this afternoon. Please take a look at your proposed schedule, then sign and return it by Thursday Dec. 3.

As predicted in our November meeting, we will not hold a monthly meeting in December. If you have any needs that have to be addressed before the end of the term, please contact me, Grant, or Gae Lyn.

In other news, sorry I've been behind on posting notes from our November meeting. Briefly, we discussed:

1. Our upcoming portfolio evaluation launch. I believe we're still on track to begin this semester, so expect to get an email from Meredith informing you of the students whose portfolios have been selected for evaluation. I will also send out an email to the entire list at that time so that in case none of your students were selected, you won't be waiting needlessly for notification.

2. A reminder to avoid using the front office for collection of large numbers of student papers at the end of the term. Please, too, do not expect the front office to hold your papers and redistribute them to students. Consider alternatives, including inviting students to give you a stamped envelope for the return of their final work, or, holding papers for the first two weeks of the following term then destroying them.

3. Continuing to pilot new texts for 2010/2020 in spring. I have extra copies of both texts, so if you'd like to get in on the expanded pilot for spring, let me know which text you'd like to see/use by next week, and we'll expand book orders for your classes. This is a good opportunity to test one of these texts and have your voice heard as we prepare to make a program wide shift in the 2010-2011 academic year. If you're interested in From Inquiry to Academic Writing by Greene and Lidinsky, please contact Gae Lyn, who's been organizing that book's pilot this semester; if you're interested in Writing Arguments by Ramage and Bean, please contact Grant.

4. A review of policies for end of term grading and evaluation, including UW, E (F), and I grades. Please contact me if you have any questions or concerns about assigning these grades--particularly UW and I.

Thanks.

November meeting this evening

2009-11-10T09:46:00.001-08:00

Sorry for the late notice, but our monthly meeting is this evening, 5-6 pm, SC 206A. Please make every effort to attend this evening, since we'll be covering issues that will take us through the end of the semester, including:

1. Portfolio project update;
2. State of the spring schedule;
3. Expansion of 2010/2020 text piloting;
4. Discussion on semester research projects, which should be in progress in all first year composition courses at this point;
5. Discussion on end-of-term concerns, such as grading, collection and distribution of final projects, etc.;
6. Handout(s) and, if time, brief discussion of supplemental texts to develop readings in course textbooks.

See you this evening.

2009-10-12T17:54:00.000-07:00

Hope everyone's semester is going well so far. Here's an update on where we are in both completing our responsibilities for this semester and getting ready for spring 2010.

Syllabi: about half of you have turned in syllabi to the front office. If you're in that half, thanks; if you're in the other half, please make sure you either send an electronic copy to Meredith (Meredith.Bennie@uvu.edu) or place a copy in her mailbox as soon as possible. (Blog update: we've gotten some more since I sent this post to the listserv, so let's keep up the momentum for those of you who have yet to turn in syllabi)

Spring 2010: schedule preference form for next semester is available at the engladj listserv (or email me for a copy). Please fill it out and return it either electronically or to my box by October 15. Don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions or concerns prior to returning it.

October meeting: Tuesday October 13, 5-6pm, SC 206A; also an ideal time to submit your preference forms. Topically, let's pick up where we left off last month, getting some discussion about how we bring the course texts to life and make them relevant to our students. Consider ways that you supplement course texts with readings of your and/or students' choices; how you explain assignments and concepts with familiar examples and models, and so on. Consider, also, where you identify shortcomings and/or weaknesses in course texts and how you overcome them.

reminder: first meeting this evening

2009-09-08T12:06:00.000-07:00

Sorry I didn't get this notice on the blog at the same time I posted it to the listserv, but better late than never, right?

Don't forget our first monthly meeting of the year is this evening, 5-6, in SC 206A. We'll keep it relatively open topic, so that we can spend as much of the hour as possible addressing concerns and answering questions that have come up in the first couple weeks of class.

Hope to see you later today.

Orientation agenda

2009-08-16T11:29:00.000-07:00

Attached is an agenda for our annual orientation on Wednesday the 19th. You'll see that we're trying something different this year, breaking up our larger group by courses taught and covering common topics but in ways that emphasize either 1010 or 2010/2020. Of course a number of you teach both first and second semester comp, so you can choose which group you'd like to work with.

Agenda

8:00-8:30 Informal Meet and Greet LA 116
Coffee and snacks available

8:30-9:50 General Orientation LA 023
All part time instructors meet for general orientation.

welcome from department administration and staff
Program updates, general Q&A
Introduction to portfolios and embedding in current scholarship (by Gae Lyn)
writing lab representative

10-10:50 Breakout #1

1010 instructors LA 106
Student engagement: discussion led by Angie Carter

2010/2020 instructors LI 205
Library services orientation

11-11:50 Breakout #2

1010 instructors LI 206
Library services orientation

2010/2020 instructors LA 106
Assignment sequence review: Second-semester instructors bring syllabi from last (or previous) semester and work together to develop/fine tune course plans; to include pacing, approaches to content, opportunities for revision, matters of length, number/type of sources required, and so on. Discussion will include portfolio generation plans and strategies.

12-12:50 Breakout #3

1010 instructors LA 112
Assignment sequence review: First-semester instructors bring syllabi from last (or previous) semester and work together to develop/fine tune course plans; to include pacing, approaches to content, opportunities for revision, matters of length, number/type of sources required, and so on. Discussion will include portfolio generation plans and strategies.

2010/2020 instructors LA 106
Student engagement: discussion led by Lovisa Lyman

. . . . . . . . . .

Please note that one of our activities is an assignment sequence review (2010/2020 at 11, 1010 at 12). Please bring a copy of a recent syllabus so we can talk about how the implementation of assignment sequences has gone for you in the past couple of years, share strategies and experiences, and begin mapping out syllabi for fall.

We're almost fully staffed for fall, thanks to the willingness of some of you to take additional class sections, and especially to new instructors who are joining us this year. We'll likely be facing tremendous enrollment pressure in the first couple of week of class, and we'll have some time on Wednesday to review departmental/institutional add policies and to field any questions or concerns you have about handling waves of unenrolled students.

