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The importance of a little wiggle room
by elise Heffernan
On the last day of our seminar, I finally asked the question that had been frustrating me for the whole seminar. How could we implement the lessons we had learned if we were TAing a class with a predetermined syllabus? Heidi responded with the advice I needed: it’s okay to stretch the limits of a set syllabus. As someone who chafes against being told what to do, this was the wiggle room I needed.
In Fall 2020, I had the simple resolution to try to make my class engaged. We were still learning how to teach and learn online, so I was keeping my expectations reasonable. I was still stuck within the syllabus, but I was able to add discussions and short writing for comprehension exercises. Our syllabus had two scaffolded scientific manuscripts and was supposed to be mostly pre-recorded lectures. I added journal article discussions thinking that then the students could build up papers to cite in their manuscripts and at least sort of get to know their fellow students. The students struggled with online learning and the fact that the data we were giving them to analyze was just given to them, since we couldn’t collect it in person. But overall, I was as pleased as I could have been with my first steps to stretch a syllabus
Then in spring 2021 I got my chance to recalibrate the class. I took over as head TA, and the power to change the class was just too tempting. I had to find a way to meet the requirements of the second writing requirement class, while attempting to better adapt the lab to online learning. So, with the mixed enthusiasm from the professors in charge of the class, I restructured our lab and implemented many of the lessons we learned in the Teaching of Writing Seminar. We still did weekly article discussions and peer-review, but I took the two bulk labs (that the two manuscripts were about) and broke them into their non-living (soils and water quality) and living (trees and stream invertebrates) components. Rather than writing two fully scaffolded lab manuscripts, the students wrote a short (3 pages) lab note on each of the 4 new labs. The lab notes were easier assignments meant to display their thinking on the topic and start exercising their science clear writing muscles. My fellow TAs and I focused on correcting the science and would give feedback on argument structure. The final paper, which connected the corresponding living and non-living labs (trees and soil or invertebrates and water quality), was a full manuscript (abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion) that were peer-reviewed. Because the semester was short my original scaffolding for the final assignment had to be cut, but it turned out that the lab notes had served as a quasi-scaffolding, and so the students were able to whip up their rough drafts in no time. The lab modifications improved student writing; previously, the students would get lost in the connection between the living and non-living components of the lab, but by separating them, they were able to assess them independently, and the manuscript became an exercise focused on this connection, rather than understanding the individual parts. The adjustments also did not increase TA or student workload! Work smarter, not harder, right? But I might be biased. And this upcoming semester, the new structure can be easily adapted to double our field days from 2-4, so we get to collect the data ourselves!
I am not sure I would have had the courage, let alone the pedagogical arguments to restructure the class had it not been for the Teaching of Writing Seminar (TWS). As TAs we are seldom given the opportunity to help to develop the class. The objective in the new version of the lab was to emphasize field work and the science within a logical flow of lab topics followed by shorter and more focused writing assignments. The TWS taught me how to use writing to reinforce student learning, and how to build a better class. But most importantly, it gave me the wiggle room I needed to change my class for the better.
The Double Mission of the Graduate TA
By TCA Achintya
As a Graduate TA in the History department, I see my teaching responsibilities as a double mission. The first is to increase knowledge about, and to foster an interest in, the historical material I teach. The second however is a broader mandate to help my students improve in their capacity to reason and argue. It was in this secondary aspect of my duties as an educator that the Graduate Seminar on Teaching Writing was critical.
As a TA my ability to control the methods of evaluation in the class were limited. I was not in a position to set the parameters of the evaluative mid-term or final essays. Nonetheless there were ways to inculcate what I had learned at the workshop in the ways I approached my work. The first was to ensure that the essays that were submitted for grading were not the only writing students did in the semester. The workshop had taught me that the capacity to present an argument on paper was a specific skill beyond just an ordinary ability to reason. It isn’t enough to simply conceive of an argument. Articulating it in a compelling and engaging manner requires skills that must be developed and practiced. The workshop gave me the tools I could use to help my students do just that.
I used the lessons about scaffolding and tiered assignments to set weekly tasks that gradually increased the complexity of the responses demanded, letting the task of writing escalate towards the graded assignments. Our discussions about peer review and group feedback helped guide my section-lesson plans, encouraging constructive peer-critique and debates of the arguments presented. Guidance on identifying flaws and methods to improve writing helped me with the feedback I gave on the graded essays and the weekly comments. What I learned at the workshop has also helped me improve my own writing and argumentation as a scholar.
Thinking about the specifics of written reasoning was reflected in the feedback I gave students in response to their writing. Feedback which I have since learned was appreciated, and which I believe resulted in visible improvements in writing over the course of the semester.
