Laying an Egg: How Scaffolded Units Can Keep the Yoke Off Your Face

Last week, in class, I laid an egg.

I was off. I wasn’t as organized as I usually am. My lesson plan had holes into it. And when I deviated from my lesson plan, I rambled around–a lot.

Ironically, it was a CIQ day, so I got student CIQ responses like:

“I believe we moved a little too fast on the website, which kind of frustrated me in class. “

And, “There was a little distance when you [began] to go over the website assignment. [T]here was confusion about what exactly you wanted us to do and how to do it.”

I’m not going to use my daughter’s birth as an excuse.

In teaching, as in life, sometimes, you’re just not yourself. Sometimes you skip a beat. And that’s okay.

You can’t maintain 100% student engagement, 100% of the time. It’s a great goal. But it’s an impossible standard. And you need to allow yourself a strike here or there, even a strike out. (Remember, getting one hit out of every three at-bats (.333) is actually considered very solid hitting in baseball.)

So how do you give yourself three at-bats instead of just one shot at the back fence? My answer is through the use of scaffolded lessons that break a major unit up into digestible parts for my students.

The biggest benefit is, obviously, for the student, who gets a number of repetitions and performs a number of credit/no-credit exercises before he or she has to put all the prewriting pieces together for a more weighty major assessment grade.

However, there is definately an advantage for the instructor as well. If you forget to mention something, if you fail to include something in your lesson, if you just suffer from low energy-level and don’t quite reach your students the way you need to in order for them to really get what you want them to learn, you still have another at-bat in a later inning. You can go back. You can review. You can layer your next lesson so that it includes both review and new material (reteach the i before you go on to the i+1), all of which is building to culminate in the major assignment, so there’s is still a sense of foward momentum and progress.

Typically, I upload my lesson plans and my PowerPoint lesson presentations to Blackboard and make them accessible to my students (for those who missed class, don’t take good notes, etc.).

But, last week, it wouldn’t have even mattered, because I got off the lesson plan and ended my PowerPoint less than half way through class (about an hour into a 3+ hour class).

Had I simply assigned working on the major assessment as their homework assignment, I would have had A LOT of VERY upset students to deal with all week via e-mail. However, the one thing I felt I did right last week was create a small, digestible homework assignment which would teach the skills they’d need to eventually accomplish the major assignment, without forcing them to take on that assignment before they were ready.

After a frustrating day in class, full of student anxiety, nervousness and questions, they went home with a relatively simple task: “Take your previous research paper and, using Notepad to code in HTML, mark it up so it appears on a browser screen as it would on a piece of paper.”

For those who could follow my rambling lecture, this would be a piece of cake, so I challanged them to play around with other HTML tags in order to change the background color and font size and color. And for those who really found this all to be extremely easy, I told them to go the extra step to hyperlinks and images. But these skills were not required to receive credit–allowing those struggling to write an HTML declaration for the first time to get full credit for an honest attempt.

My plan was to teach hyperlinks, images, etc. as the next stair-step on the scaffold a week later (today) in class.

I’m including a few examples of what my students came up with at home over the past week:

(Well, WordPress won’t let me upload the student HTML files, citing “security guidelines”.)

Anyway, the point is that even though I blew it as an instructor that day, my students still learned enough to complete the assignment.  So, instead of feeling frustrated all week, the small, digestible, scaffolded homework assignment left my students feeling generally empowered by the success they experienced (no credit to myself); and, now knowing they could code a basic HTML page, they came to class looking forward to learning more.

To Group or Not to Group…

Peer review or workshop activities have often been a key feature of composition classrooms that seek to incorporate collaborative learning stategies as a significant facet of the writing process.

For my purposes, it’s actually one of the primary components to assess the construction of a democratic classroom: “Students work in a variety of group configurations. Flexible grouping is evident” (Blake).

The problem is: regardless of how the grouping is done, by randomly counting students off, by allowing them to select their own group members, or by simply cordoning off sections of the classroom and designating students sitting in a given area of the class as a group, this is often the aspect of classroom management that students complain about the most.

Inevitably a student will complain, rightly or wrongly, that he or she is “doing all of the work;” or one group member will monopolize the group and prevent other groups members from participating fully; or, because all group members are peers (often struggling with many of the same issues), work grinds to a halt as no one seems to understand what to do or how to progress.

Even when allowed to select their own group members, students will still complain; and, even if they don’t want to complain about their own group of friends, instructors are often the ones left complaining: “Will someone please allow X to join their group (because he doesn’t have any friends in this class)?” Or, “I’m sure your drunken fiesta in Windsor last night was a blast, but do you think you could get back to the assignment, please?”

I’ve struggled with “flexible groups” and “a variety of group configurations” for a long time, and I continue to do so because I still have faith that something can be gained from peer review and collaborative learning.

For my first major assessment, I simply grouped in a way that guaranteed diversity: gender, ethnicity, age, English language proficiency and (since I assessed writing right away) writing ability. I ended up with groups of four to five members, mixing up my African-, Anglo- and Arabic-American men and women, and creating groups with at least one or two clear leaders who had already demonstrated promise as writers.

But I still got bombarded with complaints.

“I am concerned that I haven’t received e-mails from any of my group members w/ their papers.”

“I just have a concern about my group…I hope my participation grade wont [sic] be effected.” [Emphasis mine.]

“Good [m]orning, Mr. Brammer, [o]ut of curiosity, is there a possibility for me to change groups? The reason for my request is because my group participation is low. Even though I know we must strive together to win as a team, in return there has to be some team effort.”

I thought it was interesting that the last student infused his request with a spirit of competition that group work is supposed to be working against–it’s supposed to be collaborative, not competitive, learning, right?

