A Reflection on my WRA 110 Experience
During the last academic year (13-14) I have taught two sections of a hybrid class: WRA110 Writing: Science and Technology at Michigan State University. This is a 4 credit class, with two hours/week of face to face meetings and a heavy online component. In both classes I have had about 26 students complete the course and we have met in a computer cluster for our weekly meetings. In each section I have tried to create an innovative learning space for my students through the use of digital technology, open, safe spaces for inquiry and reflection, and opportunities to get to know each of them personally through conferences. I believe that I have successfully employed computers and writing pedagogies in my classroom-based practice to promote student learning. In order to create a positive learning experience for my students, I make sure to keep my class student centered, interactive, and process based.
Organization
The class lives in two digital places: Desire 2 Learn (D2L) and a Wordpress.com site.
Course Content
Because the course theme is “Writing: Science and Technology”, I try to focus the content of the course around these ideas. The students have multiple opportunities to engage with all three ideas over 16 weeks. We start the semester with a series of blog entries where they write about what these terms mean to them. I have them return to this at midterm to see how their definitions have changed, and again at the end of the semester as one of the prompts for Project IV. Beyond personal definitions, we watch, listen, and read multiple sources about all three topics. I assign the book Culture and Technology: A Primer as well as a writing handbook. The students also listen to Radiolab podcasts and watch videos. In the first few weeks of the semester I give them a lot of (different) sources to read (and summarize and analyze). I then ask them to find sources to share with the class for a Class Annotated Bibliography project that feeds into the largest project, Project III.
I start the semester with some basic information that we will use throughout the 16 weeks (I joke that there are eight things I am going to really teach them this semester). I teach them John Trimbur’s “The Five Factors Writers Consider” and the rhetorical appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos. I teach these two large concepts through play: for the Five Factors, I have the students work with a “Goldilocks” radical revision exercise where we read four different versions of the story, written with different audiences, purposes, styles, genres, and social contexts. We fill out a chart together to see the different ways that one story can be told. Then, the students break in to groups and create their own versions of the story—one group writes a letter to the president of the united states informing of a blonde alien intruder, another writes to a professor as goldilocks explaining why they missed class, etc. After sharing with the class, I introduce the rhetorical appeals, and we look at the email to the professor to see how they are used (usually a humorous misuse of pathos and logos).
We also talk explicitly about the writing process. In the first week of class, I teach a mini-lecture where I reference Donald Murray’s ideas about prewriting, writing, and revising and emphasize the fact that the most time is usually spent prewriting. We then discuss the notion of drafting—making a continuum of “one drafters” and “multi drafters” and having students put themselves on the line. I then explain that in this course we will be working from a multi draft model—but that a person who is more inclined to draft only once can treat each “draft deadline” as a single event.
Scaffolding
There are two sets of sequences I would like to describe that take place in my class: the overarching sequence of the course projects, and a sequence of events/rhetorical moves that happens in every project.
Assignment Sequence
There are four major projects in my course, totaling 60% of the final course grade. I weight them this way because my class is process based and rewards points based on participation in the parts of the writing process that happen before the “final” product is created. For example, first drafts (which are graded only on page length, to encourage students to free write something before the final due date without the pressure of it having to be “perfect”) and peer review (which is conducted in a variety of formats to help students find a way that might continue to work for them beyond the class) are worth 15% of the final grade. Other work including in class daily work and blog entries that scaffold to the final project make up the rest of the points for the class.
The project sequence is scaffolded in a way where students build upon the knowledge they have previously worked with. For example, Project I is a “Literacy Autobiography” where students are invited to reflect on how they learned to do/use/understand something. This project helps student develop introspective skills and expand their definition of literacy (a theme in the writing program).
Project II is a "Cultural Artifact Analysis" which asks students to examine the multiple meanings of an everyday object in a Students are able to take the thing they discussed in Project I and look at it in a different way—from multiple perspectives, including the history of the object, what it means in contemporary society (however they define that) and what it means to them personally. Students are required to find outside sources for this paper.
For Project III, the “Sci/Tech Literacies Assignment”, students pick a topic related to the course themes (science, technology, and writing) and find 20 sources about it in order to discuss what it means/requires to be literate in the conversation around the topic. Out of the 20 sources that they find, they write a "Partially Annotated Bibliography" where they annotate five of them, and list the others. While this might seem like a large task, the scaffolding for Project III actually starts during the third week of class, when students are asked to start looking for sources about anything related to the course themes for a "Class Annotated Bibliography Assignment”. Students have until midterm to get two sources for each theme approved by me, written about with both summary and analysis, and posted to the class blog. After midterm, I introduce Project III and students are encouraged to use the Class Annotated Bibliography as a place to get ideas about a topic they might want to write about. The added benefit of using this bibliography is that if students choose from the list they already have a head start on some sources they could use for their 20 (many choose to stick with something they posted as an annotation). Another benefit is that students have already been practicing analyzing sources and writing about them before this point.