Sorry that some of you who are no longer teaching for us will still receive emails on the listserv for the time being, and new instructors aren't yet added. I hope to get with IT this week to work out subscription problems. Please remember that program notices are copied to this blog, so let me encourage you to subscribe at least for feeds, if not also to participate as a contributor in discussions with other instructors in the program.

See you Wednesday if not before.

Annual Orientation Wednesday August 19th

2009-07-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the delay in notifying you all, but finally the upcoming term's starting to come into focus. We're getting close to completing the fall schedule--or at least getting to the point where we can offer some of you additional sections or find sections that can better fit your needs.

Also, we have a date for orientation, which will be Wednesday August 19, and will run from 8:30am-1:00pm. Attendance at this meeting is required for all part time instructors. We'll provide breakfasty snacks, talk about portfolios and other program business, and field your questions in the first session (8:30-9:50). We'll then have three breakout sessions (10-10:50, 11-11:50, and 12-12:50), details of which will follow.

Thanks to those of you who have made suggestions for orientation content and volunteered to present--to the latter group, I'll be getting in touch soon to get as many of you involved as possible.

Thanks for your patience as we've been working out the schedule over the summer. Talk to you soon.

The Extra Credit Dilemma

2009-07-13T12:08:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday after class, three of my students approached me together to ask whether there was anything they could do to receive extra credit. Their request put me into a little bit of a panic. On the one hand, I've never really allowed extra credit opportunities. I believe that it's unfair to give extra credit because it panders to underperforming students, giving them an opportunity to wheedle an unearned grade out of my class. But on the other hand, these three particular students were fairly good candidates for extra credit. They were pretty hard workers, but they happened to be at an unfortunate disadvantage in my class because they spoke English as a second language.

I've been agonizing over my ESL students all semester long. In a class of 20, one third of my students are ESL speakers. I've never had that many in a single course before. It's been a serious challenge for me, to say the least. Every time I've sat down to grade a major paper, I've been plagued with thoughts about how to treat them equitably. Is it fair to hold them to the same standards as the other students who are native English speakers? If I make them the exception and lower my standards as I grade their drafts, am I cheating the native English speakers who have worked equally hard on their papers?

To date, I've been grading them with the same standards I use with all my students. As justification, I've held the image of my freshman roommate from Hungary in my mind. She had a scholarship and a 4.0---and she worked very hard for it. She studied constantly and didn't have much of a social life. When a major paper was due, she started composing it well in advance, regularly visiting the writing lab and inviting my feedback on her papers. (If I had half her motivation and personal dedication, I probably would have done much better in subjects like Math and Science for which I have absolutely no natural talent.) I figured that if anyone could work hard and thrive academically despite some staunch language barriers, so could my ESL students. And yet, the ex-public school teacher and "good liberal" inside of me doesn't totally buy the everyone-can-pull-themselves-up-by-the-bootstraps schtick. The language barrier is a very real impediment to a student's success and cannot be totally ignored.

So, with all those conflicted thoughts bubbling in the background, today I decided to allow them to write an essay for extra credit. I rather liked the assignment I came up with and I might possibly consider using it again if any students approach me about extra credit in the future. Here's the assignment directions:

English 1010 Extra Credit Essay

The purpose of English 1010 is to teach you how to compose effective written arguments. As the Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing (5th ed.) states:

The study of argumentation involves two components: truth seeking and persuasion. By truth-seeking, we mean a diligent, open-minded, and responsible search for the best course of action or solution to a problem, taking into account all the available information and alternative points of view. By persuasion, we mean the art of making a claim on an issue and justifying it convincingly so that the audience's initial resistance to your position is overcome and they are moved toward your position. (377)

With that in mind, your task is to compose an essay in which you try to convince me (your instructor) why I should give you extra credit for this class. In this essay, you should tell me 1) how much extra credit you would like to receive---would you like 20 points, 40 points, more?---and 2) the reasons why you should receive that amount of extra credit. If I find your argument persuasive, I will award you the extra credit points that you request in your essay. If I do not find your argument persuasive, you may possibly receive no extra points for writing this essay.

In order to write an effective essay, it helps to know a little bit about your audience and which rhetorical appeals he or she will find persuasive. You should assume that I am of the same mindset as Dr. Kurt Wiesenfeld (see the essay entitled "Making the Grade" that I gave out the third week of class). That is to say, you should assume that I feel somewhat opposed to the idea of extra credit because it potentially rewards students for unprofessional behavior and erodes our university's academic standards.

So, based on what you know about me as an instructor, should you appeal to logic (logos)? To emotion (pathos)? To your personal character (ethos)? The choice is yours. (For a helpful review of these three persuasive appeals, see http://www.figarospeech.com/teach-a-kid-to-argue/.)

There is no minimum length for this essay, but your essay should not be any longer than 3 pages, single-spaced in Times New Roman font. Please submit it to me via email on Thursday or earlier. Please remember this essay is purely optional. You do not have to write the essay if you do not choose to.

***

I'm interested to see how my students respond to this assignment. I figure if they really are able to persuade me to give them extra credit (especially when I'm so resistant to it), they will have met the objectives of my course and they will have earned the extra points fair and square.

If anything interesting comes as a result of this assignment, I'll let you know. :)

New MLA Rules... (Sigh)

2009-06-23T14:53:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago the UVU Writing Center sent a little note to me (via one of my students) alerting me that there have been some changes to the MLA documentation system and that I had been instructing my students incorrectly. I'm using the 6th edition of the MLA Handbook (which I bought last summer) but it's apparently already obsolete. (To be read in a snooty voice: "You're using the 6th edition? Oh, that was just sooooo 2008.")

The Writing Center gave me a print-out of a link from the Owl at Purdue regarding the MLA Update for 2009. I'll let you read it for yourselves, but the basic gist is that there will be no more underlining (italics only, please), there will be no more full URLs, continuous pagination no longer matters, all publications must indicate what publication medium is used (e.g. print, web or DVD), and there are new guidelines for indicating missing information.

I can't help but roll my eyes a little at this. I understand the need to revise the style guide for increased clarity (especially in the ever-changing digital age), but it's frustrating to try and stay on top of all the little updates in order to remain consistent in my grading. Since we are all at the mercy of the Modern Language Association's whims, I wanted to find out if anyone has any good suggestions for making sure that you always stay up to date with the latest changes in MLA or other documentation systems. I would personally prefer not to have to buy a new style guide every year, but if that's what it takes--so be it. Any suggestions?

