|
|
|
What
is your “best practice” for getting students to be active, involved,
and invested in your writing class? What is one activity, assignment,
or lesson that especially engages your students' interest in writing? PETER SCHIFF One of the activities Peter sent in is called “Fortune Writing.” Adapted from Beth Griffith’s article, “Cookie Composition,” it offers a method for practicing creative thinking and narrative writing, and it helps students use transitional words and phrases. Materials needed: a fortune cookie for each student (or just strips of paper with fortunes on them). Procedure: Give each student a cookie or fortune, and ask them to write about what the day will be like tomorrow if the fortune were to come true immediately. Stress that students should provide details about the day and use at least two transitional words to begin sentences. Ask for volunteers to read aloud what they have written. Variation: After each student reads aloud, have the class guess the fortune that inspired the writing. KRISTI BROCK I assign the Profile Essay from ST. MARTIN’S GUIDE TO WRITING, but I ask students to interview a person in their major course of study. If the student doesn't have a major, I ask the person to choose a field that at least holds some interest for him or her. This interview could be with a professional or a graduate student in the student's field. The student cannot write about anyone in his or her own family. It also has to be a job that you need a degree to acquire. Several of my students get jobs from writing this paper. For instance, a student who wants to be a podiatrist was offered a job at a podiatrist's office. The doctor also told him that he would help him to get acceptance into certain medical schools. I also have students who say that shadowing professionals makes them realize that they are not interested in that field at all. Each student gives a speech summarizing the interview. I feel that this assignment is valuable because so many students have misconceptions about various fields. BOB WALLACE First day of class in ENG 151 and sometimes 291: (1) Show a succession of four Goya slides for thirty seconds each, asking each student to write the first word that comes to mind in response to the image. (2) Turn on the lights and go around the room with each student saying the word they wrote for each image, getting a group response to each successive work. (3) Then divide the class into “specialists” who must restrict themselves to one of five formal properties (such as light, color, background, posture, clothing) as each image is shown again. (4) Show four slides again, now for two minutes, so the specialists can write down their impressions for each work. (5) Then turn lights back on and compare these responses orally until the period ends. General goals: to get students to trust their own impressions before being subjected to those of teachers, art historians, classmates; to begin building a sense of interpretive community in the classroom. Specific goal: to prepare students for two diagnostic paragraphs due at the beginning of the class period, one beginning “Goya is ---. . .,” the other “Goya’s [name of art work] is . . . ,” the blank-filled sentence being the topic sentence of each paragraph. SUNNY RHOADS I Xerox articles from Time magazine on important issues (never anything boring) like bin Ladin, the Catholic priest dilemma, media manipulation—something I know they have an opinion on. Then we discuss the article. Everyone gives an opinion or feeling about the issue. They they do a critique in class; it can be one agreeing or disagreeing with the article or one on the construction and structure of the article. VICKI STIEHA As I consider "best practices" in terms of enhancing student activity and involvement in ENG 101, semester after semester it would have to be the "final project" I design. The project varies each semester, depending upon the theme of the class or Learning Community, but it is always collaborative, always a "culmination" of the course theme and almost always involves writing in an online environment. Final Project The final project for the course will be to create public writing that will last beyond your time together in this community. For the benefit of future Mayerson Student Philanthropy groups and for the Mayerson Foundation as well, we are going to "document" our semester working on the project. The work you do during the semester will be the content of a web site. Requirements: Each team will create a web page (an html document) featuring one of the Mayerson Philanthropy Investment recipients. Included on that page will be a profile of the organization, their need, and the plans they have for the investment funds. If that organization has a web site, your page should provide a link to it. Additionally, team pages must link back to the main class page. Each team will also work together to choose excerpts from your essays that you think exemplify the class' attitudes toward the Mayerson Student Philanthropy Project and service learning. MARY QUILL One successful activity seems to be when the class works on a "pretend" paper. They choose the topic and thesis statement so they are involved from the beginning. They debate which facts and examples would be most supportive of the thesis and I list them on the board. They get into groups where each group addresses a part of the paper. Some do the introduction, others do the conclusion, and others work on the body paragraphs. We compare the different approaches for effectiveness, decide which we prefer, and put it all together verbally. They seem to be less anxious about writing a paper when they begin to see that there are options. Another practice is getting them moving, getting them out of the classroom for part of the class session. I use this as a form of prewriting for some of my papers. For example, with a descriptive piece, they do observation/discovery near the classroom. In BEP, the Early Childhood Center and the Japanese office are good choices. For the survey/analysis paper, they create a few questions they wish to be answered, and go to the University Center or cafeteria, for example, then return to evaluate and analyze the responses they receive. They discover which questions are good and which are not. They begin practicing making educated guesses. When assigning persuasive papers, I encourage the students to mail their papers to the appropriate audience; sometimes I mail them myself. KRISTIN DIETSCHE One thing I tried this semester that worked better than I expected was to have groups of three or four students make reading assignments for the rest of the class. They found journal articles appropriate to the broader class research project (in this case a 291 project that involved researching problems faced by first-year college students across the country). They had to search for sources but also be careful to select something both interesting and useful for the rest of the class. When they assigned the article they had to set it in context and kind of "sell" it to the class as useful and interesting (and they used the "evaluating sources" section of EVERYDAY WRITER to prepare the pitch). Once the readings were assigned, individual students