Project IV is a Remix Portfolio, where students are asked to write a 3-4 page reflection letter focused around a set of prompts and share their best work in an online portfolio on their individual blogs. They are encouraged to cite their own work as evidence of meeting the prompts, and include copies of their best work in their portfolio. Students work with ideas of remix by watching a video series about the topic, writing a blog entry about it and then apply this knowledge to remixing their previous work from the class to meet the goals of Project IV. Students also get experience making pages on their blogs, creating a professional portfolio, and uploading documents to the internet. Some fantastic examples of student portfolios can be found here, here, and here. My hope is that they will use this knowledge later in their careers (both academic and otherwise) to showcase their work for others.
Drafting Sequence
Each major project follows the same sequence: brainstorm, “accidentally” write, first draft, peer review, grading conference, final draft. There is usually one week’s worth of time devoted to each stage of this process, with grading conferences happening the same week that the next major project is introduced.
Reflection
There is a lot of built in reflection that is tied to assessment—assessment doesn’t just happen through traditional grades. I invite the students to critique each unit when it is over, asking them to reflect on what went well for them, what didn’t go well, and what they would do differently if they were to teach the class in the future. These project reflections have a double purpose: they act as a list of activities that students engaged in for each project that they can return to for Project IV, and I use them to see what worked and how to adjust my teaching next semester. I also make sure to do anonymous check ins during each project, where students are given a piece of paper and told not to put their name on it. I ask them to tell me what is going well, what they are concerned about, and what they would like to know more about. I use these as a way to get a feel for how well the class is understanding the information about each project, and adjust my lessons accordingly.
I have learned that if I set the bar high, students will surprise me. Initially, assigning 30 blogs, two annotated bibliographies, and a paper with 20 sources seemed like it would be too much. It turns out that most students not only engaged with the materials, but thrived. For example, for the final blog of the semester I asked them to write to future students advising them about what to expect in the class. You can see them talk about their experiences here, here, here, and here.
Organization
The class lives in two digital places: Desire 2 Learn (D2L) and a Wordpress.com site.
- D2L is where the course documents are kept, and where the majority of the instruction is recorded. I divide the course by projects and have a separate tab for the syllabus, which is available before the first class meeting. Since we only meet face to face once each week, it is critical that the information for the class is organized in a way that is consistent, easy to find, and very clear. I post weekly agendas for each class meeting: they start with the date and class name, then a list of things we will do. The document is then broken up into sections for each part of class, and always ends with a “Next Time” bulleted list of assignments and reminders [link]. This document is available before class starts for the students to download and follow along during class. I also download the document and we work from it (with it on a projector screen) for the entire class period. I take notes in the document and reupload it to D2L for people who may have missed class that day or did not take notes. I also keep a course calendar in D2L with due dates for assignments that the students can access. Finally, my grade book is available on D2L, and I update assignment regularly so students can know where they stand at any point in the semester.
- I use wordpress.com for a course blog. The class blog is usually more of a splash page for the students to find each others’ blogs (always posted as “Student Blogs” on the sidebar). I will occasionally post something to the class blog page and ask students to comment on it for discussion points. This is also where the Class Annotated Bibliography lives.
Course Content
Because the course theme is “Writing: Science and Technology”, I try to focus the content of the course around these ideas. The students have multiple opportunities to engage with all three ideas over 16 weeks. We start the semester with a series of blog entries where they write about what these terms mean to them. I have them return to this at midterm to see how their definitions have changed, and again at the end of the semester as one of the prompts for Project IV. Beyond personal definitions, we watch, listen, and read multiple sources about all three topics. I assign the book Culture and Technology: A Primer as well as a writing handbook. The students also listen to Radiolab podcasts and watch videos. In the first few weeks of the semester I give them a lot of (different) sources to read (and summarize and analyze). I then ask them to find sources to share with the class for a Class Annotated Bibliography project that feeds into the largest project, Project III.
