Special Guest Blogs!
Read on for insight from our veteran GAs
Finding Balance in the chaos
BY Amelia Bruce
I am really glad that I was able to attend the Graduate Instructor Seminar the Teaching of Writing. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going into the class but in the end, it was very informative and had tools and techniques that I took away from it and still implement with my students today. In the past I have taught as a TA for a few different classes here at UVA, however, for this seminar I wanted to focus on my undergraduate level Biomechanics class taught through the Kinesiology department.
Traditionally this class is math and theory heavy so I was finding it difficult to find opportunities to get students engaged in writing. I had to remember that I was not the instructor of record so there was only so much that I would be able to change. Additionally, a big consideration for me was that I was the only TA for a large class of around 100 students. My responsibilities for this class included: guest lecturing, office hours, grading, and leading afternoon help sessions. I wanted to find a good balance of engaging students in writing practices, while also being cognizant of me being the sole grader of assignments with my other time commitments for this class. My first suggestion was to implement a writing to learn (W2L) exercise of discussion boards on canvas. Either myself or the instructor would pose a question to the class or post a research article once a week and the students would respond with their thoughts, questions, or summaries on the board. These assignments were just for completion, making it low stakes while still having students reflect on their understanding of the topics. Additionally, I was able to make adjustments to our homework assignments newly named “Solve & Explain” that were given during each of our major units throughout the semester. I was noticing prior to the S&E assignments that many students were able to do the math and problem-solving aspect associated with this class, however, students were having a seemingly difficult time articulating the meaning and clinical implications of their findings. These assignments had the solve portion at the beginning to ensure that students understood how to solve the content questions. The explain part was a critical thinking question that built upon the foundational knowledge and concepts that students completed in the first part of the assignment. The explain portion did have a word limit of 50-100 words for two reasons. First, this minimized the amount of time I spent reading during the grading process. Secondly, this word limit encouraged students to use their words wisely and challenged them to focus on clarity and conciseness in their work. In the past I’ve been under the impression that having writing assignments in a class equates to a 5-10 page research paper. This type of assignment is very daunting and likely unrealistic with the size of our class and only one TA. I think a new framework of thinking about writing assignments could be more about the quality of writing instead of the quantity.
During my time at UVA, I have learned that a major focus and learning objective that I have for all my students, regardless of which course I’m teaching, is the ability for my students to be effective communicators. In many aspects of life, whether my students continue to a career in my field or not, people are typically going to be required to communicate through writing whether that be via email, reports and projects, job applications, books, blogs, etc. I feel like the better we can prepare our students to be effective communicators, the better prepared they will be for what comes next after UVA. From this seminar I feel that I have the pedagogical rational for incorporating writing into any coursework. Once I have a class of my own, I can’t wait to incorporate more writing techniques within my teaching practice.
You can download Amelia’s presentation slides here.
”To Rubric or Not to Rubric—That Is the question”
BY Brittany Acors
When I took the Graduate Seminar on Teaching Writing in January of 2021, I realized for the first time the challenge of a writing assignment which calls for an “essay” or “paper." While I had been writing this kind of assignment for a decade and thought I knew how to explain it, when I actually tried to interpret what this means, I discovered it didn’t really fit any particular genre. Students right out of high school, from different backgrounds, or with different levels of writing instruction and experience could interpret these assignments differently. This also explained why I had received such varied submissions during my first year of teaching–to some students, an “essay” needed to follow the five-paragraph format, with an introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph. To others, it was more stream-of-consciousness, or just a series of disjointed two-sentence paragraphs. I learned that in writing my own course assignments, I should be more specific in the prompt, in communicating my expectations, and in scaffolding the assignment so students have opportunities to learn and improve before the big submission.
Unfortunately, in my experience as a TA, we don’t typically get the opportunity to design ideal assignments. In the spring semester after I took the seminar, the professor provided the following prompt for the students’ first writing assignment:
Go to the website “Freq.uenci.es: A Collaborative Genealogy of Spirituality,” at http://frequencies.ssrc.org/… Skim through the various entries, and finally settle on two: one that appeals to you, for whatever reason; and one that you find disagreeable, annoying, or unsettling, for whatever reason.
In a two-page (approximately 500-600 word) essay, explain why you respond as you do in each case… Your essay can be personal or impersonal, political or apolitical, but it should be analytical rather than only emotional.
Even I was confused by the expectations of this prompt. But as the primary academic connection for 60 students in a course with asynchronous lectures and synchronous online discussion sections, I had to interpret the assignment for my students. I also had to explain how I would be grading something that was supposed to be personal… but not too personal.
I thought a rubric would be helpful not only for breaking down the expected components of the prompt and how grades would be determined for a pretty open-to-interpretation assignment, but also for speeding up my grading process for 60 essays (120 pages). I designed the rubric so that it restated key elements of the prompt in question form, and then I applied the “stoplight system” we learned in the seminar, telling students I would assess whether they answered each question in a way that was excellent (green), satisfactory (yellow), or needs improvement (red). I stated that mostly greens would put them in the A/B range; mostly yellows in the B/C range; mostly reds in the C/D range. I figured that by sharing this rubric, students could check their own work the same way I would. I hoped it would make my grading process less subjective and more equitable, while still having some wiggle room.
