Writing Across the Curriculum and Teaching with Technology: Making Learning Hard Fun

A session for the

2014 Northern California Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) ConferenceFriday, January 24, 2014 from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM (PST)
San Francisco State University

This session will focus on using technology to teach writing across the curriculum by looking at how instructors can use simple tools – discussion boards, online books – in easy to start ways to promote both writing to learn and writing in the disciplines.  Our students come to us already using digital technologies to write a lot in online social networks and other settings. We’ll look at how we can begin with literacies and practices students know, and then use those to move them into the kinds of academic habits of mind we teach in our courses.

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As Andrea A. Lunsford said in an article by Clive Thompson on new literacies, "we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization."  Because of networked computers, social networks, internet connected phones and tablets, people, including our students, write now more than ever before. And that writing, contrary to many of our personal impressions and anecdotal evidence, while often informal, isn't a cause of weaker academic writing. Lunsford's research -- The Stanford Study of Writing -- has been bolstered by other studies of students use of social networks and texting and the effects those writing practices have on learning and writing in college.

All of which is to say, that as always, our students come to use ready to learn, able to write with coaching and guidance, and wanting to do well. The trick, as always, is to help them develop academic habits of mind. My favorite articulation of those habits of mind comes from a joint report published by the National Council of Teachers of English and the National Writing Project. In summary, and quoting directly, here's what the NCTE/NWP describes:

Habits of mind refers to ways of approaching learning that are both intellectual and practical and that will support students’ success in a variety of fields and disciplines. The Framework identifies eight habits of mind essential for success in college writing:

• Curiosity – the desire to know more about the world.

• Openness – the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world.

• Engagement – a sense of investment and involvement in learning.

• Creativity – the ability to use novel approaches for generating, investigating, and representing ideas.

• Persistence – the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects.

• Responsibility – the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others.

• Flexibility – the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands.

• Metacognition – the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge.

The Framework then explains how teachers can foster these habits of mind through writing, reading, and critical analysis experiences.  These experiences aim to develop students’

• Rhetorical knowledge – the ability to analyze and act on understandings of audiences, purposes, and contexts in creating and comprehending texts;

• Critical thinking – the ability to analyze a situation or text and make thoughtful decisions based on that analysis, through writing, reading, and research;

• Writing processes – multiple strategies to approach and undertake writing and research;

• Knowledge of conventions – the formal and informal guidelines that define what is considered to be correct and appropriate, or incorrect and inappropriate, in a piece of writing; and

• Abilities to compose in multiple environments – from using traditional pen and paper to electronic technologies.

So. Students come to us as digital natives, but not as academic natives. They know how to Google something, but not necessarily how to research. They can text with fluency, but can come up mute in a class discussion. They post to Tumblr, YouTube, WordPress, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest and more, but launching an online discussion in our courses can be challenge. They read a lot, but quickly, and so getting them to slow down, to read more critically and closely, still must be taught. Let's look at some ways e-book technologies are changing to support this quest: meeting students where they are and then bringing them to academic habits of mind, the ways of thinking and writing that mark our disciplines.

Bringing the Social Into the Academic

Click the image to enlarge. What you'll see is an ebook page. However, unlike a print book or a PDF ebook that keeps print-book page fidelity, this book -- The Everyday Writer 5e Xbook by Andrea Lunsford -- uses course management and social networking tools to change how the book is referenced, read, written in, written with, and written about.

You can see that there are tools for assigning readings, that the content, if you dive in, is more than text -- it includes self-scoring exercises, manually scored writing prompts, images, video, and audio. But what it also does is bring writing into the book. For example, in the Table of Contents, added to a chapter on understanding rhetorical situations is a link to a discussion board a teacher created called "Discuss Your Rhetorical Situation."

It was created by the course instructor using this tool that lets an instructor add activities and content to the book, making those part of the book itself. Here's the Add tools menu from a variation of the XBook called LaunchPad:

You'll notice that in addition to a discussion board, an instructor can add a writing assignment, create an html page -- with full html features, including the ability to upload images, embed video, and so on -- the ability to upload a collection of documents, and a dropbox for students to turn in work.

