_text_

Here are some notes on how I feel like I've developed my teaching over this last year:

First, while I'm still not great at involving students in conversations about ideas from texts or the rhetorical moves they make, I've gotten better at this. In this regard, the Writing Program has shown me that it's ok to have students work with really complex texts (as long as there are sequenced individual, group, whole class, homework, and/or in-class heuristics for students to engage with), which facilitates richer class discussion.

Second, I've continued to experiment with different forms of feedback on student work. I've found a conversational style using track changes that works well for me.

Third, I've come to understand the role of content (readings) in creating not a subject for Writing students to learn but a set of questions that help provide an exigency and rhetorical purpose for student writing.

Fourth, I've developed a recognition of the generative nature of having students start not from their personal experience or prior knowledge but from the unknown, the complex. Instead of having students first freewrite about an issue related to a topic they might be considering, I can have students START by doing research as invention strategies in specific databases or search engines using an open yet narrow topic enough topic *I* provide. I've never before taken such an active role in guiding the teaching of research. And the absolute best papers this semester came out of such activities or were fairly direct continuations of Unit 1 questions.

Thanks so much for starting off this conversation, TJ, and thank you for such thoughtful comments about your teaching. In particular you make me want to read some of the feedback you have provided students this semester because I really valued and appreciated the opportunity to see the response strategies and styles of the members of my small group a couple of weeks ago. I told my group that written feedback remains a struggle and a work in progress for me, and that I was inspired by how generous and astute and articulate and, well...for lack of a better word, "present" many of you are when you speak back to students about their writing. I want to give a special shout out here to Tina Lee, whose summative comments at the end of a particular unit 2 paper have helped me to imagine a whole new way of interacting with students, and actually made me want to try out a slightly new voice and approach with my next set of essays. The grading/feedback conversations my group had this semester also reinforced a theory I have explored in recent years about what it means to "know" our students—not, I want to clarify, be friends with them, but to know them—to attend to them as people, as budding professionals or academics, as young adults navigating sometimes several challenging realms (school, work, friendships, extracurriculars, home life, etc) at once—and to use that knowledge, that awareness to hold different kinds of conversations with them about their thinking and writing. My feedback to students does indeed change when I am more informed about their efforts and struggles and desires and commitments.

I did not teach this Spring semester and taught 105 in the fall. As a 670 consultant I've been able to see some wonderful class observations and have been able to think critically about my own teaching practices through the conversations we've had in 670. As we wind down in 670, I'm thinking about 2 things in particular that have been most helpful for me as a teacher:

-less can be more

-it takes *time* and patience for students to work through text and writing! (yes, I know that I should know that :-) so I'll explain that one first)

Frequently, I tend to pack calendars and plan for class periods with a tremendous amount of work, my fear is always that I won't have enough for students to do. What I've re-realized is that there are multiple ways of having students come to assignments/texts so that its not always about adding something new so much as it is about returning to a text or assignment in a new or fresh way.

I've often found myself in a similar situation as Candace - preparing far too much work to be dealt with successfully in a single class period, overwriting worksheets so that students barely finish the first page with enough time, etc. And while my anxiety to a certain extent is reassured by all of this preparedness, it's entirely unnecessary on my part, and I think it does a disservice to the students who then feel as though they're being rushed. on my part, I often lose track of the larger objectives of the unit in trying to cram so much in, and end up communicating the subtleties while the students remain unclear of what they're supposed to be doing. I think framing a unit calendar that allows for a certain amount of breathing room and that focuses each class on primary objectives, reinforcing those objectives, would help both me and the students more easily ascertain what our goals are, and the kind of work each project or essay is asking from them. single concrete examples looked at closely (as heuristic or for discussion or whenever) end up being far more effective than tons of different examples, glossed over that reinforce the same idea. so yes, less is more, I entirely agree.

I have to admit I'm having trouble saying things that don't sound superficial. It's hard to think back when we're so near the end and I'm feeling very forward looking. So I guess I'll think about what comes next, and in the process hopefully I can reflect on why I'm going in that direction. I know for next year I'm going to try to have my class topic of inquiry be something more overtly controversial because I found that something abstract like "media and socialization," though interesting to the students to some degree, doesn't seem to really provoke them in any way. I want to also adopt Robert's method of giving students reflection questions to write about when they do shared readings. Students have been giving me a lot of feedback that they wish there was more opportunity for in class discussion (I shied away from that this semester since my Freshmen last semester had so much trouble sustaining conversation). I think by using Robert's method I can reintroduce more class discussion and, along with a more debatable topic of inquiry, I should be able to get at least some students more actively engaged in the conversation and their own paper topics. I am also going to try making my class more revision and post-invention oriented rather than pre-invention oriented. By that I mean, I want students to punch out a lot more writing earlier in the unit and then I want them to work on developing, expanding, complicating, and so on their own work the rest of the unit rather than doing various writing exercises before the first draft (which I have been saving for half to three-quarters of the way into the unit). I think that when you do all that hard work before the first draft students seem unable to apply what they've learned to the paper. So I'm going to try instead to work on papers in layers, doing freewrites first, and then applying heuristics, etc. to those freewrites until they start to shape into what look like papers. I wonder if students will get the concepts better that way?