Nevertheless, what was even more interesting for me was the fact that in each of the three cases cited above, the group that each student was complaining about had the HIGHEST level of collaboration and the GREATEST number of posts to the discussion board the week I received their complaint or request to change group.

Three complaints (usually from the person I thought would emerge as the group leader) in three weeks (despite being the most active group for that week) forced me to go back and rethink the way I went about assigning groups.

Would I be better off just allowing them to select their own groups for the next assessment? Even though I’m already aware of the possible pitfalls, it would be “democratic,” wouldn’t it?
In the end, I came to a point where I had to ask myself: “To what end?” Why was I assigning groups? What was the purpose? What outcome did I hope to achieve?

Since my next major assessment was a research paper exploring the intersection between technology and each student’s chosen field, what I decided to do was group them according to “fields of discourse.” They would be required to do a couple of weeks of “key words” assignments, posting words and definitions of terms used in their own fields in a way which is different from the common lexicon (something incorporated from 6010); they would have to do journal research, posting articles from the leading journals in their fields to be read and discussed by group members; then they would have to post clips of new media (digital video, sound files, etc.) and analyze and discuss those materials as well. Finally, all of this pre-research and pre-writing would culminate in a research paper written individually by each student. (I guess I could have made it a collaborative writing assignment, but I didn’t).

The result–as far as group designation is concerned–is that I haven’t had ANY complaints about groups so far, and this is after four weeks with this configuration. Remember, with the previous configuration, I got at least one complaint a week.

Although I don’t yet have student comments to cite or to confirm my hypothesis, I think students are really enjoying working in a “mini-field of discourse” comprised of their peers. These are people who are interested in the same things they are interested in. They all have an investment in the topics being discussed and it takes very little coaxing to get them to post and read articles, write and read comments, and view and write about the video clips they’ve seen. The discussions have been lively and I have heard from them in conversation that they appreciate the opportunity to learn from each other.

So, my next challenge: What do I do with the next major assessment? Do I change groups just for the sake of using “a variety of group configurations?” Or, do I leave it alone? (If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!)

I’m not sure.

But, in the true democratic classroom tradition, I think I’ll ask them.

We’ll see what they have to say…

Performing the “Good Student” or Is the “Experiment” Really Working: The Results of the CIQ

Honestly, I’m almost embarrassed to post the results of the discussion of the CIQs that my class had over Blackboard last week. But since I already set it up with a previous entry, I feel like I need to follow through by reporting on the conclusion of the exercise.

Now, if you recall (assuming someone is actually reading this so that they can, in fact, recall), after collecting the first batch of formal essays from my students, I asked them to complete a CIQ (Critical Incident Questionnaire) in order for me to assess how the first four weeks had been progressing, through my students eyes.

After collecting the CIQs, I created a thread on the class Discussion Board and allowed my students to make anonymous posts so that they could be as honest as possible without fearing any reprisal.

Well, because a couple of students actually chose not to exercise the anonymous option and posted with their names attached to their entries, I’m a little confused about exactly how to read the data: Are my students simply performing the role of the “good student” and giving back to me the “currency” they believe I, as the “banker”, am requesting? Or, are these genuine and honest responses from students who are not trying to win “brownie points” from the classroom “dictator” but simply failed to or did know how to post anonymously?

Anyway, here is a representative sampling of student responses posted to the Discussion Board (none of which offered any criticism of my instruction–and, thus, my suspicion, since I know that this comes from college students, who are usually apt to complain about almost everything, almost all of the time, myself included).

“I think that you are inspiring the students to take a leadership role [through] the classroom discussions, group projects, discussion board, creating the rubric, etc. There [has] to be laws in a democratic society so I feel that the syllabus is a guideline to go by without you being taken advantage of. I really don’t have any specific ideas, but wanted to respond that if the students want to have more say, they should speak up in class and participate more. You can’t inspire someone to take a leadership role if they don’t want to go above what is expected of them.”

“I believe that you are giving the students a challenge as well as introducing new things to the class and really making us think about the decision[s] that are being made. Which I enjoy because in most class[es] you don’t learn anything, just the little information that they teach you but then you soon forget. The information that I able learning [sic] in your classroom is very beneficial and will stick with me for a life time.”

“To tell you the truth this is by far the most interesting class I had. Because this class does engage the students in participating in some kind of a democratic field. I think that the class is not fully democratic, I think [it's] 50/50. Why? [W]ell if we say that this is a democratic class then we have to have the students decide on everything even the amount of work that is done, the the [sic] way that work should be done. However we see that we are alomst 50% directed to do certain things in a certain way or we [will] be penalized, so here the question [arises] whether or not this is [truly] a democratic class or not.”

“I believe that this expirement [sic] seems to be working. Although it is not truly democratic because there are some guidelines set up b the University that must be followed. But, it does seem that we as a group are able to vote and voice our opinions on other matters. As far as being inspired, I think since this is a university class, students should be able to inspire themselves to reach higher and expand [their] own horizons.”

“The democractic classroom has given me a great deal of balance and it has provided me with a collaborative environment where everything I say isn’t for competition. It’s more so geared towards us as students learning from each other. The knowledge that I’ve gained from this Enlish 3010 will forever inspire me throughout my life long career. What an excellent class to be engaged in!”

“In class, Mr. Brammer makes 3+ hours on a Saturday morning actually enjoyable.  I signed up for this class because it was the only 3010 section left open, and for weeks I was thinking I was totally insane for voluntarily sacrificing my precious Saturday mornings.  Now I don’t think it’s such a big deal because I am genuinely enjoying myself.”