As a side note, this is probably a better question for John, but why do we ask students to buy a writer's handbook (such as the one that comes with the Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing) as opposed to requiring them to get the original handbooks, such as the ones published by MLA? It would seem to me that the MLA Handbook would be more authoritative. But I do see how it would be nice to have an all-in-one handbook, I suppose.

tentative fall schedules ready & other news

2009-06-09T10:42:00.000-07:00

The first draft of the fall schedule is ready, and tentative assignments are now in your mailboxes. Please review your schedule and sign it to indicate your approval (ideal), or let me know if you would like to be considered for particular adjustments (not so ideal). Once we get a sense of everyone's needs, we'll take another crack at the schedule, taking into account individual preferences and department availability.

Grant, Gae Lyn, and I are still reviewing textbooks to better support our 2010/2020 assignments and outcomes. We'll keep you notified of opportunities to pilot a short list of texts in anticipation of making a program wide shift in fall 2010. In other program news, we'll be working more on assessment plans, which will center around end of term portfolios, which were recommended in earlier iterations of our assignment sequences but will now be required. We'll have more details for you in the coming weeks, but we'll be guided by the handout that was distributed at the April meetings.

We've gotten some good suggestions for our annual orientation meeting in August. We'll get a draft of activities and topics to be covered in the coming weeks, so if you have any suggestions, don't hesitate to reply. Don't forget that the default reply is "reply all" so ensure that you've selected "reply to sender" when you want to write only to the person who sent the email (i.e. me, in this case).

I will be updating this email list in the next few weeks to reflect changes in our instructor group. If you no longer wish to teach for us let me know and I'll remove your name.

Write back with questions and/or suggestions. Talk to you later.

How to Teach a Child to Argue

2009-06-01T13:48:00.000-07:00

I stumbled upon a great article that I'm considering sharing with my students. It's called How to Teach a Child to Argue. It was nominated for a 2007 National Magazine Award. I hope you enjoy it!

spring evaluations/fall schedule update

2009-06-01T08:33:00.000-07:00

You can see your student evaluations from Spring 09 by following the (overly complicated) instructions below:

1. Open UV link
2. click Faculty/advisor services
3. click Select term (S 09)
4. click Faculty detail schedule
5. click Course Evaluation report

Grant, Gae Lyn, and I will take a second crack at the fall 09 class offerings later this week, so we should be able to offer you a tentative schedule shortly. Keep your eyes on your campus mailbox.

Talk to you soon.

Out with the old/in with the new listserv

2009-04-13T11:01:00.000-07:00

Although Mark Crane warned me about this possibility last week, somehow the engladj list got deleted. Since I can't reactivate it, I've simply started another list: engadj@lists.uvu.edu and updated each of your email addresses following your fall 2009 schedule preferences.
Sorry about any inconvenience this change may cause. You should have all received subscription notices today.

Don't forget that if you're ever unsure about receiving messages, they're copied here on the UV Writing blog. This may turn out to be our most stable site, but I'll also stick with the listserv.

Thanks for your work, and I'll see you soon.

April Meetings/Adjunct Social

2009-04-01T09:06:00.000-07:00

Our monthly meetings will be held Tuesday and Wednesday next week (the 7th and 8th), at 5pm in the usual place.

Following program business announcements and addressing questions and concerns from the group, we'll return to portfolios for the bulk of our time. I'll outline the purpose of adding a portfolio component to the assignment sequence for program assessment purposes, a basic plan for compiling documents, and some ways to use portfolios in your own classes. Gae Lyn will present some of the recent scholarship on assessment and how portfolios fit into larger assessment questions. We should have ample time for questions and discussion to follow.

And, here's an invitation from the faculty center with attachments to two upcoming events:

*******
Deans and Chairs,
The Faculty Center is holding their 3rd Annual Adjunct Social on April 10,
from 6:00-8:00 p.m. We would like to ask you to encourage your adjuncts to
attend, and we also would like to personally invite you and a guest to this
event. Registration is open until Monday, April 6, at the following url:
http://www.uvu.edu/facultycenter/events/adjunctfacultysocial/registration.php

In addition, we would like to request you encourage your faculty to attend
and you to attend the First Annual Scholarship of Teaching and Engagement
Conference on April 13-14. I am attaching an agenda detailing the sessions
that will be presented on these days.
Registration is open until Monday, April 6 at the following url:
http://www.uvu.edu/facultycenter/events/scholarteachingconference/registration.php
Thank you for your support,
Ursula
*********

See you next week.

March meetings coming up

2009-02-25T13:56:00.000-08:00

Our March meetings are coming up next week, 3 and 4 March, and we'll be in the usual SC 206 g/h location.

We'd like to use the March meetings to start the process of thinking about how to incorporate portfolios into our first year comp courses. Doug alerted us to this likelihood last year, and it seems time to follow up on it for a couple of reasons, but mainly because portfolios will give us the means to assess our writing courses more effectively than in some past attempts. Since we'd like to involve our instructors as much as possible in the planning stages, please consider sharing your experiences with portfolios at our meetings next week. Think, for instance, about:

1. How many assignments you ask students to include: how many (or which particular papers) are required, and which are open to student choice?
2. How heavily do (or perhaps should) portfolios weigh in final course grades?
3. How do you incorporate students' reflective writing (i.e. self-assessment) into the portfolio?
4. How much weight do you give to revision?

Certainly too, share both positive and negative experiences you've had with portfolios, so that we can not only consider the directions we should pursue, but also anticipate challenges that may arise from particular approaches.

I'll bring some hard copies to the meeting, but in case you'd like to get ahead of it, or if the electronic version works best, I'm attaching the schedule preference form for fall 2009 on the listserv. The deadline to turn them in is 13 March.

A few people have asked about summer classes, so let me update everyone now. I hope to see a summer schedule by the end of the week. If you're interested in summer classes, please drop me an email by Monday.

See you soon.

February Meeting Followup

2009-02-10T08:24:00.000-08:00

Thanks for attending our February meetings last week, and thanks Gae Lyn for heading the Wednesday session.