So with an XBook or Launchpad, the book becomes a place for the class to meet, a space to work in. For writing to learn, the discussion of the text is embedded in the text being studied. Students can be prompted to copy and paste from the text into their discussion responses, drawing on the text for evidence, as writing to be analyzed, writing to summarized or synthesized with materials added by the instructor or discussion posts written by classmates. 

But there is another tool key to these kinds of books -- annotations that can be shared among students, giving them the power of social reading. Here's an example of note from a history LaunchPad title, positioned at the top of a page from the book -- in the page. 

The ability for instructors to have students write and share in text annotations, so see those annotations, opens up new ways to use writing to learn and writing to read. It builds on the kind of social networking technologies students know -- the short post (because annotations are shorter than discussion comments usually) -- in a way students know: socially shared.

What this allows us as instructors is ways to see students use writing to develop the kinds of habits of mind we want to encourage. We can then, if we choose, direct them on the kinds of annotations to write, the kinds or reading heuristics to use. We can shape reading, slow reading down, foster close reading with these kinds of writing tools. 

That's cool. It's fun. And the work we ask students to do when we do this kind of assigning is hard, but it's purposeful and in the context of seeing other students notes, of other students thoughts in discussions, each student will have models of good thinking, new ideas, different interpretations to consider, all of which will help that student become a better reader and writer.

As students annotate and discuss, they begin to do the hard work, the necessary work, of moving into the conversations of our fields, of learning to think like a historian, or psychologist, or chemist, or rhetorician, or in other ways our courses seek to have students apply to their reading and writing. 

That's the power, really, of books like these -- the way they can not only capture learning via writing, but provide insights into that learning teachers can use to help meet students where they are and get them to where we'd like them to be.

10 Tips for Grading Writing w/ Less Stress and Frustration

I belong to the Professional and Organizational Development Discussion List (http://podnetwork.org/pod-listserv/), a smart group that cares about college level teaching and  professional development. On Monday, December 2, a member of the list posted a request for ideas to help faculty get past their frustrations when grading student writing at the end of the year. I wrote a reply that turned into a list of ten. After posting the list here, I made some edits from the original one-draft email for clarity and typos. I expanded item 6 a bit to say more about drafting.

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It is hard to know what tips will help best the professor you write about without knowing the context more -- how the writing was assigned, whether the professor saw drafts, whether there's a writing center students could have been recommended to visit, and so on.

But with those caveats in mind, here's what helps me with grading stress and frustration:

1. Before I start, I remember that they're students and may not write standard edited English often, perhaps one or two papers a semester once they leave their first year writing course. That's not nearly enough to get to the point where they will write fluently on all aspects of writing. So I expect that I will see a variety of surface level errors -- typos, awkward sentences, homonym errors, maybe a little subject-verb agreement error and so on. Accepting that I'll see it, while it doesn't mean I won't call attention to it nor want account for it if I'm using a grading system that includes a consideration final draft editing and proofing, I won't let it bother me.

2. It's too easy to see what's wrong with student essays. Things start leaping out. So I try to read once through the essay with no pen in hand, no fingers on the key board. I read as if I'm in a dentist office, skimming even, but just trying to get a good first sense of things. It doesn't take long, and it makes me more efficient later. I read differently without a marking or responding technology at hand. I listen more and suspend judgment a bit. Sometimes I am surprised by what I hear and seen when I'm not reading aggressively, with an eye looking out for student error. What I'm really trying to do here is to suspend reading the writers as students and instead to listen to them as authors, the same way I would with an article I might pick up to read at the doctor's as I wait for an appointment. And as I say, it helps to get a lay of the land.

3. 1 and 2 combine to help me ask this question as I read more closely, ready to respond and grade: what's working in the piece? what do I like? where has the writer pushed him or herself, maybe even failing to reach where they wanted to go, but where they're pushing? I look for good stuff because I know I'll find the stuff I don't like very easily.

4. If it's a really rough batch, I take breaks, mix in other work for the course or another course. In part to not let my reading get less or more critical as I proceed. I need to see each piece freshly, and that can be impossible without some kind of break. The quick read in 2. helps me to sense how much I might want to break things up. I also can use the quick read to sort papers, saving ones that look especially promising as ones to read after a few that look average or below average.