Book Review: Contested Policy

CONTESTED POLICY: THE RISE AND FALL OF FEDERAL BILINGUAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES 1960-2001, Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., (University of North Texas Press, 2004, 176 pp., $21.95).

University of Houston history professor Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr. plunges both hands into the dirt and muck of another checkered chapter of the history of race relations in the United States of America in his book, Contested Policy: The Rise and Fall of Federal Bilingual Education in the United States 1960-2001:

“Bilingual education is one of the most contentious and misunderstood educational programs in the United States because it raises significant questions about national identity, federalism, power, ethnicity, and pedagogy. It raises questions about how one defines an American in general and the role of ethnicity in American life in particular. It also raises questions about relations between federal, state, and local governments and between majority and minority groups. Finally, it raises questions about instructional methodologies and their relationship to immigrant and native children. How do you teach immigrant children in general and how do you teach English to them in particular? Also, how do you teach foreign languages to American children in the elementary and secondary grades?” (1).

Like Werner Sollors in Multilingual America, San Miguel demonstrates very clearly in the first chapter, entitled “Origins of Federal Bilingual Education Policy,” that English has never been the only language spoken in the United States. “Bilingual education,” says San Miguel, “is not a new phenomenon. It has existed in various forms since the nation’s founding. The use of non-English languages as well as the use of two or more languages to teach academic subjects to individuals in the elementary, secondary, or post-secondary grades has been supported, tolerated, or sanctioned by public and parochial school officials since the 1600s” (5).

As long as the languages in question were European languages, such as Greek, Latin, German, French, etc., being able to speak more than one language has always been considered a mark of high culture and advanced education. However, the languages of Eastern cultures, such as Chinese and Japanese, as well as the languages of the indigenous people of the Americas, have historically been suppressed in the United States, until the 1960s, when the country experiences a great cultural and social upheaval.

It was in the 1960s that linguistic specialists, researchers and activist educators joined forces with civil rights groups and newly empowered Chicano/a activists and began pushing for federal funding for more bilingual education research and federal bilingual education legislation as a key facet of the emerging Chicano/a Movement. The combined effort culminated in the first federal bilingual education policy, the 1968 Bilingual Education Act, which, though not providing any funding for bilingual education programs, at least utilized the scientific evidence available at the time to endorse and support bilingual education programs and the benefits that they could provide for all students in the United States, native and immigrant alike.

The celebrations were short lived, however, as social conservatives and racial hate groups immediately came together in order to resist any federal policy that would embrace linguistic pluralism in the schools. Though cases like Lau vs. Nichols in 1974 established that it was, in fact, unconstitutional for the public school systems to deny non-English speaking students instructional services in a language that they could understand, the election of Republican President Ronald Regan in 1980 signaled the beginning of the end for bilingual education in the United States, with the second Bush Administration delivering the final death blow soon after taking office in 2000.

Though it because very clear who are the protagonists and antagonists in this historical struggle for individual linguistic and educational rights, San Miguel never loses his tone of objective, academic reportage while simply tracing the chronological series of historical events.

The aim of Contested Policy is less to convince anybody of any argument about bilingual education policy as much as to provide readers and researchers with the tools necessary, like extensive bibliographies after each chapter, in order to establish their own lines of inquiry. And, with this role in mind, San Miguel has created an invaluable resource for anyone, proponent or opponent alike, who wishes to engage in a knowledgeable discussion of the evolution of bilingual education policy in the United States.

A Book Review: The Language of Argument

THE LANGUAGE OF ARGUMENT, ed. Larry Burton & Daniel McDonald, 11th ed., (Pearson Longman, 2005, 412 pp., $59.35).

Now in its eleventh edition, The Language of Argument, edited by Larry Burton and Daniel McDonald, has firmly established itself as one of the staple textbooks for college composition courses throughout the nation.

In terms of the over-all quality of the text, little has changed since being first reviewed in College Composition and Communication in 1976.

The stated purpose of the text remains: “to teach students to read argument and provide material around which they can write their own argumentative essays” (xxvii). However, the text has evolved and grown from the original three part structure, including the previous sections entitled “Forms of Argument,” “Argument for Analysis,” and “Literary Argument,” to now include a fourth part which provides students with “Eight Rules for Good Writing.”

Of course, the text has increased in size as a result of the addition of new materials, growing from 274 pages to a much meatier 412 pages, and, as one might expect, the price has jumped substantially as well, going from a mere $4.75 in 1976 to a whooping $59.35 now, though I’m sure that has much more to do with issues of inflation (and publisher profit margins) than the addition of Burton and McDonald’s eight rules.

Despite changes in the size and cost in the text, what hasn’t changed is the fact that The Language of Argument continues to be a well-organized, extremely accessible and thought-provoking college composition reader which includes short response exercises which reinforce the main concepts being illustrated in each section and that can be easily turned into prewriting activities which could eventually culminate in larger, essay-length assessments.

The first part, “Forms of Argument,” does an excellent job of talking about the tradition of rhetoric and argumentation, beginning first with a discussion of audience awareness then moving on to other facets of argumentation, such as “Argument by Authority,” the “Semantic Argument,” and the use of statistical evidence.

However, for me, the most important discussion in this first part is the section which covers “Fallacies.” With so much attention being placed now on standardized testing, the first and most obvious victim in this educational paradigm shift has been the teaching of critical thinking skills which can’t be tested very well on a Scantron.

I find that many of my students don’t even have the most basic language or framework to speak about the flaws or traps inherent in the persuasive texts (ads, popular film and television, web logs, etc.) that they come across each day. Many of them are not even aware that these texts are, in fact, trying to persuade them of anything and tend to be oblivious to the fact that these texts help construct their own lived realities and the ways in which they see and interpret the world around them.