Just to catch everyone up and give everyone access to documentation, here's a link to the university policies on awarding UW grades and accommodating military leave. Gae Lyn followed up on questions about the last drop date (after which we should avoid giving any UW grades), which is February 19, later than I believed.

There was also some discussion about administrative drops. The department typically does not use the administrative drop option, but we're working on ways to get the institution to allow wait listing when students attempt to sign up for full sections, which we hope will--if used as we imagine--allow for more flexibility in the first few weeks of the term.

As we consider assessment plans for the coming academic year, it's likely that we'll follow up on Doug's suggestion last year of incorporating some kind of portfolio system into the existing assignment sequences. I'll link here to Basic Comp's portfolio guidelines so you can get an idea of what they've been doing, but we'll try to spend some time in our upcoming monthly meetings proposing some approaches and getting your feedback before we proceed with any new requirements.

Finally, I hope we'll be able to distribute schedule preference forms for fall 2009 soon. Since we're a few weeks out from our March meeting, you'll probably get the forms first via email, but we'll have hard copies available as well once we get a sense of the fall schedule.

See you in the halls.

Incorporating New Media in the Classroom

2009-02-01T17:47:00.000-08:00

In my now 4+ years as a writing teacher and through my own experiences as a student, I've come to realize that one of the most valuable ways to improve as a writer is to get a great deal of feedback. (And recent neurological and educational research would seem to corroborate that.) Unfortunately, with class sizes as large as they are due to budget constraints, there is a limit to how much one-on-one feedback and personalized mentorship I'm able to provide to each of my students. (There is only so much that one person can do, after all!)

Not that I'm advocating this for any of you, but I tend to go a little above and beyond the call of duty and meet with each student via the phone for at least 20 minutes to discuss their rough drafts for every major paper. This is a tremendous sacrifice of my personal time and energy, but I keep doing it since my students say it's often the #1 most helpful thing about my class. Plus, I tend to find a big improvement in most of my student's writing as a result of these conferences. While part of me is always concerned that I may not be able to sustain this level of commitment in the future, another part of me wishes there was some way I could give them more feedback and guidance even earlier in the writing process.

That's why I'm starting to see some of the appeals of using new media (e.g. Web 2.0 applications) in the college writing classroom. I've been enjoying a blog and podcast called Academic Evolution recently. It was launched by Gideon Burton, a former mentor of mine and a professor of English at Brigham Young University. Academic Evolution is devoted to exploring the ways new media is changing (or should change) the way academic discourse is carried out---in both the college classroom and in scholarly research.

Episode 3 of the podcast was about Blogging in College Writing Instruction. I recommend downloading it and listening to it yourself, but for those of you who don't have the time (it's about 35 minutes long), I'll summarize it here. The episode is basically a discussion between Burton and Kathy Cowley, a graduate writing instructor who is trying an experiment using blogging as an integral part of her instruction this semester. In the podcast, Cowley argues that real-world writing involves a 3-way rhetorical interaction between the writer, the content, and the audience. The problem is that the classroom is an artificial rhetorical context because it lacks a real audience. Students spend 30+ hours on a writing assignment that is only read by their professor (and maybe a disgruntled peer or two). But it doesn't have to be that way. Using a term coined by Rosa Eberly, she argues that classrooms can become a "proto-public" space by fostering greater collaboration between peers.

Cowley is trying to foster greater peer collaboration through blogging. She requires her students to write three weekly blog entries on their class blog (one before each session of class). The entries must be at least a paragraph long and need to be semi-polished prose. The students also need to post 10 comments on posts written by their fellow students by the end of the week. Cowley posts weekly blog prompts and blog assignment directions for the students on a separate blog. For example, Cowley frequently requires students to post portions of the papers they are working on so that they can get feedback from their peers. Cowley reports that many students have revised their arguments and ideas based on the initial responses from their fellow students. She feels the experiment has been successful so far.

I can see how Cowley's blogging idea could have some good applications for assignments such as the Summary/Strong Response paper in 1010 and the Analysis/Synthesis paper in 2010. Since those assignments involve having students respond to a common text, I see value in having students exchange and debate the ideas in these texts in a more proto-public forum such as a blog. I try to get students to engage in these kinds of discussions during my class, but these good discussions often get cut off when class time ends. Plus, I think an online forum could entice some of my more shy or introverted students to participate in discussions a little more.

As a side note, I also recommend checking out Episode 2 of the podcast, The Facebook Experiment. In this episode, Burton discusses his own experiment using a Facebook group to foster better class discussions about literature. Burton's use of Facebook is another possibly good use of new media in the classroom that is in a similar vein as Cowley's. If you have a Facebook account, you can check out his class's Facebook group: BYU English 251 Sect 4 (Winter 2009).

Hopefully you'll find some of these ideas helpful and provocative!

February Meetings Coming Up

2009-01-30T08:33:00.000-08:00

Our February meetings will be held next week, Tuesday and Wednesday in SC 206 G/H, 5:00-6:30.

I'm happy to announce that we'll be joined this month by Forrest Williams, Chair, and at least one other faculty member from the Basic Composition Program. They'll have a presentation on recent developments in their program that in many positive ways reflect our own, and then lead a discussion and answer whatever questions you may have about the ways they're preparing students for our courses, the relationship between 089/099 and 1010/2010, and so on.

We should also have some time to discuss other questions and matters of concern regarding your classes, including folllowing up on last month's topics as necessary.

Please feel free to email me (gosherjo@uvu.edu) if you'd like any issues added to our agenda or have any questions you'd like us to address as a group. Otherwise, see you next week.

downloading/starting micrograde

2009-01-14T10:07:00.000-08:00

Steps for downloading Micrograde

Login to UV Link (use Windows Explorer rather than Mozilla)
· Open the help tab
· Open “Employee” file in Download Manager window
· Choose your platform (Mac/PC)
· Open Micrograde file and click on “Micrograde Setup exe”
· Run installer

Setting up courses is pretty intuitive, and the micrograde program will walk you through each step:
· Name your course and term
· Select grading methods (points or percentages)
· Set grade standards (either confirm the default grade breakdown or adjust as you wish)
· Fill in grade categories and weights.
· Add student names to populate your class roster. Blackboard/Web CT users can import class roster into Micrograde, but in my experience, it simply doesn’t take long to type in student names.