One of my core values while teaching is transparency, so I let the students know up front that this was my first time using a rubric, and it was just on a trial basis, but that I hoped it would be helpful to all of us. As I graded, I felt more constrained by the rubric than I expected. I spent a lot of time debating whether a student’s response to one of the rubric questions was green or yellow, when really it was probably what Crayola aptly named yellow-green. Then, once I had highlighted each question in the color I felt it deserved, I still had to determine what number to assign: Was a paper with all greens but one yellow a 96 or 94? If there were two yellows, should that be a 90 or a 88? It ended up still being pretty subjective, did not communicate the basis of the grade to the students as clearly as I expected, and took longer to complete than my normal system of grading did.
After I returned the grades, I held an anonymous poll asking students whether the rubric was helpful, not helpful, they were indifferent, or they did not look at it. While I did not save the results, I recall that they were pretty discouraging and the extra time I invested did not make a noticeable difference to the students. By the time the second writing assignment came around, I decided to scrap the rubric.
The moral of this story is not that rubrics are useless, but that they require time, effort, and trial-and-error to be beneficial to both the students and the grader. If given the opportunity again, I would design a more specific rubric, like the VALUE rubric we learned about in the seminar, with clear point values for meeting detailed expectations. Rubrics can help communicate expectations and make the grading process more equitable, and I think they are worth a try for “essays” and “papers” that students might not otherwise understand.
OVERCOMING PERFECTIONISM:
FREE FORM WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
BY LAURA ORNEE
One of the most useful lessons the teaching writing seminar taught me is the difference between writing assignments meant to produce a finished, polished product, and assignments meant to help students think through class material or questions of their own. Seeing students grow free in their writing, overcoming their perfectionism, and bringing the ideas from their small writing assignments into the classroom is not only incredibly rewarding, it also improves the quality of class discussions.
For me there have been three key elements to effectively using different types of writing assignments. The first is making the distinction clear to students. This means explaining the goal of every writing assignment to them (multiple times!), so they go into it with the right expectations. It may seem clear to us teachers that when we say ‘journal’, we don’t expect a polished paper, but in my experience many students, especially the ones that don’t have great faith in their own writing skills, will see any writing assignment as something that needs to be perfect. Something that has helped me is telling students to write out questions they don’t have the answers to, or things they don’t understand, in their assignment. It often gets them to ruminate on possible answers, which means they are engaging with the class materials on a deeper level.
The second element is the design of the assignment, which has to facilitate free flow writing. While longer exploratory writing assignments are possible, within the structure of a college course I think they are almost always going to have to be short, maximum one page. Both students and teachers do not have the capacity for longer ones. Aside from that, I think multiple short assignments work better to get students to engage with the material than one longer assignment. I also think this type of assignment should never be graded, if a student has done the assignment according to the instructions, they get full credit.
Responding to the students’ work is the final element in effectively using different writing assignments. Aside from exploratory writing not being graded, since that will put unnecessary pressure on students, your response can make or break the student’s view of the assignment as useful or not. I have seen many professors assigning weekly or monthly assignments that students later commented on in the evaluations as being useless busywork. A good rule to keep in mind, I think, is that if you make students spend time on something, you should expect to spend time on it too. That means providing useful feedback even to journaling assignments. This doesn’t have to be a paragraph of comments every time, but even a short line with every assignment can change students’ perception. A good way to let students know you really are interested in their thoughts, is bringing up what they wrote in class as a jumping off point for a discussion. This doesn’t take a lot of prep work, just write down a few lines from a few students before class.
The type of comments you give should be different from comments on formal assignments too. While steering students in the right direction if you see they are not understanding the readings is important, commenting in a way that students don’t view their writings as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ will help them feel free and confident in the next assignment. Phrasing comments as questions can help with this. I have also asked students whether they want me to correct their grammar and spelling or not: some students experience those type of comments as restricting, while others feel they get more out of the assignment that way. In my experience most students will not want this option, so again it does not have to take up much time.
When applying all these elements, students can get a lot out of exploratory writing assignments. As I’m sure many of you, like me, are used to writing for papers and being perfectionist about your writing, this free form of writing can be a bit of an adjustment. I have learned quite a bit from students who are better at free form writing than I am and it has been a joy to read their work. I have also really enjoyed this type of assignment as a way to get to know my students better, they are usually not afraid to put their thoughts on paper! All in all, it is one of the most useful things I have picked up from this course and I hope it will be for you too.
You can download Laura’s presentation slides here.
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: try to keep 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 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 analyzing was just given to them (the real fun of Ecology Lab is going in the field and collecting the data). 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 page) lab note on each of the four 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 connected the corresponding living and non-living labs (trees and soil or invertebrates and water quality) in a full scientific manuscript (abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion) that were peer-reviewed. The lab notes had served as a quasi-scaffolding, and the students were able to write up their rough drafts in no time.
The changes we made to the lab notably improved student writing. Previously, the students would get lost in the connection between the living and nonliving components of the lab. By separating the concepts, 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! We took a “work smarter, not harder” approach.
The 2021-2022 school year, we finally got to leave online learning and test out the new lab structure in person. Fully realized, the students were engaged and their writing improved dramatically from the original syllabus. The transformation of the lab is one of the things I am proudest of achieving in my tenure at UVA. We took an overlooked (and quite frankly boring) requirement and made it engaging and fun for students (and TAs) again.
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 a 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. Since my decidedly lackluster initial meeting with the professors in charge of the class, our ecology lab is now well received by students and professors. 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.
You can download Elise’s presentation slides here.