But, this section on argumentative fallacies provides students with the key words they need in order to identify and discuss errors in logic and reasoning, issues like false analogies, non sequiturs and post hoc arguments, so that students can begin to analyze and discuss rhetorical strategies in writing in a more informed and rational fashion, rather than by merely responding emotionally to a given text.

Part Two: “Argument for Analysis” is simply an anthology of current political and social commentary as well as pop culture items like cartoons, bumper stickers and billboards, all kept up to date by revising the edition about once ever two to three years. These readings are offered as sacrificial lambs for students to practice their newly acquired language of argumentation and rhetorical frameworks. And the editors do a good job of “bundling” these various readings for instructors to use for lesson planning purposes in an appendix to the table of contents, exploring such themes as: “alcohol and drugs,” “crime and punishment,” “sex” and “diversity.”

If you’re a lit. junkie, like me, and you need to find a way to incorporate literature into your composition course–or you might just die, the third section is for you: it’s nothing but Milton, Austen and Shakespeare (more critique than compliment), capped by a piece of literary criticism by Irene McDonald, entitled “Do We Really Need Another Biography of Jane Austen?”

Finally, though “Eight Rules to Good Writing” may seem a little bit reductive at first (I mean, c’mon, at least there were TEN commandments.), the advice offered by Burton and McDonald is not all that bad: “Get your facts [straight],” “Limit your topic,” “Organize,” “Make your writing interesting,” “Avoid mechanical errors,” etc. And you could definitely use it as a solid point of departure for you to come up with (at least two) more qualities of good writing in your composition classroom.

CIQs: How “Demo” Can You Go?

Ever since first learning, in one of Ruth Ray’s graduate seminars, about Stephen Brookfield’s use of the “Critical Incident Questionnaire,” I’ve been itching to try to implement its use in my own classroom.

In his book Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, Brookfield explains how this technique is tied to his own understanding of democratic pedagogy:

“What we do as teachers makes a difference in the world. In our classrooms, students learn democratic or manipulative behavior. They learn whether independence of thought is really valued or whether everything depends on pleasing the teacher. They learn that success depends either on beating someone to the prize using every available advantage or on working collectively. Standing above the fray and saying that our practice is apolitical is not an option for a teacher. Even if we profess to have no political stance, and to be concerned purely with furthering inquiry into the discrete body of objective ideas or practices, what we do counts. The ways we encourage or inhibit students’ questions, the kinds of reward systems we create, and the degree of attention we pay to students’ concerns all create a moral tone and a political culture.

“Teachers who have learned the reflective habit know something about the effects they are having on students. They are alert to the presence of power in their classrooms and to its potential for misuse. Knowing that their actions can silence or activate students’ voices, they listen seriously and attentively to what students say. They deliberately create public reflective moments when students’ concerns–not the teachers’ agenda–are the focus of classroom activity…They make constant attempts to find out how students are experiencing their classes…All their actions are explicitly grounded in relation to students’ experiences, and students know and appreciate this.

“Trust is the thread that ties these practices together. Through their actions, teachers build or diminish the amount of trust in the world…College classrooms provide the conditions in which people can learn to trust or mistrust each other. A teacher who takes students seriously and treats them as adults shows that she can be trusted. A teacher who emphasizes peer learning shows that it’s important to trust other students. A teacher who encourages students to point out to her anything about her actions that is oppressive and who seeks to change what she does in response to their concerns is a model of critical reflection. Such a teacher is one who truly is trustworthy” (25-26).

What Brookfield suggests is that instructors solicit student critique regarding their own teaching performance, not at the end of a semester when it will no longer have any impact on the class that is being taught, but repeatedly over the course of the class in question. This way, students’ comments, questions and suggestions can be discussed, digested and integrated into the class that the student is taking and not after the course is over, if at all; for, as we all know, in a research institution like Wayne State, if you’re tenured, or if you’ve published enough books, or if you bring enough grant money into the university, student evaluations are worth about as much as (used) toilet paper to the university when it comes to hiring and promotion.

And it’s with this fascist/corporate-model university in mind that Brookfield call us to be different. Do we want our students to choose majors simply because of the money they can potentially make in a given field? Do we want to encourage students to run over the voiceless and disenfranchised and ignore all opposing views, as long as they can cash in and reach the brass ring for themselves? Or, do we want to instill in our students (and model for them) that we truly believe in the democratic exchange of ideas in a pluralistic society, where all voices deserve to be heard and all voices should carry the same amount of weight, regardless of race, class, gender, education, age, ability, language, etc.?

Brookfield’s method for soliciting student critique of his teaching is known as the “Critical Incident Questionnaire” (CIQ) and he describes it in this way:

“Critical incidents are vivid happenings that for some reason people remember as being significant (Tripp, 1993; Woods, 1993). For students, every class contains such moments, and teachers need to know what these are. The CIQ helps us embed our teaching in accurate information about students’ learning that is regularly solicited and anonymously given. It is a quick and revealing way to ascertain the effects your actions are having on students and to discover the emotional highs and lows of their learning. The CIQ provides you with a running commentary on the emotional tenor of each class you deal with” (114).

Brookfield’s CIQ is comprised of five simple questions:

• At what moment in the class this week did you feel most engaged with what was happening?
• At what moment in the class this week did you feel most distanced from what was happening?
• What action that anyone (teacher or student) took in class this week did you find most affirming and helpful?
• What action that anyone (teacher or student) took in class this week did you find most puzzling or confusing?
• What about this week surprised you the most? (This could be something about your own reactions to what went on, or something that someone did, or anything else that occurs to you.)