Don’t hesitate to stop by or email if you have any questions about using the program.

Of course you need not use Micrograde, but you have to maintain a detailed record of grades --rather than final grades alone--over the term that you can give to Meredith after finals.

See you later--next month at the latest.

Welcome Back--January Meetings Next Week

2009-01-08T12:06:00.000-08:00

Welcome back to campus. Hope your first classes--today, tomorrow, Saturday--go well.
I wanted to remind you that our first meetings of the term will be held next Tuesday and Wednesday, the 13th and 14th, from 5-6:30 in SC 206 g/h. As a reminder, and for the new instructors who are joining us this semester, you need only attend one meeting a month, since the content of each is roughly the same.

This month we'll be joined for the first part of the meetings by Professor Mark Crane, who will be talking about online technologies that facilitate communication between instructors and students, and between students themselves. I hope that--particularly since office space and predictable times are difficult to come by--emerging technologies will help mitigate the lack of physical space.

Also, we'll talk about maintaining grade books electronically. We'll be asking you to turn in a detailed grade book (rather than simply a final grade report as in the past), so part of the meeting will include an introduction to the Micrograde software--which is free and which I find pretty user-friendly--and to writing Excel spreadsheets--which Grant will talk about, particularly for Mac users. Certainly, we invite you to briefly describe your own book-keeping strategies, including keeping paper grade books, at next week's meetings as well. Any approach is fine, as long as you're able to provide Meredith an electronic or paper document with a detailed report of your grades.

Finally, I know a number of you were hoping to get additional classes, especially since there remains significant enrollment pressure this semester. Unfortunately, budget cuts have prevented us from adding more sections, so your schedules are most likely to remain as they are. We hope to return to being able to offer everyone the number of sections they'd like in the fall. On that note, because of the additional enrollment pressure, we're likely to face unusual pressure from students and administrators to over-enroll our writing classes in the first weeks of spring. Regardless of that increased pressure, we strongly encourage you to keep your classes at the enrollment cap (23 in regular classrooms, 20 in computer classrooms), using, if you'd like, the department's add policy as leverage. Copies of the add policy are in your mailboxes.

I think that's about it for now. Write me if you need anything in the first week of class--otherwise, see you next week. In case you reply to the email listserv, don't forget that when you reply to a listserv message, the default reply is to the entire list--so make sure you select "reply to sender" if you want your message to come only to me.

See you soon.

--John

2008-12-01T20:05:00.000-08:00

A (now typically) last minute reminder:

Our final part time faculty meetings of the term will be held Tuesday and Wednesday of this week; as usual, we'll be in SC 206 g/h from 5-6:30.

We'll take some time to talk about any questions or concerns you have regarding final projects, grading, and anything else that's pressing as we head toward the finish line. We'll also try to devote the byulk of our time to a presentation by Library staff--both letting us know about instructional resources (especially library introductions for students) and fielding questions and suggestions from you.

Thanks to everyone for responding to your proposed schedule. There have been a small number of changes, and I may be contacting a few of you to make adjustments in your schedules. As always, it's a moving target, so thanks for your patience.

Talk to you soon.

November meetings this week/spring schedule out soon

2008-11-02T21:41:00.000-08:00

A bit late on the reminder, but don't forget that our part time faculty meetings will be held Tuesday and Wednesday of this week; as with last month, we'll be in SC 206 g/h from 5-6:30.

This month, in addition to the usual starting point of addressing any questions or concerns you have, we'll be talking about your students' research projects. It's likely that at this point in the term most of you are beginning, if not in the midst of, your students' culminating projects. You might consider in advance of the meetings some of the following:

How do you help students get their research projects started?
How do you help them find sources (i.e. an adequate number and type)?
How have you helped students develop (in 1010) or sustain (in 2010/2020) an acculturation in one or more academic conversations?
How effectively are the course texts and sequences of assignments supporting your work in relation to teaching research writing to lower-division students?
What can Grant, Gae Lyn, and I do to more effectively support your work in class?

OK, that's probably enough to get us started, so we'll get to it when we get together this week.

We should have a draft of the spring schedule ready for you either later this week or early next week. Please keep an eye on your mailboxes for your schedule and acknowledgment.

Talk to you soon.

More thoughts on Strong Resonse texts

2008-10-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

So, I got lots of good comments about texts for the strong response paper. I think everyone is on really different pages with this assignment, which caused everyone's suggestions to be also very different.

In order to decide on texts, I've taken time to really think about the students this semester, where they are, and what they need. I just did a week on personal narrative writing with them, and as I taught them, I realized that they needed this earlier. I may have pushed them on issues and politics a little too much in the first too papers, and I am not sure they were ready for that.

This tells me a few things. 1) I think paper #3 for them needs to be a little out in left field because if they start to feel like all the assignments are too related, they start to bring their writing "sins" and worries with them from paper to paper. Some of them freeze under this pressure. 2) We did so much focus on the thinking process in papers 1 and 2, that I think I need to give them an assignment that to them feels more like a writing assignment/ process. Again, we know that all assignments are both, but sometimes it isn't about us or how we perceive the process. It is about the students and what they see. 3) I want to take advantage of the current political climate and election if I can. 4) I want all my students to get a strong sense of success after paper #3 as they prepare for the next two papers.

So, with all that said, I have decided to let my students choose essays from The New Yorker magazine. I gave them a word limit and a specific place to look for the essays online. There are enough that I am hoping each students will be able to find something that is challenging and interesting. It also exposes them to new ideas that are current and real. So many of my students were nervous about talking about local issues in previous papers because they did not feel informed. I am hoping that this adventure with the New Yorker will actually empower them and give them more confidence in their ability to find out what is going on and have an opinion about it. Plus, these essays are well written while also leaving room for response and critical thought.

Am I off in left field? Let me know.
What problems should I prepare for with this?

Texts for Paper #3

2008-10-13T19:06:00.000-07:00

I'm excited to move on to Paper #3 for English 1010, but I am having a very hard time finding texts for the students to respond to. I want to provide 3 texts and let them choose one to respond to, but I am nervous about picking them myself since I have not worked with this assignment before. I am also still new to the demographics of freshmen students. I don't want to choose a text that is not at least user-friendly for this purpose.