Like Candace and Kayla I worry that I spend too much time planning to too much to do with the final result of making my students feel rushed. I think if I were to teach 105 and 205 again, I would put less detail in my calendars in order to leave me room to slow down if necessary. I also, like Laurel, want a lot of the writing my students do to be around revising. This semester I experimented a bit more by giving them a lot of writing throughout, but writing that could be built upon and revised into a paper format. This also freed me up to give fewer in-text comments on their final papers, as I had been making extensive comments throughout. I think I would like to develop a kind of heuristic of some sort where I hand back papers and we take time to look for instances of weak transitions, weak claims, etc. and actively work on it *in class* rather than leaving the paper behind and starting up something new. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but I'm interested in helping students understand that revisions are a necessary part of writing...that sometimes they may really have to scratch the first claim they come up with...

The biggest thing I want to work on is discovering that line between being as helpful as possible v. doing too much and not letting them learn themselves. Sometimes I worry that I tell them too much rather than showing them and letting them work it through for themselves (whether "it" is locating spaces in their own texts that need to be revised/clarified, or looking for sources, etc.).

Upon reflection on my teaching this semester, I feel that I did pretty well compared to fall semester. Wrt 105 teaching last fall was my first time teaching in US and given the differences in approaches and expectations, I struggled little though everything eventually ended up positively. This time around in Wrt 205, however, things worked even better than I had expected. In fact, I was excited from the very beginning with the topic of inquiry itself and the way course was structured. I had adapted Eileen Schell’s course “Black market: marijuana, illegal labor and pornography” and structured 3 units around three different sub-topics of black market: first unit on marijuana, second on illegal/immigrant labor and third on pornography. Because all three topics of inquiry were so provocative, they generated productive class discussions and carefully designed assignments excellent writing products from students. I feel that the course is an over all success as students upon my curiosity answered that they learned number of things directly pertinent to their lives and communities from writing class which they had not learned from other classes. Of course, their writing skill and style must have been enhanced.

My final thoughts: if I were to teach the same course next year, I will change nothing but may be the sub-topic of inquiry for the third unit. I had moments of uneasiness talking about pornography in the class though it is no doubt a topic of immense significance. I also found students struggling to produce an I-movie out of it. So, may be replacing it with some other topic related to black market could make the course wonderful…

Given how responsive students were to working with 'visual rhetoric' both in 105 and 205, I’m planning on doing more work with this kind of stuff in the future. Trying to devise a topic that will move things more toward the visual will be a mini-project for the summer.

One thing that has kept coming up in my experiences is need for flexibility in the classroom. Often I get so caught up with sticking to the calendar or with a specific plan that when things don’t turn out or move along as I imagined they would it becomes difficult to adapt to or change the situation. Stepping out of the situation, seeing whether or not something is working, and changing things up in the moment is becoming easier as I get more comfortable with the ‘Teacher’ role and the authority that comes with it. Feeling comfortable pressuring students to examine things and developing new and different ways to put that pressure on is something I look forward to continuing to explore. The idea (Betsy’s) of having ‘a bag of tricks in your back pocket’ is so useful! Working on developing and implementing these ‘tricks’ has played a major role in my ability to adapt to what happens in the moment and to create more effective and interesting ways of responding.

Like Eric, I also learned to value flexibility and fluidity in the classroom. It was tempting, as a first-time teacher, to bind myself to the lesson plan. There’s a sense of safety in it, and while preparation has its own rewards, I learned a lot during the moments when it became clear that the class needed something different from what I’d anticipated (more time, clarification, an impromptu discussion, etc..). When things didn’t go as planned, or when the course shifted, I found myself better understanding what my students needed from me, and responding in a present way. These moments also revealed how each class is different, and how what works in one might not work the same way in another.