Needless to say, there’s something about this model that really resonates with me and my teaching. Perhaps it is the balance of hearing what is working with what is not; perhaps it’s the non-threatening language modeled: What was “puzzling or confusing” versus what did you hate, what pissed you off, or what did you think was stupid, dumb, or just plain sucked; or, maybe it just seems to naturally fit in a composition classroom, because this is a narrative response rather than a rubric with a point scale (And, yes, I’m acutely aware of the contradiction with my own use of rubrics for essay grading; but, to my defense, I do also make extensive, narrative comments on student papers; I don’t just stop at circling numbers on the rubric).

My biggest critique of Brookfield has always been the emphasis on doing a CIQ at the end of each week of class. This might work for a 1010 that meets three days a week, or a chem. class with a lab that meets 4 or 5 days a week; but, with my 3010 that meets once a week on Saturday, that would mean doing a CIQ after each class session. I just don’t think it’s practical. I’m not even sure enough happens each week for there to be very many legitimate critical incidents for my students to discuss. And, finally, requesting a CIQ every class session, I think, would overwhelm the rest of the content being covered during class.

I also had a problem with the issue of anonymity: not because I didn’t want my students to feel safe to be truthful, but because I really wanted them to participate; and, regardless of how much I would like to develop an altruistic investment in their own learning, I know that not all of them are quite there yet, so many of them still need some kind of carrot (a grade) to motivate them to really develop their ideas fully.

My plan, originally, was to do the CIQ digitally over Blackboard, an environment that would have reinforced the digital literacy component of the class as well as provide the opportunity for anonymous feedback (a built-in Discussion Board option). However, facing the potential for low student investment and/or participation, I decided to do it as an in-class writing assignment instead; and, not every week, I was just going to assign them after the completion of each major unit (approximately once every four weeks).

I would assess a grade and maintain anonymity by telling my students not to put their names on their CIQs, reminding them that I don’t know their hand-writing because everything they turn into me–other than the CIQs–is done digitally, and just giving everyone present in class that session full credit for completion of the assignment, with the one caveat that if I didn’t see an adequate level of participation, I would have to find another method to collect the CIQs, which could mean requiring students to put their names on their papers in the future in order to fairly assess their participation.

This seems to have worked for now. Students wrote at length about their feelings regarding the class thus far. And I was hoping to share some of their perspectives with you here:

“I felt the most engaged last week once I got started on the paper–a good hour into it. It took me a while to get started–felt so lost, but I gathered all my thoughts and brainstormed my ideas and actually felt somewhat excited. (It’s very unusual for me to feel that way!)”

“I am surprised I enjoyed the discussion board. At first, to be honest, I thought it was pointless and a waste of time. However, I have to admit, I was wrong. It turned out to be one of the best ways to interact with your classmates all week about the assignments, things you missed or didn’t understand, etc.”

“Technology issues. The Powerpoint presentation. I felt lost and the class sometimes feels very fast paced.”

“That I stayed after the first class. The Powerpoint presentation frustrated me and I almost dropped but I enjoyed you as a professor, so I stayed and am enjoying the class atmosphere.”

“That we use the computer so much. I hate it! I guess I really don’t hate it. But my computer is broke so I’m having a really hard time right now.”

“It was the first week of class. I was told by my teacher that our classroom was going to be a democratic classroom. This allowed me to be myself, to take a leadership role in class.”

“I’m surprised that with this experiment in a democratic classroom more people haven’t tried to take advantage of the professor. I found that most people will try to get away with as much as possible.”

“When we started class, I got the idea that it’s a democratic class, so we students can make up [illegible] or what assignments to write. However, the syllabus had mandatory requirements, so it does not feel like a democratic class.”

It’s the last three comments that I just cited that I think I would like to address with the whole class in the form of some kind of anonymous dialogue over our Discussion Board. I’m going to make participation optional since I would like students to feel free to say whatever they feel needs to be said.

But the question is a compelling one for me: What are the limits, the boundaries, of a democratic classroom? How can you inspire students to feel free to be themselves and take leadership roles, without being taken advantage of and without losing all sense of academic rigor?

I’m excited to hear what my students have to say…

Grading: The Democratic Classroom’s Final Frontier

Democratic grading may well be the final frontier for a college composition classroom which hopes to deconstruct traditional hierarchical student-instructor relationships.

And when I’m talking about democratic grading, I don’t mean the ol’ have students grade each other’s quizzes to save you time technique (which is now illegal, by the way); nor am I talking about polling students about what grade they think some anonymous piece of writing should receive, which can sometimes be a helpful exercise for students to understand your own biases as an instructor when grading, especially if you don’t use rubrics that spell things out for them; nor am I even talking about allowing students to tell you what they think they should get and considering that self-assessed grade along side your other grading criteria.

When I’m talking about democratic grading, I’m talking about really allowing students to participate and help determine, in a democratic fashion, the method by which they will be evaluated during the course, or, at least, in my specific case, how they will be graded on each of their major writing assessments.

I’m in the habit of constructing rubrics for my students for each major writing assessment. And rather than waiting until after they have turned in their essays, I provide my students with a rubric at the beginning of any unit which will result in a major writing assessment. My feeling is that, if I like seeing the criteria for teaching evaluations before I have someone come into my classroom to evaluate my teaching, I’m sure my students would appreciate the same courtesy. Besides, students will often use the rubric as a guide for composing their essays, and I encourage them to use the rubrics during writing workshops as a way to facilitate the evaluation of their colleagues’ papers.