Please help. I would love recommendations about texts to use. Again, I am looking for about three options. Also, any student samples or thoughts on teaching paper #3 would be great. I understand how it fits into the sequence, but I know I am going to have more questions along the way.

Thanks,

Jill Fellow

Diana Hacker materials

2008-10-10T16:23:00.000-07:00

Several people (including myself) at Tuesday night's meeting mentioned having used Diana Hacker's handbook in the past. I forgot to mention that the library has a link to her materials on research and documentation. Go to library's Citation Help page and click on "Research and Documentation Online by Diana Hacker," the fourth link in the list. She has an excellent web page on the documentation styles for different academic disciplines, including some sample essays which I have found useful in the past.

GM

Part Time Faculty Development Meetings this Week

2008-10-05T20:51:00.001-07:00

Well, it's already that time again for us to be thinking about scheduling the coming semester. Please fill out the attached schedule preference form at your earliest convenience, and return it to me either via email or hard copy in my mailbox. Note that the Wasatch Campus is now an optional location for your teaching, so if you'd like to start teaching up there (or experiment with it for a semester), check the "WC" off-campus location.

Our October meetings are also coming up on October 7 and 8 in SC 206 g/h. Please come to one of them. I'll have hard copies of preference sheets for those who haven't yet filled them out, but I'd appreciate having them back by the 15th. One of our October agenda items is to prepare for annual class observations. We'll plan to spend the bulk of our time discussing responding to student writing, since at this point you've probably at least received, if not already returned, the first major writing project of the term.

A side note: when contacting me (and I assume, Grant and Gae Lyn), please use the new uvu email addresses:

gosherjo@uvu.edu
GaeLyn.Henderson@uvu.edu
mossda@uvu.edu

Side note #2: don't forget that when you're responding to a notice or query from the listserv (i.e. regarding recent schedule preferences), please make sure you're responding only to sender--unless you're planning to share information with everyone on the list. The default reply is to all.

OK, see you later this week.

Updated on Paper Number 1

2008-09-28T17:20:00.000-07:00

Thanks for all the suggestions. I had some of these same questions before the semester started, but your answers mean so much more to me now that I am in the middle of things. Just an update: I took a step back after the paper #1 rough drafts. I added a lot more thinking and group activities. I posed questions that really helped the students see some of the narrowness of their thinking instead of writing everyone a long list of does and don't. They really rolled with it. We had some awesome class sessions where ideas were flying and light bulbs were burning brightly.

I just read one section of the final drafts, and I was very impressed with my students. They really took things to the next level. I am so glad that I took the time to carefully read the rough drafts because now I feel very connected to each students' progress. My one student with the very inappropriate views on immigrants caught the vision of the assignment and turned in a very progressed version of her first attempt. It still made me a little nervous, but I can really see her progress.

Wish me luck as we dive into paper #2. Thanks again for all your help.

2008-09-18T22:02:00.000-07:00

Jill,

I don't think your experience here is that uncommon, since the first paper calls on students to problematize, a rhetorical strategy that's totally foreign to most college freshmen. It's something I recall us talking about in a monthly meeting last year, and my explanation (which you can buy or not) was that our students are immersed in two rhetorical genres: one the testimonial narrative (on panel shows, human interest news stories, etc.), and the other the political opinion (talk radio blowhards, newspaper editorials, etc.). Those dominant rhetorical forms are connected in a number of ways, but most importantly for our students, they have no need for either critical reflection (i.e. on facts or context) on the part of the speaker/writer, or a critical disposition on the part of the listener/reader.

At any rate, rather than it being a primary/secondary matter, I'd suggest that the papers reflect the students' rhetorical dispositions--or, one might say, what they got out of the text and instruction thus far. I've found though that because problematizing (what the Allyn and Bacon Guide calls "wrestling with complexity" ad nauseum) is the essential rhetorical orientation for which the book is arguing, and on which the students will be working for the term and their college careers, the first paper is an opportunity for students to get their feet wet.

OK, a couple of practical suggestions (you may already be doing one or both of these): one, give students a week (or so) to revise and resubmit their papers after revisiting the chapters and your comments. Two, encourage students to resubmit the paper in a portfolio at the end of the term, so that the first and the last papers "frame" the course and can document the progress they've made--thus you can value student progress and acquired rhetorical sophistication more than the content of the first paper in isolation. I'm sure others will have more (and perhaps better) advice for you as time goes on. We can also think about how to incorporate your experience into the year's theme of interacting with students.

That's about it for now. Comment at will...

A "What do I do with this" Paper

2008-09-15T19:15:00.000-07:00

So, I have spent half of the today grading rough drafts of paper #1, and I have had some interesting reflections about my teaching.

John mentioned something to me the other day about the papers (the final product the students turn in) being somewhat secondary in importance to the thinking and growing that happens in the process. I'm used to teaching journalism where the product is pretty central , so I didn't quite understand him until I read these papers today.

A lot of my students totally missed the mark. They wrote some very strong opinions on some hot topics instead of really questioning a problem or an issue. As I read, I started to see the patterns and I am going to take a huge portion of class time this week to have them rethink their issues. I put together some activities where they will be able to question and challenge each other to help them think more complexly. I realize I should have done this long before the rough draft was do. I guess I thought I had. Maybe they needed more examples. Has anyone else had this problem?

But I'm excited for class tomorrow because I feel like all the time reading and commenting on the rough drafts will really pay off as I focus the class time to fill these gaps in my teaching and their understanding. Go Team!

But then I also got a paper that was not a lot different then the paper we read in Grant's seminar at our training this year. It was about immigration. It was highly offensive to me. But I tried to keep it in context with what the students was trying to do. Instead of reacting, I am using the paper to really think about how my teaching is both strong and weak and how can make many concepts more clear for ALL the students this week. I found some very delicate but serious ways to address the issue with this student, and I was very glad we had talked about these situations as a group before I had to face it.

Anyway, that's what I am working on today. I'd love comments or posts about what you do if you realize you've got to back track a little. Any great classroom ideas for getting them to really think about their topics? Any strong paper examples would also be great. I'd love to see a variety of samples.