Going forward, I hope to develop the ability to “turn on a dime” more fully, particularly when it comes to leading focused discussions. As some people mentioned earlier, I sometimes struggled with finding the balance between guiding students to see something and letting them discover on their own. Discerning when conversation is fruitful versus when it’s time to redirect students (or directly instruct them) seems to be an art in itself.

Somewhat expanding on Sarah's last point, this year I've learned to place more responsibility on the students. Especially in 105, I found myself feeling nervous if students didn't get what I was saying right away, to the point of simplifying the assignments to alleviate any possibilities of confusion. In 205, I began to have more confidence in myself and the assignments, placing more responsibility on the students to work through any difficulties. It's been helpful for me to see how much more students get out of being pushed rather than coddled. I've had wonderful presentations so far in Unit 3, and I think this stems from giving students the room to be ambitious.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the tension between focus and open-ness in the classroom. Sarah, this sounds to me a lot like what you’re talking about. While students demonstrably learn more from working things through for themselves and taking responsibility for their own learning, that doesn’t mean that students will take said responsibility or necessarily know how to do so. Throughout the year, I’ve found myself striving towards lesson plans that communicate the essential knowledge and skills without constricting all the magic from the classroom. In retrospect, I think I’ve too often let them slide with I-don’t-knows, or settled for students understanding the point while they were still missing THE POINT! This became especially clear to me during Unit 2 when many of the revised thesis statements I received contained fewer words but the same inherent flaws as the first batch of statements. This also led to my biggest realization—what now seems obvious to type—higher expectations garner better results. I found myself explicitly telling students that they were responsible for understanding X concept and that while me and the entire class was there to help, they were also responsible for asking questions about whatever part of X they didn’t understand. I found myself experimenting more and more as the year progressed, which is a trend I’d like to keep up.

Like Christine, I have also learned the importance of letting the students take more initiative in their own learning process, especially in the classroom. My first impulse is often to play the ringmaster and try to direct the flow of information until the students "get" what I'm trying to tell them. When I have allowed the students to generate more of the discussion themselves, they often get to the point on their own. This has been especially true for Unit 3, where I have often found the students making all the necessary connections without even being immediately aware of it. I haven't seen the final presentations yet, but my class has demonstrated higher levels of understanding for their topics than they have all semester, so I am very optimistic about the results.

I did not teach this semester either, so my comments are based on teaching WRT 105 and working with students at the Writing Center. Like Christine, one of the things I learned from this experience is to allow students room to learn by placing the responsibility of doing their own work on them. I had the tendency to do most of the work for students but I learned that students develop a better relationship with their work if they have to work hard on it.

I think the biggest concern for me over the year was time management, both in and out of the classroom. There are so many great responses talking about the balance between guiding and "coddling" students (thanks, Christine!), lesson preparation and flexibility, all of which I definitely agree with. To that end, to try and add something "new" to my reflection, I'm taking a more selfish tack and thinking about how teaching meshed with my own graduate work. The first semester especially, I found it hard to constantly shift my mental energies from the needs of my students (whether planning marathon lessons that we didn't end up having time for or reading multiple drafts from overly anxious students) to my own studies. Part of this was probably because of my lack of teaching experience coming in and familiarity with the composition field (I was bred entirely on the 5-paragraph form!). But this seems to be an on-going tension inherent in teaching, when so many obligations are present "behind the scenes" beyond classroom time. While I think being in the classroom is amazing, and I really enjoyed getting to know my students on an academic level, I have to admit there were times when I was like, "What're you doing for me?" And to approach it like that (instead of my usual other way around), sort of helped me to see how these skills I was developing could be used in my work as well (instead of a dead split between teaching and writing)--this is a kind of silly example, but after reading so many terrible essays and thesis statements, I really do feel I compiled this lengthy list of what to avoid in my required second-year essay.

Some of my most productive and electric classes over the past year have been classes where I would "let" group discussion find its own form, seek its own trajectory, instead of "managing" it towards some conceptual pay-off. It's not that I would disappear from the discussion, but instead drop back and become more like part of a wave than a wavemaker. It seemed like whatever ideas we were trying to unpack, the more associational, improvisational and sometimes even counterintuitive discussions were the ones that more regularly produced genuine, organic, "aha" moments -- i.e., they didn't feel canned -- not only for the students, but also for me. By breaking away from the script, or at least a blueprint for a script, and by working with content in a spontaneous and sometimes vulnerable way in these particular discussions, I was more working with my students than "guiding" them, and whatever ideas we wound up with at the end of class were new for all of us, and fought for by all of us.