I start the semester with some basic information that we will use throughout the 16 weeks (I joke that there are eight things I am going to really teach them this semester). I teach them John Trimbur’s “The Five Factors Writers Consider” and the rhetorical appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos. I teach these two large concepts through play: for the Five Factors, I have the students work with a “Goldilocks” radical revision exercise where we read four different versions of the story, written with different audiences, purposes, styles, genres, and social contexts. We fill out a chart together to see the different ways that one story can be told. Then, the students break in to groups and create their own versions of the story—one group writes a letter to the president of the united states informing of a blonde alien intruder, another writes to a professor as goldilocks explaining why they missed class, etc. After sharing with the class, I introduce the rhetorical appeals, and we look at the email to the professor to see how they are used (usually a humorous misuse of pathos and logos).
We also talk explicitly about the writing process. In the first week of class, I teach a mini-lecture where I reference Donald Murray’s ideas about prewriting, writing, and revising and emphasize the fact that the most time is usually spent prewriting. We then discuss the notion of drafting—making a continuum of “one drafters” and “multi drafters” and having students put themselves on the line. I then explain that in this course we will be working from a multi draft model—but that a person who is more inclined to draft only once can treat each “draft deadline” as a single event.
Scaffolding
There are two sets of sequences I would like to describe that take place in my class: the overarching sequence of the course projects, and a sequence of events/rhetorical moves that happens in every project.
Assignment Sequence
There are four major projects in my course, totaling 60% of the final course grade. I weight them this way because my class is process based and rewards points based on participation in the parts of the writing process that happen before the “final” product is created. For example, first drafts (which are graded only on page length, to encourage students to free write something before the final due date without the pressure of it having to be “perfect”) and peer review (which is conducted in a variety of formats to help students find a way that might continue to work for them beyond the class) are worth 15% of the final grade. Other work including in class daily work and blog entries that scaffold to the final project make up the rest of the points for the class.
The project sequence is scaffolded in a way where students build upon the knowledge they have previously worked with. For example, Project I is a “Literacy Autobiography” where students are invited to reflect on how they learned to do/use/understand something. This project helps student develop introspective skills and expand their definition of literacy (a theme in the writing program).
Project II is a "Cultural Artifact Analysis" which asks students to examine the multiple meanings of an everyday object in a Students are able to take the thing they discussed in Project I and look at it in a different way—from multiple perspectives, including the history of the object, what it means in contemporary society (however they define that) and what it means to them personally. Students are required to find outside sources for this paper.
For Project III, the “Sci/Tech Literacies Assignment”, students pick a topic related to the course themes (science, technology, and writing) and find 20 sources about it in order to discuss what it means/requires to be literate in the conversation around the topic. Out of the 20 sources that they find, they write a "Partially Annotated Bibliography" where they annotate five of them, and list the others. While this might seem like a large task, the scaffolding for Project III actually starts during the third week of class, when students are asked to start looking for sources about anything related to the course themes for a "Class Annotated Bibliography Assignment”. Students have until midterm to get two sources for each theme approved by me, written about with both summary and analysis, and posted to the class blog. After midterm, I introduce Project III and students are encouraged to use the Class Annotated Bibliography as a place to get ideas about a topic they might want to write about. The added benefit of using this bibliography is that if students choose from the list they already have a head start on some sources they could use for their 20 (many choose to stick with something they posted as an annotation). Another benefit is that students have already been practicing analyzing sources and writing about them before this point.
Project IV is a Remix Portfolio, where students are asked to write a 3-4 page reflection letter focused around a set of prompts and share their best work in an online portfolio on their individual blogs. They are encouraged to cite their own work as evidence of meeting the prompts, and include copies of their best work in their portfolio. Students work with ideas of remix by watching a video series about the topic, writing a blog entry about it and then apply this knowledge to remixing their previous work from the class to meet the goals of Project IV. Students also get experience making pages on their blogs, creating a professional portfolio, and uploading documents to the internet. Some fantastic examples of student portfolios can be found here, here, and here. My hope is that they will use this knowledge later in their careers (both academic and otherwise) to showcase their work for others.
Drafting Sequence
Each major project follows the same sequence: brainstorm, “accidentally” write, first draft, peer review, grading conference, final draft. There is usually one week’s worth of time devoted to each stage of this process, with grading conferences happening the same week that the next major project is introduced.