Critical Thinking and Writing

2008-09-15T18:45:00.000-07:00

Some of you requested quotations I shared at Orientation. We talked about how achieving outcomes requires a semester-long effort, focusing on critical writing on the first day of class, foregrounding critical writing on our syllabi and at the beginning of each class period.

In our Sept. Wed. meeting, we followed up by sharing examples of what we do in the first week or day of class. I suggested that we might evaluate our choices based on desired outcomes as opposed to just doing what we have always done. Thanks to everyone for sharing unique approaches for building community and actively involving students.

Critical Thinking and Writing
WPA Outcomes and UVU Writing
From Orientation Breakout Session—Gae Lyn Henderson
August, 2008.

Wayne Booth insists that students must learn to distinguish between sources, to evaluate and understand the “flood of misinformation” with which they are inundated. He centers The Rhetoric, a culminating book of his distinguished career, around this concern: “A citizenry not habituated to thoughtful argument about public affairs, but rather trained to ‘believe everything supporting my side’ and ‘disbelieve everything supporting the bad side,’ is no longer a citizenry but a house of gullibles” (89).

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Donald Lazere points out that writing instruction, and the broader field of English Studies, has “defaulted on critical thinking” (264). In one example, while he admires Carol Gilligan’s work in women’s ways of knowing, which “judiciously modified the gender bias” in her predecessors [Lawrence Kohlberg and William Perry], a consequence of her work is that “the notion of stage-development of moral or intellectual reasoning was dropped like a hot potato in English Studies” (264). Similarly, the important critique of various oppressive consequences of Enlightenment reason conducted by the Frankfurt School and other postmodernists, “got misinterpreted as a rejection of reason altogether—a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bath water” (264-65). Lazere argues that “it is precisely higher order reasoning that is needed to refute the logical fallacies in sexist, racist, class-biased, or jingoistic rhetoric . . . manipulating sociocentric emotion” (265).

Lazere, Donald. “Postmodern Pluralism and the Retreat from Political Literacy.” JAC 25.2 (2005): 257-91.

Richard Weaver, in his analysis of the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial,” argues for the difficult, yet invaluable goal of “education in any age,” to create what he names “a Summa Dialectica. . . . [T]he educated people of our country would have to be so trained that they could see the dialectical possibility of the opposites of the beliefs they possess” (124).

Weaver, Richard M. “Dialectic and Rhetoric at Dayton, Tennessee.” Landmark Essays on Rhetoric of Science. Ed. Randy Allen Harris. Mahwah, NJ: Hermagoras Press, 1997: 107-25.

Scaffolding first year comp assignments and courses

2008-09-05T09:12:00.001-07:00

Since a few people asked following orientation last week, I planned to link to the overhead slides I used to discuss the scaffolding of writing projects in Engl 1010 and 2010/2020, and the scaffolding of the courses themselves; however, one more data transfer--this one the "research" server from UVSC to UVU postponed the posting. Anyway, here it is as MS Word document:

http://research.uvu.edu/goshert/Scaffolding.doc

or...
http://research.uvsc.edu/goshert/Scaffolding.doc

OK--don't forget we've got our first part time faculty meeting of the year Tuesday and Wednesday next week. Meetings are 5-6:30 in SC 206 g/h. See you there.

Adjunct Email List

2008-08-27T09:11:00.000-07:00

Greetings all,

I just wanted to remind folks to be careful about replying to emails that were sent to the adjunct email list (engladj@lists.uvu.edu). This is the list that we use for general announcements and information. You are, of course, welcome to use the list for relevant discussion topics and issues, as well as the UV Writing Blog (http://uvwriting.blogspot.com). But remember that when you click "reply" to a message that was sent to the adjunct faculty list, you are sending an email to EVERYONE on that list--all sixty of us--and not just to the original sender. Please be sure that this is your intent before you click "send." This is especially important if the email includes ID numbers, grades, or other sensitive information that you may not wish to send to the entire group.

Best wishes for the semester,

Grant Moss

Just before classes start...

2008-08-23T15:21:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone for coming to--and especially for participating actively in--our annual orientation Friday. In preparation for the start of class Wednesday (or Thursday, or Saturday as the case may be), don't forget to check your class schedule on Banner. The easiest way to do this (thanks to Christa for pointing this out yesterday!) is:

Log in to UV Link
In the Banner self service drop down menu choose "enrollments in courses for a term"
Choose fall 08 (the default)
Find your name on the drop down menu
See the CRN, section number, days and times, locations, and enrollments in your classes

Use banner to get printable rolls:

Log in to UV Link
In the Banner self service drop down menu choose "summary class list"
Choose fall 08 (default)
Select a class

If your HR paperwork hasn't gone entirely through the system yet and you don't have a UV ID to log in to the system, Dorice, Kim, or Kari in the front office can find and print this information for you.

Our monthly part-time faculty meetings will be held on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings from 5:00-6:30pm so that everyone can attend (of course, you’ll only need to come to one meeting in each pair). We’ll meet on the following dates, all except for March in SC 206 g/h (March location still to be determined):

September 9/10
October 7/8
November 4/5
December 2/3
January 13/14
February 3/4
March 3/4
April 7/8

Let me know if you need anything prior to the start of class. Otherwise, see you in the halls and at our September meeting.

orientation notice/schedule in your mailbox today

2008-07-31T22:00:00.000-07:00

Notices of our orientation meeting, which is scheduled for Friday 22 August, went in in your mailboxes today. For our new instructors who haven't yet been assigned mailboxes, you can get your letter from Kim or Kari in the front office. Please keep in mind that this meeting is required for all part time English faculty.

Please plan to drop in at your earliest convenience to pick up your letter and any required texts you haven't yet gotten. If you have any questions or concerns regarding your fall 08 schedule, assignment sequences, or other matters, don't hesitate to contact me by phone or email.
If I don't hear from you before then, see you next month.

In case it takes you a while to get into the office, here's the basic plan:

Part I: Orientation Session for New Adjuncts
8:00, LA 115
Includes snacks and coffee, greetings and Q+A from WPA, department staff and administration, and brief introductions to the library and writing center.