Like Candace, I too have a tendency to cram calendars with a number of activities and exercises. Looking back on my first year of teaching, I realize that I was really inflexible in 105. I developed a class trajectory every day and if we moved too far away from it, I would quickly try to "set us back on track." I realize now that it's the quality, not the quantity of assignments/in-class exercises/discussions that counts. I think Kayla is right to suggest calendars "that allow a certain amount of breathing room."

In 205, I stopped thinking of my students as "students" and treated them more like colleagues. I found that my 205 students really appreciated that our discussions (and their writing) were being taken seriously. I learned so much about writing (and about storytelling) from listening to my 205 students.

For the second time this semester, I am taken aback by all the interesting and relevant information being shared on this discussion board. This is definitely a tool I am going to utilize in the future for my students. TJ's third point, that he learned how readings could be used not with the focus trained on content, but on setting up "an exigency and rhetorical purpose for student writing", is difficult for me and always has been, because I tend to pick texts that I feel are "important" for students to be exposed to. Pulling out the list of goals for 205 (in all the Units) really helped bring a reality check into my calendar planning. I think my students got some very practical benefits because of the course trajectory and goals statements - in order to do the goals justice, I had to build more studio time into my calendar. The realization of the importance of these goals made me calm down a bit on the number of texts we "had" to read and made me focus a bit more on the exigency and the rhetorical situation of Writing 205.

I also think that TJ's last point, that having students begin their research from a place of uncertainty rather than from already-rooted convictions is extremely useful for producing interesting arguments where you can tell the students actually learned something. I can't say that I was wholly successful here, because my course inquiry this semester focused on tradition, specifically consumer-created or enhanced tradition, and most people have long-standing beliefs surrounding these issues. In the future, I like the idea of changing it up and going with more of the quick-and-dirty research heuristics so students can start from places of true unknowingness.

Finally, I am going to start instituting the Anne's note-at-the-end-of-class in the next class I teach. At the end of every class, she asks them to write her a note, letting her know how they received the class that day. Notes can include opinions, questions, and constructive critiques; she tells the class that they're a pedagogical tool which she uses to prepare for the next class. She writes a response to every note and hands them back at the beginning of the next class. This seems like a great way to both get to know and stay in touch with students. It also occurs to me, as I visualize handing them back, that students who are frequently absent will not receive their notes at the beginning of the next class. This could become potentially awkward (in a constructive way) for them and a beacon highlighting their absences for me. So yeah, definitely going to do that, and to remember to pull out those course goals when I make my unit calendars!

Such smart and amazing responses here! I think the most interesting moment I experienced this semester was connected to technology. I have always been somewhat ambivalent about technology in the classroom. Of course I can see the benefits in terms of organization, taking advantage of the world our students have grown up in, and changing things up a bit from the normal. But I have not been convinced that computer technology fundamentally changes the ways that students develop their sense of writing as a rhetorical practice in the writing studio.

Whoa, so when I visited Rachel’s class a couple weeks ago, she had students get into groups and conduct technology literacy interviews using imovie. I basically observed the technology seduce the class into engagement with the task. One young man (ESPN guy) sitting near me began by saying something like this to his peers: “yeah, so I watch ESPN on the TV, I follow ESPN on the computer, and I play [I think this was it] fantasy football. So that’s my narrative.” Then his partners conducted their interviews with obvious relish (these people have some serious relationships to technology—a computer at 13!). He was stricken and said “Hey! I want to do mine again!” The interviews I listened in on were amazing—and during the process of editing, students were clearly intent on issues of timing and arrangement. What came out were rich, student-generated texts ripe for critical analysis of issues connected to privilege and access. I’m not quite ready to leap into a Technicolor raincoat, but I do think I need to tip my ambivalence a bit and explore ways to take up technology to a greater extent in my own classes.

Nice going, Rachel!

So, once again I have demonstrated my apparent allergy to deadlines, but nevertheless, here are some thoughts about my year in teaching...
I'd like to sort of echo many of the comments made by TA's whose first experience with teaching has happened this year. I am not a first-time teacher, but I am new to this curriculum. Teaching a course over whose content I felt little ownership has been way difficult for me, as I think any new teaching experience is. There are so many things I feel I'd like to tighten up for next year. First and foremost is my treatment of readings. Though I feel confident in working slowly through texts, identifying claims, comparing them to other texts, and using them heuristically to help students draw out their own claims, I have a hard time doing all of this in conjunction. Therefore, students frequently feel like the readings were unimportant, especially those coming out of rhetorics where I often simply ask them to take out the meaningful advice and apply them to their writing. I feel I performed that last task well in 105, but not in 205. I also have trouble teaching argument-formation. I can do thesis statements and feel I have a keen eye for unearthing arguments buried in students' work, but teaching argument as a whole, separate from individual's papers is something I've done vaguely at best.