5. I move. If I get frustrated or tired, I stop, stand, pace. And often my mind is racing because I wonder too what the assignment might do better. That is, surface errors are one thing, I can see past those pretty well (though I still note them in final drafts), but if the content or thinking I wanted the writing to evidence isn't coming through, if the central reason for the assignment isn't proving out, then I start to -- when I stand and pace and stretch* -- think over the assignment.  And sometimes I do find that I wasn't clear, or I can see where students might have gotten a wrong impression, and I begin to understand why I'm seeing some of what I'm seeing. And when that happens, I adjust my response.

6.  If I have seen earlier writing assignments, or prior drafts of the assignment, I look to see if there's overall progress, and often there is. Not that all things are better, but very often a student will have worked on one or two things in their writing over the series of papers/drafts and there's some improvement. I take joy in that. Note**: the longer the writing assignment and/or the more high stakes (percentage of grade in the course), the more drafting I'll ask to see. Seeing and giving feedback on drafts does three things: one, helps writers stay on task for longer papers so they aren't done last minute or, worse, intentionally stolen or plagiarized; two, helps writers revise and work through some of the hard learning issues touched on below; and three, for me, lets the final read for a grade happen more efficiently and quickly.

7. Some miscues fascinate me. Especially in papers where students are working with new ideas, new ways of thinking, new vocabularies and terms. So cognitively when they write, if their working memory is carrying all that new information and if they haven't written enough in their lives to have fluidity with standard edited English, they'll make surface errors mistake they don't normally make. And that fascinates me because the errors on the surface link often to a struggle with getting their thinking organized. So sometimes I see errors and then see that the real issue isn't a subject-verb agreement matter or that a sentence runs on or goes awry. It's that the writer is losing control because they are struggling to think and express that thought, and so it's a real snap shot into learning. That tells me a lot and it's really interesting stuff.

8. Cheer failure. Celebrate it with the student. Paula Krebs has a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education called "Next Time, Fail Better" (http://chronicle.com/article/Next-Time-Fail-Better/131790/). I have students read that and we make it a kind of motto, especially around something like writing, which is hard for most of them. So with 7. I do actually find ways to call out things that don't work in ways that are cheerful, not disdainful, hopeful and forward pointing, formative even if the grading act is summative and the assignment will have no more drafts. There will be more writing in their life, maybe my course, and so being of good cheer helps them to pick themselves up.

9. I don't take bad writing personally. My students haven't failed _me_ if they're not writing well. I may conclude (see 5.) that I've failed them.  And clearly, some students don't do the work they should and out and out fail themselves. But if they're not doing well and I've done everything as well as I could, then I don't blame them nor me. This stuff can be hard. And while it's sometimes disappointing to get work that isn't where I'd like it to be, it's also the case that work I see simply shows me where students are. My wife is fourth grade teacher. On her wall her are posters about grammar. For example, one about sentence structure explains and illustrates simple sentences, compound sentences, and complex sentences. I remember seeing my children go through their K-12 experience getting coverage of this stuff every year in way or another. My kids did o.k. on their college papers, As and Bs mostly; we live in a house where both parents write a lot every day, we read a lot, and the girls grew up writing and reading. But I know that a lot of kids they went to school with don't write as well. No surprise here but worth remembering:  the same schools, same teachers, same assignments, graduate students with different abilities. We do the same in our courses, pass students with different abilities. And those kids my children grew up with -- I've talked to their parents and seen some of their papers -- had writing of the kind that as a teacher could be frustrating (as did my own daughters on occasion). There are too many variables in all this. And so I've learned not to take it personally when bad writing happens and to not lay blame on prior teachers, schools, society, culture, the Internet and so on. It is what it is. Students will only get better at writing by writing a lot and reading a lot and being conscious -- through good teacher feedback, good peer and friend feedback, and learning to see their own writing and habits as writers in a way that allows for good self-feedback -- over time. We cannot fix it one course.

10. As you can see, I've learned to like bad writing. Not to accept it as always satisfactory or done, but to like it because it is often necessary and  reveals useful stuff. Bad writing is students (and myself because I produce my share of it) at least getting things down and starting to work with ideas in words. The writing can get better and there's often something in the bad that's worth making better. A pony in all the manure, or rose ready to bloom.  And I seize on that, gather my rosebuds where I may, and make the most of those darling buds.


* I do enjoy splitting infinitives.
**  This note and the items in italics were not part of the original post to POD-L.