Part II: Contact Group Breakout for All Adjuncts
8:45, LA 115
All instructors, please bring a draft of your syllabus to the meeting for questions and advice.

Part III: Concurrent Breakout Sessions (attend each once)
9:30
Gae Lyn Henderson, “WPA outcomes and UVU Writing” LA 027
Grant Moss, “How do I Respond to This?” LA 118

10:30
Gae Lyn Henderson, “WPA outcomes and UVU Writing” LA 027
John Goshert, “Integrating Research with Assignment Sequences” LA 115

11:30
Grant Moss, “How do I Respond to This?” LA 118
John Goshert, “Integrating Research with Assignment Sequences” LA 115

Part IV: Lunch and Guest Presentation
12:30-3:00, SC 206b/c
Lunch will be provided for all part- and full-time faculty, and we’ll be joined by Professor Tom Huckin of the University of Utah for a conversation on how we emphasize the teaching of critical inquiry: critical thinking, critical writing, and developing the habits of mind that will allow students to enter the academic conversation. Many of us are concerned at the tendency of beginning writers to merely re-present information. Through presentation and group work Huckin discusses the difficult task of acculturating students toward academic inquiry and involve us in learning and teaching activities to achieve that goal.

On another planning note, I'll probably send out a reminder about this when the date gets closer, but I wanted to let those of you who are interested get it on the radar. On August 25, from 1-2:30 in LA 005, our Pearson sales representative, Ryan Hatch, is bringing a technology specialist from Pearson to introduce instructors from English and Basic Writing to the newest version of My Comp Lab. Unlike in previous versions, this product is now free for students who purchase Allyn and Bacon and/or the DK Handbook.

For part time people especially, who have limited access to office space and time on campus beyond class meetings, My Comp Lab may offer new opportunities for communication and consultation between instructor and students and among student peer groups.

If you'd like to join Ryan and other interested instructors, please send Ryan an email (Ryan.Hatch@Pearson.com) a week or so in advance. I'll get a reminder out when we get closer to the date as well.

I think I've successfully made the change to the new UVU system, so in future correspondence, please email gosherjo@uvu.edu.

Thanks.

Fall Schedule and Preparing for Class

2008-07-02T11:08:00.000-07:00

Fall 2008 schedule notifications are now in your mailboxes. Please take a look, sign them if they're OK, and return to Brianna's mailbox. If you have any concerns or need to request changes, you can give me a heads up via email, and I'll get on it when I get back on campus--probably a week from Thursday.

One issue I forgot to include on the notifications is that we're switching handbooks from the Prentice Hall Reference Guide to the new DK Handbook by Wysocki and Lynch. Please be sure to get a copy of that, and any required texts you may not have yet, in the front office. Don't forget that the Allyn and Bacon Guide (the new 5th edition) is the approved text for 1010, and is one of the two options for 2010/2020, the other being the Norton Field Guide.

Also, please keep in mind that your 1010, 2010, and 2020 courses will be guided by general assignment sequences. Don't hesitate to make an appointment or email me with any questions as you consider ways of integrating the sequences with the good work you've been doing.

In anticipation of either general or specific questions having to do with course design this year, I'd like you to have drafts of your fall 08 syllabi and class schedules ready to share at our orientation meeting on August 22nd. If you'd like model syllabi, let me know and I'll get together with Brianna to find some of the best examples from recent semesters. Consider including the following elements on your syllabi in the meantime:

Course description, including brief descriptions of assignments, course objectives, and so on;
Course policies, including statements on attendance, plagiarism, and so on;
Required text(s);
Grade distribution;
Instructor contact information, including contact hours;
A disability statement (you can simply paste the boilerplate statement, which I can send those of you who don't have it);
A tentative class schedule, which can take any number of shapes, from day-to-day, week-to-week, unit-to-unit, and so on.

I'll get together with Grant and Gae Lyn when I return to campus and complete a detailed agenda for our orientation day. For now, however, please plan to spend an informative (and fully compensated) day with us, which will include morning breakout sessions on important issues, and a scrumptious lunch, followed by a presentation and discussion by Tom Huckin of the University of Utah. We'll probably be going through about 3 in the afternoon.

Please email me if you need to. Otherwise, keep checking back here for updates.

beta testing assignment sequences

2008-06-18T10:56:00.001-07:00

Please take a look at the program website

http://research.uvsc.edu/goshert/uvscwpa.html

where you'll find assignment sequences for English 1010, and 2010/2020. The sequences were revised over the summer for the new edition of the Allyn and Bacon Guide, and for the Norton Field Guide. While each sequence includes a number of options and encourages you to continue teaching courses in ways that work for you, you should nonetheless plan to use the sequences to guide the essential shape of your courses.

As many of you know, we've been drafting and class-testing these sequences and soliciting your feedback over a number of semesters. All our preparation notwithstanding, I'm calling this the beta test of the program's writing assignment sequences. As such, they're available as MS word documents, not only for easy saving/printing, but also so that you can continue to comment on the sequences and help us revise them and make them work as well as possible for you and your students. Feel free to email me with comments and suggestions on the sequences as they arise. Thanks for your work, and we'll talk soon.

midsummer program update

2008-06-11T21:10:00.000-07:00

It's been a month since our last post, so here's the status on getting ready for fall 2008:

I expect to have a draft of the schedule ready by June 20th;
You'll be notified of your tentative schedule and asked to either accept it (ideal) or request changes (not so ideal);
You'll get updated sequences of assignments and textbook(s) for the course(s) you're assigned;
Please plan to join us for the annual orientation on August 22--more details to come.

In the meantime, drop me an email if you have any questions or would like to become an author on the blog.

Talk to you guys soon.

Getting (re)started

2008-05-12T19:41:00.000-07:00

We'll get the UV Writing blog back up and running over the summer. As we move through the year, we'll try to provide updated program news, links to useful strategies and handouts from UV instructors, and notification of upcoming workshops and events.

Feel free to drop me an email--or simply comment here--if you have any suggestions for materials, discussion topics, whatever you'd find useful in this forum.

Also, if you're a UV writing instructor (part time or full time), I'll gladly add you as an author if you send me your email address offline (gosherjo@uvsc.edu). That way, we'll be able to build an online discussion community for those who are interested.