I do think the wiki site I use has been an amazing tool, and allows for the kind of just-in-time teaching advocated by Gee, but I think I need to be far more on top of responding to students' homework assignments. I think only taking two courses each semester next year will help me accomplish this. I am also proud of having run a nearly paperless classroom. All-in-all, though there are many more things I could point out as shortcomings in my teaching this year, I think they are things I will reflect on more fully over the summer as I use them as ways to improve my teaching next year. Thanks for a great year in 670 where my peers' and coordinators' advice and inspiration have been invaluable! (Also, I'm glad to Hear Gale, that my students have demonstrated the holy light that is technology! ;)

First of all, sorry for the late response!

I've taken two major things from my experience teaching this year. First, I've learned to let my students help me to be a better instructor. This was extremely difficult at first in 105, being new to teaching and also being pretty anxious about not looking a whole lot older than my students (ha). After the first unit, I left class every day not really having any idea what--if anything--students had taken away from class, and that made planning kind of difficult for me. So, for the second unit, I added a bunch of questions to their reflection responses designed to help me to see how the unit went--I asked specific questions about heuristics, discussion, readings, etc. I learned, for example, that students most appreciated days where I linked the shared readings to music videos, or news, or blogs, etc., so I was able to plan my entire third unit around these suggestions (and it was extremely successful as a result). For 205 this semester, I've been really open as far as asking students what they think of the full-length text I selected, the presentation format that I developed for our second unit, etc. so that I will be able to use that feedback going forward. It took a lot for me to relinquish some of the "authority" of the classroom and let students see that I don't necessarily have the perfect plan all mapped out, but in the end I think that students appreciate the flexibility that we develop together, and it also creates (in most cases!) a productive dynamic between me and my students.

The second thing that I've taken away is a realization that students turn out much better work when they are in the driver's seat. This sounds quite obvious, but I find that students turn out much better work when I do less to "police" their topics. For my students' unit 2 essays this semester, I read some incredible papers on topics that I initially wouldn't have thought would even fit into our course inquiry, but because students were incredibly interested in them and had links and ideas mapped out in their minds that I couldn't anticipate, they turned out amazingly! Similarly, I think that students also do better work when they see that work as relevant and interesting. I am really thankful for Betsey's advice (when we first started discussing potential topics for unit 3 this semester) that students really like primary research that they can conduct locally. I designed my third unit around this concept and my students are totally into it. They find it really cool that things like surveys, observations, and interviews count as "research" and as a result, they're really invested in their projects and have gone way above and beyond what I initially expected. I'm hoping to incorporate more of these research techniques in both 105 and 205 next year.

I want to second Gale in saying what a delight it is to read these thoughtful reflections, and even more to have had the opportunity to witness and learn from so much of your collective good work this semester. I continue to think about (and often struggle with) so much of what has been mentioned here, particularly in regards to that tension between over-planning and making more room for students to direct the lesson. I think what Sarah L just added about letting her students help her to be a better teacher—as well as Anne’s practice of asking students to reflect class by class—are part of the antidote to this. . . I’ve noticed that I have more of a tendency to get tied to the lesson plan when I don’t have a good sense of where my students are/what they know/etc. Another thing I’ve found helpful in trying to negotiate this is identifying one or two objectives for the class (one of which might be very concrete and skill-based), so that I think of the class as having a focus rather than a script. On his unit 3 calendar Aaron (I think it was you, Aaron!) gave each day a kind of title that identified the goal of the class in a pithy, playful way, and I really liked that practice.

One other thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how I can encourage students more—outside of my written feedback. We all had a good laugh over Mike Rose recounting how he’s called students at home to discuss their essays (on the “Take 20” video), but I do think that there’s great power in what Anne would call “the shout out.” I caught one of my students in the library two weeks ago, and told him how impressed I’d been with a particular aspect of his research paper, and he absolutely lit up and told me how much he’d enjoyed writing the essay and how proud he was of his grade (FYI—it wasn’t an “A”!) and I could see a difference in the level of confidence and engagement he brought to class the following week. Very cool. . . Whether it’s asking students to share their work in class, citing them in an essay prompt (as Gale did on the “Entering” assignment) or pulling them aside to offer some praise, students really appreciate when we value what they do enough to return to it or recognize it in personal and unorthodox ways.