- Brainstorm: This usually happens as a set of activities in class when the project is first introduced and are continued with a blog entries that start the students writing the paper (even though they usually don’t realize it at the time). For example, for Project II I began the unit with an exercise: I take an everyday object (usually a computer keyboard plastic cover) and pass it around the room and have each student ask one question about it. We go around the room as many times as we can (usually twice, although I threaten 30). I then introduce the assignment and we watch the documentary Objectified. Class ends with students being assigned two blog entries to continue the brainstorming: one where they are asked to keep a “Technology Consumption Journal” where they log every technology they come into contact with over the course of a weekend. They post the list to their blogs and reflect on what they realized/noticed from doing this. You can see two examples here and here. I also ask students to read a part of a chapter out of a book I assigned, Culture and Technology: A Primer, about space, place, and technology and connect it to the movie from class and their experiences with their consumption journals.
- “Accidentally” Write: Students write a good portion of their projects through blog entries. For example, for Project II I ask students to write a series of three blog entries about one object they picked from their consumption journal. In the first, they need to use at least one source about the object’s history and tell me what it used to mean. In the second, they need to use one source to tell me what the object means today. In the third, they tell me what the object means to them. These are the three main perspectives of Project II, and many students found it easy to move from blog entries to first draft.
- First Draft: As mentioned previously, in my class first drafts are given full credit if they simply meet the length requirement outlined in the assignment sheet. This way there is no pressure for students to have “perfect” writing. This is the draft that they use for peer review.
- Peer Review: Peer review happens with each major assignment. I believe that there is a lot of benefit to having students develop review skills, both for their own writing and for other people’s writing. We practice peer review in a different way for each project. For Project I we use Eli Review and students gave and received feedback anonymously, completely online. For Project II we used Eli to give and receive feedback not anonymously, and the students wrote “Peer Review Letters” to each group member summarizing their feedback and making specific suggestions. The students then met with their peer review groups the next week to discuss the feedback and share the letters. Peer Review for Project III was entirely face to face, and students brought printed copies of their papers to class and side-shadowed them. They then read them aloud to their group members and talked about the papers. This took the majority of the class period, and students had to write a reflective blog entry about the experience. Project IV brought us full circle by being entirely online, but students side-shadowed their portfolio letters and then posted them to a peer review page on their blog.
- Grading Conference: Grading conferences are the most important part of my pedagogy. I was trained as a Writing Center consultant before becoming a teacher, and I have kept the pedagogy of “more talk, better writers” close to heart. Grading conferences are run similar to a writing center consultation, with the awareness that it is never a completely flattened hierarchy since I am the instructor (whereas a consultant may have an easier time engaging with a student as a knowledgeable peer instead of an authority figure). Grading conferences are 30 minutes per student per project and happen after peer review. The students upload the most current version of their project and when we meet one on one, I down load the paper and insert the rubric. We start by talking about the rubric, then we read through the paper together and discuss things as they come up. I insert comments into the document based on our conversations. I am able to ask the students things like, “show me your thesis statement” and “what did you mean here?” instead of trying to figure it out without them. We are able to talk through what the paper is doing together, and compare it to the assignment description. When we reach the rubric at the end, we are generally at a consensus about where the current draft would fall in each category. This becomes the student’s “grading conference grade” and they have the option to revise further if they so choose. Most do. I re-upload the document with the feedback to D2L so that the student and I both have access.
- Final Draft: If students choose to revise after the grading conference they must make their changes using Track Changes, in order to highlight what has changed. They must also reflect on each major change using the Comment feature and summarize these comments in a short paragraph at the end of the paper, after they have re-graded the draft (with the understanding that that is not necessarily the grade they will get). Students upload these final drafts to D2L and I regrade them. Most students go up 5-10% and comment that this is a useful way of revising in their final reflections.
Reflection
There is a lot of built in reflection that is tied to assessment—assessment doesn’t just happen through traditional grades. I invite the students to critique each unit when it is over, asking them to reflect on what went well for them, what didn’t go well, and what they would do differently if they were to teach the class in the future. These project reflections have a double purpose: they act as a list of activities that students engaged in for each project that they can return to for Project IV, and I use them to see what worked and how to adjust my teaching next semester. I also make sure to do anonymous check ins during each project, where students are given a piece of paper and told not to put their name on it. I ask them to tell me what is going well, what they are concerned about, and what they would like to know more about. I use these as a way to get a feel for how well the class is understanding the information about each project, and adjust my lessons accordingly.
I have learned that if I set the bar high, students will surprise me. Initially, assigning 30 blogs, two annotated bibliographies, and a paper with 20 sources seemed like it would be too much. It turns out that most students not only engaged with the materials, but thrived. For example, for the final blog of the semester I asked them to write to future students advising them about what to expect in the class. You can see them talk about their experiences here, here, here, and here.