For me the greatest challenge in trying to apply lessons was to think about what sort of writing prompts to give. As easy as the concept of scaffolding was to debate and discuss, conceptualizing a tiered set of assignments is not easy. Especially as the aim isn’t to simply add to the burden of work, but rather to focus on ways to help students reason through more complicated positions.
Grading and feedback were similarly challenging. It wasn’t just enough to identify problems in written submissions. I had to think about ways in which that writing could improve, and to do it in a way that didn’t involve simply proof-reading an assignment and fixing all the errors I found. One piece of advice from the workshop that helped with this enormously was to focus on a limited set of things. Rather than try to identify everything wrong with an assignment, I simply focused on the big things, and a few big things at that. This meant that the returned essays weren’t giant globs of struckthrough red text and a sea of comments. It also helped focus how much time I spent grading each essay, letting me limit the number of hours per week the task demanded. As a graduate student, I think I remain most thankful for that, since it allowed me to get through a semester of distance education and Covid with a lot less stress than I had any right to.
WRITING ON STAGE, LEARNING ON THE PAGE
BY ERIN JORDAN
When I get stuck writing my dissertation, I start with an image, memory or idea that I know is key to my thinking, I freewrite until connections emerge. Sometimes I write the same ideas over and over again every day for a week. In this push and pull coherence and argument slowly emerge.
But how to apply those lessons in the classroom?
Overwhelmed with work and life, students’ essays haunt them until the last minute, when they dash off whatever is possible in the time they’ve got left. What results is good, bad, or indifferent, depending on the attention they’ve paid in class and the quality of their writing education – and then it’s on to the next thing. As I prepared to teach my own class, ANTH 2625: Imagining Africa, I wanted to make space instead for the subtle emergence of understanding, for the way ideas get stronger through rereading, rewording, and for them have the time to think, “wait, that’s not what it is at all, maybe it’s something else, maybe it’s…”
In the Graduate Institute for the Teaching of Writing, I gained new language for the processes I was already using, and how to operationalize them in my teaching: “writing to learn,” scaffolding assignments to encourage thinking in stages, and peer review.
From exploratory exercises in class to low-stakes blog posts, I encouraged students to think on the page without feeling married to the results. Their blogs then fed into larger analytical essays, where I asked them to think more explicitly about synthesizing course materials around key themes of representation, power, and ethics. The prompts that produced the most interesting blog posts were the most off-the-wall or exploratory. For example, as inspired by “I’ve Come to Take You Home” by South African poet Diana Ferrus about the repatriation of Sarah Baartman’s remains, I asked students to write a tribute to an African person depicted in a colonial and/or anthropological photograph. In another, I directed them to LIFE magazine’s archive to analyze how African Independence movements were depicted in Western media. Both of these assignments yielded blog posts that were rich with detail, feeling, and analysis of how visual representations have fueled Western imaginaries of the African continent.
My primary challenge in creating such a writing-intensive course was to keep up with feedback that I felt the deepest of their engagements merited, whether for blogs, rough drafts, or final essays. I graded blogs on a simple scale, primarily for completion, which made my gradebook easy to keep up with, but I was often falling a few weeks behind, such that my comments were no longer as relevant or useful. On their essay drafts, I meant to keep my feedback short, with a focus on only a few argument- and organization-based suggestions. Though I constantly had to rein myself in from more detailed editing, in the end the time crunch of getting 30 papers back within a week or two helped to keep me to that original goal (once I’d already far over-commented on the first 5 to 10 papers).
To pre-empt student urges to wait until the last minute to write, I incorporated a first draft and peer review workshop into our course structure. Peer review was most successful for students already invested in the assignment, but on average seemed to be a wash.
The biggest surprise for me (especially considering students struggles with peer review) was that students loved reading each others’ blogs. Knowing that I personally loathe being forced to comment on forum posts when I’m a student, I did not require it. However, for their final learning portfolios, I asked students to revisit their own blog posts and those of others to reflect on how their imaginaries changed over the course of the class. They LOVED this, and in their reflections, follow-up e-mails, and student evaluations, multiple people said they wished I’d had them engage with each other’s writing sooner! In the future, I’d love to make formal peer review feel more like the reading and sharing they’d enjoyed – another form of scaffolding to consider, and one that might reduce my workload as well.
Lessons from the Teaching of Writing seminar helped me to teach several students to love the writing process as much as I do. A huge win was in learning to incorporate Ann Lamott’s “shitty first draft” concept in the classroom through exploratory writing: numerous “writing to learn” activities that scaffold into more involved arguments. I think my next goal will be to try to organize “peer review” feel more like a writing group – a critical part of my personal process – and student responses to each other’s blogposts give me some ideas for where to start.
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