The obvious dangers of teaching and learning to the test aside for one moment, the benefits are fewer complaints about grades, fewer complaints about assignments not being clear, and fewer papers that are written the night before the due date, because I usually require on my rubrics that all prewriting and revision materials be submitted along with the final draft.

So how is this democratic?

Well, it’s not. Not yet, at least.

It was while pondering my experiment in democratic classroom pedagogy that I asked myself this question: What would happen if I asked my students to construct their own rubrics for their writing assessments?

In this case, the teaching and learning to the test would be teaching and learning to a test of my students’ own design, meaning that I would be potentially teaching directly to the stated needs of my students, the needs that they themselves would most like to address, and their grades would be assigned based on how well they met their own collaboratively established learning objectives.

Far from the chaos and anarchy that I half expected, what I got was a very intelligent discussion (via the Blackboard Discussion Board) about what my students thought was important to learn, how they felt that learning could be most fairly assessed, and what was the most reasonable method to weigh the different elements of writing to create as fair and as balanced a rubric as possible.

For a whole week, I had my students discussing the very same sorts of issues that we spent the day talking about during GTA orientation before the semester began:

“We should have a page criteri[on] instead of a word criteri[on]. ..Sometime[s] word counts tend to stress students out.”

“Presentation/Format. I believe we are using different writing techniques: MLA, APA, Chicago Style, etc. Maybe the rubric should include if we accurately used the style assigned.”

“[O]kay, I think that the professor should focus a little on grammer [sic] but not to [sic] much to a point where it might hurt someones [sic] grade.”

Attached is the rubric that my students collaborative wrote for themselves for their first major writing assessment. Curiously, it looks a lot like something I would have constructed.

democracy_and_technology_assessment.doc

A “Common Place” rubric? Perhaps.

But the discussion really made my students think about their learning in relation to the grading process. And, they did manage to come up with at least two alternatives that I would have never thought of:

1) Using a 10-point scale instead of my traditional 0-5 scale. (The percentages work out better for them, because I never give half points, like a 3.5 score.)

2) Adding an extra-credit criterion: if a student wishes, for an additional 1-10 points, he or she may rewrite the paper according to my suggested revisions (and after a visit to the writing center).

For me, though not exactly allowing my students to entirely grade themselves, I do think that allowing them to have this level of imput and this amount of power over the grading process is in the spirit of democratic classroom methodology, while still allowing me to maintain the kind of academic rigor expected in a course like 3010.

And, for the students, if nothing else, they were able to engage in a lively discussion about issues of learning, teaching and grading for a whole week with a very high degree of investment, for, after all, their grades absolutely depended on it.

Plagiarism and Citation

One of my biggest pet-peeves when it comes to the teaching of citation is the connection often made with issues of plagiarism.

I can still recall the buzzing in my ears as my junior high school English teacher slapped the top of our desks with a yard stick and threatened us with life imprisonment for felony plagiarism if we failed to properly cite our references in our one-to-two page research papers (one page, of course, being the bibliography itself; and, yes, back then we still called it a “bibliography”).

It wasn’t until I started graduate studies that I realized that the first U.S. copyright laws written to protect the rights of individual authors from illict copying were written in 1790, but the protections only lasted for 14 years after original publication. Of course, the kinds of strict, punitive statues prohibiting plagiarism that we use to intimidate our composition students with today weren’t written until 1976.

Are you trying to tell me that no one cited before 1976?

What did English teachers use to intimidate their writing students to use proper citation before then?

The truth is: Citation has NOTHING to do with plagiarism.

No one is going to hang for failing to cite Foucault, no one is going to be water-boarded for operating Raymond Williams without a (publishing) license, no one is even going to go to jail for copying an essay off the internet. The “fair use” clause for educational purposes covers the first two, and the last isn’t so much about plagiarism (which requires an element of financial gain for the perpetrator) as it is about CHEATING.

Isn’t that the real point? It’s not that we don’t want our students to plagiarize (bootlegging copies of Marx’s “Capital” in the bathroom during potty-breaks), it’s that we don’t want them to cheat, copy, turn in a paper that they didn’t write, or commit fraudulent acts of academic dishonesty. (Can you say, “demystification”?)

However, the (over) emphasis on “plagiarism” actually gets in our way of teaching about the real reason we cite: many hundreds of years of quoting and citing culturally accepted “truths” and “expert” opinions as a rhetorical strategy.

Plato cited Socrates, Cicero quoted them both, and most of the Renaissance writers quoted liberally from all three. Rabbis quote from the Torah, priests from the Bible (BIBLI- ography) and imams from the Q’oran.

The ability to cite universally accepted truths in one’s own culture is a very persuaive tool, and potentially destructive as well. And, it has the added advantage that, if someone is unsure of your use of a certain text, or the next generation of scholars simply wants to go back and re-check your work/research, it provides a paper-trail for them to be able to look it up for themselves.

The reason I bring this up now is because, obviously, with papers due next week, we just got finished with a lesson on MLA citation. But, rather than just read threats and lies and misrepresentations about the penalties for plagiarism from the writer’s handbook, to open up the discussion, I simply took a posting from my class’s own discussion board, entitled “J., We Need Your Citation”, which stated simply:

J., we need you to post your link!

E

What the student had done was posted a very interesting summary and analysis of an article he had found on-line regarding the class topic, “Democracy and Technology”. After reading his posting, a number of students were very interested in reading the original article and perhaps incorporate it into their own research, the only problem was: the student failed to provide a link to the article and no one could find it (try sorting through all of the hits you get when you type “Democracy and Technology” into a search engine).