wrote summaries of two of the assigned articles. Then the group making the article assignment read and evaluated the summaries. Finally, they led class discussions about the articles and explained what they thought people had missed. What worked best was the last bit. I was surprised that the students became really invested in the articles they had assigned and were very good at explaining the subtleties to the rest of the class. These articles have finally been used in a short researched report (with others), where I think the class has a better command than usual of their source material. JUDY TAYLOR I have worked to involve students in their profile assignments by sharing with them the New York Times Profiles-in-Grief series of last year. The series began soon after 9/11/01; it offered profiles of those missing after the bombings. A woman involved in the newspaper series was involved, too, in a compilation of these profiles this year. In a discussion of both projects, she said that a) in each she wanted "revelation"; b) each was to be not a life's story but a capturing of "the essence" of the person; c) included in each was "an anecdote emblematic of the person." Our faculty has discussed the problem students have finding a focus for/a way into the profile assignment. I am hoping that introduction of the context of these NY Times profiles will allow depth to infuse my students' profiles. Because 9/11/01 affected children as well as our young and not-so-young adults, this may remain a useful introduction to the profile assignment for some time. ROBERT T. RHODE The participants in my sections of Honors Freshman Composition are especially engaged in reading aloud their papers to their colleagues and receiving immediate criticism. By not distributing printed copies of their essays, I put the burden on listening carefully to what is read. I find that conscientious listening helps participants to become better writers and better readers. ROBERT O’NEILL An assignment that I like to use to emphasize editing to students is this: I pose a question on the board, usually about a current topic or topic from an essay we have read in the text. I hand out the same piece of paper to each student and tell them to put the last four digits of their social security number in the upper right hand corner and write a three or four paragraph response for a half hour. Then I pick up the papers, redistribute them, and tell them to edit and grade their fellow student’s paper and put the last four digits of their social security number next to the grade. The grade is not applied to their final grade; it simply goes in the grade sheet as an in-class assignment completed, but it enhances students’ editing abilities and gives them feedback from someone beside the instructor. The anonymity of the same piece of paper for everyone and the last digits of the ss# help the students to avoid squeamishness or self-consciousness when editing, commenting, and grading. Like a sport, the more one practices writing and editing, the better one masters it. TIFFANY HINTON My best practice: I make extensive comments on my students' first essays. When they're returned, students do a number of activities geared toward reflecting upon and improving the individual issues I have highlighted on each of their essays. First, they workshop my comments on each peer group member's essay with regard to LOCAL concerns: they determine and list at least one weakness in terms of local concerns, consult their WRITER'S REFERENCE, ask questions of me, and attempt to improve upon specific examples. This workshop is scheduled on the due date of their second essay; therefore, the last step of this workshop involves transferring what they've learned to the task of editing their second essays, before turning them in. Secondly, they write journals in which they show their understanding of all the issues I've highlighted and discuss their plans for addressing and improving upon them. On the day this journal is due, they have a second workshop regarding my comments about GLOBAL concerns. We discuss some examples aloud in class, then group members must "sign in" on one another's journals; they, too, must show their understanding of the issues I've highlighted in their group members' essays and discuss their plans for helping those members address and improve upon them. PAT CURRAN I give grade points for using hardback reference texts from [the] reference section for their research paper. I give points all along the way, step-by-step, for note cards, photocopied sources, etc. in advance. These steps produce a much better final result. CORDELIA KOPLOW When I returned to teaching five years ago, I started out reading and correcting all rough drafts of assigned essays. I assumed that such reading was standard procedure. It seemed to be the best way to do individual teaching and evaluation that was not tied to the dreaded grade assignment. I have continued to this--sometimes using student conferences to go over drafts, and most times just correcting and commenting on them, returning them by the next class meeting. My policy is that I do not grade an essay until I have read the draft and returned it to the student, giving him or her enough time to consider the suggested corrections and revisions. I also use rough draft workshops for those essays for which a conference is not scheduled; in these, students read each other’s essays and respond to questions selected from the ST. MARTIN’S GUIDE or of my own devising. JEAN TIMBERLAKE 1. Allow rewrites of graded papers 2. Schedule mandatory conferences after I hand back the first paper. Suggest extra ways students can improve writing. 3. Never depend only on class discussions—rather, assign readings, put writing topics on the board, have students write, and then read their entries [aloud to the class]. BARBARA GARTIG I asked students in both of my classes what learning activities they liked best. They like group work best because they can socialize. I usually type up ten or twelve questions, and each group of three or four is responsible for answering two to three questions from their reading homework. JONATHAN S. CULLICK One way I try to motivate students is to let them know that I am a writer too. I tell them that I love to write and teach writing, but like them, I have days when writing is a struggle. On the first day of class, I announce my hope that they will leave my course at the end of the semester with a greater sense of confidence in themselves as writers and perhaps even a greater sense of enjoyment as well. Throughout the course, I model good writing skills by joining them in writing whenever I can. Every time the class freewrites responses to questions, I freewrite with them. When the students workshop papers, I join in the workshops. When explaining what revision is, I display a project of my own on a table in the classroom, so they can see how substantially I revise my own writing. Occasionally I will write my own draft of an assignment I have given them, as a way of providing a sample of how the essay could be written; at the same time, I invite them to critique my draft (many enjoy doing this). In all we do, I strive to make the class “a community of writers.” |
|||||||||||||||