In the end, I still got to teach the nuts-and-bolts of MLA citation and the creation of the Works Cited page (without ever having to resort to threats and intimidation) and my students got to learn another valuable lesson: Citation has nothing to do with plagiarism, and EVERYTHING to do with hundreds of years of scholarship.

The Syllabus as Promissory Note

It was actually while first thumbing through all of the out of print suggested 3010 texts that I got reacquainted with Paolo Freire.

The “banking concept”, of course, is one of Freire’s most noted contributions to the field of education.  And, since I was struggling so much with actually piecing together a syllabus, it got me thinking: if, in the “dictatorial” classroom, the teacher is the “banker” and the students are simply asked to produce/regurgitate the No-Child-Left-Behind-style state approved and monitored standardized “correct” answer as intellectual currency in the classroom, then doesn’t the syllabus, often referred to as a “contract” between instructor and students, act as a kind of loan agreement or promissory note?

There you have it, on the first day of class, a list of all the official, pre-approved and institutionally certified “Knowledge” which you will be accountable for over the course of the semester.  Read the predetermined, preordained academically “correct” readings, complete the prescribed, proscriptive assignments and assessments in a way that will please the “Banker”, and you will be released from your loan obligation (academic indentured servitude) with a grade of C or better so that you can move on to a slightly bigger house in the curriculum with an even larger mortgage attached.

How does this age-old way of constructing a syllabus address the student’s need, except in the most vague, theoretical and hypothetical way?  According to this method, the instructor comes into a class with a predetermined agenda, “Knowing” what is best for his or her students, “Knowing” what they need, and making a diagnosis without having ever having seen the patient.

How can you know what your students really need without formally or even informally assessing their needs first?  Every class is unique.  As is each student in every classroom.  You can’t possibly be able to guess at the myriad of different skills, talents and/or deficiencies that each student will have until you do some kind of concrete assessment of the student’s actual needs.

This point seems to be particularly relevant for the composition classroom, because, unlike other disciplines, like math and the sciences, where there seems to be a more clearly articulated progression in the curriculum (you can’t do calculus until you’ve mastered algebra; you can’t do organic chemistry until you know some basics aboutboth biology and chemistry); but, in English, it is possible to deeply express one’s perspective on a particular social question or debate, but still have that expression littered with grammatical and syntactical errors, just as it is entirely possible to write an essay which is flawless in its mechanics, but says absolutely nothing profound or even slightly interesting.

Yes, the math student could have missed a lecture on a geometric concept, but it may never come to light in his or her class on non-linear mathematics.  However, in writing, whether writing a paper for an English, History or even Astrophysics course, the lessons missed or never mastered always resurface and become glaringly obvious in later essays.

So assess.  Right away.  So those obvious errors can resurface as soon as possible and you, as an instructor interested in addressing your real students’ real needs, can reteach those lessons missed or expose those students to certain concepts in composition for the very first time.

Seems reasonable, doesn’t it?  So why doesn’t it happen more?  Or, if it does happen, even if it happens often, why is this kind of assessment-based teaching rarely reflected in course syllabi?

My guess is that it really has less to do with students and their needs and much more to do with the beaurcratic needs of the department (who are the “bankers” in charge of assessing you).

In our department, your syllabus must be turned in the week before class.  And there is a very strong departmental and institutional “understanding” that syllabi will not only list things such as office hours and required texts, but that they will also include a detailed calendar of readings, assignments and assessments.

In this way one hierarchy of knowledge construction pressures another to conform to traditional methods and standards, or rather, following Freire, one bank president makes sure that the individual bank-tellers dole out wads of cash in the same prescribed, proscriptive fashion that they always have, since the days the university and the monastery were still one and the same.

This is an interestingly autocratic (“dictatorial”, according to Freire) method of instruction, especially for American universities which hope to produce democratically-minded students who will later become engaged citizens in a democratic society.

My solution?  I just assigned very broad and vague titles for each week on my syllabus, headings like “Week 2: Democracy and Technology”, in order to both appease the gods of academically certifiable knowledge construction AND leave plenty of space for me to pursue an agenda established not upon preconceived notions of what my students may be like and what I think they may need to learn, but based entirely on concrete assessment, to be conducted on the first day of class and to continue as an on-going, evolving process until the final paper is turned in to me in December.

We’ll see how it goes…   

Day 1

My first day was full of surprises, as first days typically tend to be.

I arrived at my classroom about 45 minutes before the scheduled start time in order to get set up in an unfamiliar classroom without having any students around to distract me.

But, once I got there, lo and behold, there were already about half-a-dozen students outside the classroom waiting for me to open the door.

There must be some kind of mistake, I thought to myself.

I checked the outside of the door to make sure there weren’t any classroom assignment changes that I failed to be notified about, I asked the students if they were waiting for some class other than 3010, and I even polled them to see how many were there just hoping to crash.

To my utter disbelief (and dismay), they were all waiting outside my classroom to take MY class–and all of them were already enrolled.

I couldn’t believe it.

The whole reason I had gone in so early was to be able to set up the classroom, the computers, the digital projector, etc., WITHOUT having students around to see what a bumbling idiot I can be.  (For, as Harry Wong demonstrates in The First Days of School, in teaching, first impressions are everything!)

So, while frantically trying to open the security door without setting off the alarm again, I had to split my attention between exchanging polite good mornings with my students (as to not create the impression that I’m arrogant or egotistical) and trying to remember my code. I messed up my security code at least twice in the process–no doubt, appearing to my students clumsy and unorganized, but I suppose that’s still better than arrogant or egotistical.

Once I finally got the door open, class, for all intents and purposes, had begun–more than 30 minutes before the official start time.

I spent that time fumbling with locked cabinets, checking suspicious connections, moving unnecessary dry-erase boards, and placing piles of xeroxed materials out on tables for later distribution, all while trying to entertain my early-bird students and make them feel welcome to their first day of class (and trying to hide the fact that I really didn’t want them there, at least not yet). It was quite a balancing act and it was exactly the kind of stress I was trying to avoid by arriving early to my first day of class.

However, once class had actually started (according to the official schedule now), things flowed rather nicely.

Roll.  Check.

Explain laptop check out procedures.  Check.

Check out laptops.  Check.

Everything went smoothly, that is, until we hit the heart of the lesson and my PowerPoint personal introductions.

In general, I find it helpful to assess my students’ writing abilities as soon as possible in a term.  (You can’t address student needs until you know what they are, and you can’t tell what they are until you’ve assessed some of their writing.)  But rather than just have them write a quick two or three paragraph diagnostic essay on some random, out-of-context topic, I usually like to couple the assessment with something that is actually relevant to the purpose of the first day of class.

In the past, one of my favorite assignments for the first day was to read “My Name” from Sandra Cisnero’s The House on Mango Street.  It’s a fictional piece in which the narrator, Esperanza, discusses the origin of her name in a way that reveals a great deal about her identity in terms of gender, ethnicity, language, family history, etc.  And I find it to be a good way to open up a discussion about the relationship between names, naming customs and identity formation.

I usually have students write a few paragraphs about the story of their names, how they acquired them, what their names mean to them, how their names define them, how their names relate to issues of gender, class, education, ethnicity, language, etc.  And then I have each student go around the room and introduce themselves to the class. 

So, in a lot of ways, it’s like the first day of class in most of their other courses, but the introductions tend to be a bit more thoughtful and revealing than simply saying something like: “Hi, my name’s Jake and I just graduated from Westlake.  That enough? Uhm, okay, yeah, cool.”

The exercise also creates the opportunity to not only talk about issues of identity formation, but also to talk about the benefits of writing and the five-step writing process.  After presenting, students generally agree that it is helpful to write down their personal introductions before speaking in front of the class, and we review the steps of prewriting and drafting, and then I tell them that we’ll continue with revision and editing in the subsequent classes, because they have just started their first major writing assessment: the personal narrative.

Like I said, it tends to be a fairly reliable first day lesson.  The students usually get more out of it than the typical introductions and I get to collect the essay drafts and see what specific kinds of grammatical and mechanical issues I will need to cover over the course of the semester for each batch of new students.

For my 3010, I wanted to do something similar; but, conducting class in a computerized classroom, I also needed to assess their computer literacy skills ASAP.  So, that’s how I came up with the PowerPoint personal introduction assignment for the first day of class.

In addition to being able to assess some basic writing and composition skills, I would be able to assess a certain degree of digital literacy: since I had sent all of my students an e-mail before the first day of class requesting that they bring pictures of themselves to class in a digital format, not only was I able to assess whether or not they knew how to use PowerPoint as a compositional tool, I could also see whether or not they knew how to use e-mail, upload and attach files and images, etc.

The only thing more surprising to me than the number of students that showed up almost an hour early to class that day was the number of students who still didn’t know how to use e-mail and attach files, much less compose using PowerPoint.  This was an extremely important revelation because my intent was, and still is, to make my course as paperless as possible through the use of digital file sharing technologies.

So, just so that I could be sure that my students could access their homework on-line, we shifted gears and spent a large chunk of time on familiarizing ourselves with Blackboard and the various buttons they could use to retrieve course documents as well as learning how to upload and attach files which they would be regularly assigned to do throughout the semester.

Technology adds a whole new layer to resistence theory in composition.

Once I was sure everyone could perform the basic computer skills they would need to successfully retrieve and submit homework assignments, etc., we continued on to the composition of the PowerPoint personal introductions.

As with most of my writing assessments, we started with a variety of scaffolded prewriting assignments:

1.  Brainstorm three images that best represent you.

2.  Cluster three key words that you identify with strongly.

3.  Freewrite three sentences that best describe you.

From there we went on to drafting, in paragraph form, before ever opening up the PowerPoint software:

4.  Using the three prewriting activities, write a personal introduction that could be used to introduce you to your new classmates.  Be sure to include important personal background information, like your name, where you live, your major, etc., as well as information regarding your personal interests, hobbies, and your hopes and expectations for this class.  (This last component was key for me to get a sense of where my students were coming from as they began this course, a kind of student psychological assessment, if you will.)

From there, students were asked to take all previous writing exercises and use them, along with the images sent via e-mail as homework, to compose a PowerPoint presentation of at least three slides in length to be used to introduce themselves to the rest of the class (and later open up a dialogue about new media and composing various texts in different rhetorical contexts).

Like any composition exercise, my students demonstrated a remarkably wide range of ability with the technology, from the Digital Animation major, who basically created a short film in about ten to twenty minutes, to the continuing education student, who, after more than an hour, still struggled with just writing her name and a few sentences about herself onto a blank slide.

Yes, over an hour.

The assignment that I had allotted twenty minutes for spilled over the break time and consumed the remainder of the three-hour class period, my Digital Animation major spending much of the time surfing the net, as my continuing ed. student not only worked through the break but was even forced to use the time that students were sharing their PowerPoint presentations with the rest of the class in order to finish her one, unadorned slide.

I had already learned a lot about my students over the course of that first three-hour session–about who they were, what digital literacy skills they possessed (and didn’t), what they hoped to learn this semester, etc.–and, believe it or not, I got the distinct feeling that, perhaps not all, but a number of my students were already beginning to learn quite a bit as well.

Not bad for a first day of class…