Thanks, Jim Vopat, for a wonderful idea--the writing circle. I selected the book Writing Circles (Heinemann, 2009) for my Teaching Writing class, on the basis of a quick review of the exam copy, and I've been delighted with it. The writing circles are modeled on literature circles, and they incorporate all the elements of writing workshop and process that I want students to be conversant with after taking the class, but they also give an extra dimension of structure to a couple of workshop features that can be challenging to manage: peer response and student choice of topics. The approach is suggested for all levels of writing instruction, and I look forward to incorporating it in my first-year and upper-level writing classes next year.
Personally, I've long been ambivalent about peer response, and I really distrust peer editing--something I've never implemented but that some of my students have participated in at some point in their writing careers prior to college. When peer response happens only a few days throughout the semester, it can be awkward and artificial. I usually give somewhat specific guidelines for peer response sessions, but I feel that students often go through the motions--knowing that what "counts" is the teacher's response because it's the teacher who gives the grade.
Moreover, I'm a great believer in more or less individual choice in writing topics, within certain parameters. It can be difficult for students to respond well to their peers' writing if their peers are writing about different topics. Yet I really like giving students some control over topics. In first-year writing, sometimes this takes the form of giving them a choice among readings from a limited list I've generated, and then writing essays in response to their readings that have specific parameters--such as a research base, or a requirement that their essay refer specifically to material in three different chapters of a book they've read, etc.
In the writing circles approach, the small group selects the topic all members will write on, but each student chooses the genre and style for the writing, the length of the text, and so on, individually. What this suggests, to me, is that students can explore a topic together, so that they share a knowledge base that will help them think critically about each other's writing. But the individual choices they make will mean that they aren't looking for cookie-cutter essays that follow teacher dictates.
The book has a lovely chart (on page 7) that shows how the small-group approach creates an important balance between student-directed and teacher-directed activities. Vopat also includes great suggestions for building rapport, generating ideas (with an impressive list of potential genres), incorporating the writing notebook, selecting topics for minilessons, giving response, and assessing writers' progress.
My Teaching Writing students, upper-level undergraduates who plan to teach at all levels from kindergarten through college (and some in Special Ed), have been practicing writing circles for several weeks. I've been impressed with their investment in their writing for their peers, and most days they sound like they're having fun reading aloud to one another and selecting the next topic. I'm really happy that I selected this book.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Why blog?
Why blog anyway? That's the question I ask myself after long lapses between my posts. Nearly every time I start writing again, my writing is prompted by an assignment that I've given my students, when I ask, "How can I ask them to do something that I have such a hard time keeping up with myself?" I see two questions emerging here: (1) Is a teacher obligated to complete the assignments she gives to her students? (2) What are the advantages of writing in a blog as compared with other venues or genres?
(1) I believe that a teacher should complete a fair proportion of the assignments she gives, to make sure that she understands the effort and time involved in the work. When I assign poems, for instance, I think I should write in the same genres because I don't often write poems, and I need to remind myself of the challenges they pose: succinctness, use of metaphor, rhythm, precision in word choice. When I assign memoirs, I need to remember how scary it is to be nakedly honest, as is necessary in good memoir writing (and to remember it's especially scary to share that honest writing). When I assign blog writing, I want students to write regularly and to choose a tone appropriate to the subject of the blog--and to maintain a reasonable succinctness (something I have a hard time doing myself). Practicing blog writing throughout the duration of the assignment helps me appreciate the time and thought that goes into this regular writing on the web.
(2) Which brings me to the second point: why the blog, particularly? I think the blog is the best current venue for timely professional exchanges of opinion and ideas about teaching. When we articulate our ideas for the potentially larger audience that reads blogs on the web, we need to think through those ideas more thoroughly than often happens when we're writing for the classroom audience in a (relatively) safe space. When students know that the English teacher will give them another chance with revising, they sometimes turn in really rough rough drafts. In another manifestation of their feeling of safety, many students will write just about anything for an English teacher's eyes, sometimes confessional writing that I'd really rather not read! In contrast, much of the writing we do in the "real world" is not one bit safe--as young adults have been learning in social networking sites, sometimes to their great harm. So it seems to me appropriate to ask students to think carefully about what they can say for a potentially wide audience of people they don't know personally.
Today I got an email from someone who'd happened on one of the webpages I've posted as a resource for students and colleagues. The sender informed me that one of the links no longer works and suggested an additional link, something I really appreciated. I haven't used the page and haven't updated it for several years, and I'd completely forgotten it was still on the server. This email was a timely reminder that the web documents created for a specific, timely purpose remain available to a wide audience, once they're on the web. It reminded me that writing for that large, unknown audience puts us on our best professional behavior--a lesson worth learning by prospective teachers.
(1) I believe that a teacher should complete a fair proportion of the assignments she gives, to make sure that she understands the effort and time involved in the work. When I assign poems, for instance, I think I should write in the same genres because I don't often write poems, and I need to remind myself of the challenges they pose: succinctness, use of metaphor, rhythm, precision in word choice. When I assign memoirs, I need to remember how scary it is to be nakedly honest, as is necessary in good memoir writing (and to remember it's especially scary to share that honest writing). When I assign blog writing, I want students to write regularly and to choose a tone appropriate to the subject of the blog--and to maintain a reasonable succinctness (something I have a hard time doing myself). Practicing blog writing throughout the duration of the assignment helps me appreciate the time and thought that goes into this regular writing on the web.
(2) Which brings me to the second point: why the blog, particularly? I think the blog is the best current venue for timely professional exchanges of opinion and ideas about teaching. When we articulate our ideas for the potentially larger audience that reads blogs on the web, we need to think through those ideas more thoroughly than often happens when we're writing for the classroom audience in a (relatively) safe space. When students know that the English teacher will give them another chance with revising, they sometimes turn in really rough rough drafts. In another manifestation of their feeling of safety, many students will write just about anything for an English teacher's eyes, sometimes confessional writing that I'd really rather not read! In contrast, much of the writing we do in the "real world" is not one bit safe--as young adults have been learning in social networking sites, sometimes to their great harm. So it seems to me appropriate to ask students to think carefully about what they can say for a potentially wide audience of people they don't know personally.
Today I got an email from someone who'd happened on one of the webpages I've posted as a resource for students and colleagues. The sender informed me that one of the links no longer works and suggested an additional link, something I really appreciated. I haven't used the page and haven't updated it for several years, and I'd completely forgotten it was still on the server. This email was a timely reminder that the web documents created for a specific, timely purpose remain available to a wide audience, once they're on the web. It reminded me that writing for that large, unknown audience puts us on our best professional behavior--a lesson worth learning by prospective teachers.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Teaching Writing One-to-One
This is not news. One-to-one teaching is more effective than one-to-many teaching. As a Writing Center person, I know that I can have a real impact on a student's writing when I can sit beside her and ask her about her ideas and push her to say more and to make connections. And we can talk about the stylistic choices she's making--word choice, sentence length--and what the implications of those choices are. Then, I hope, the student goes away with ideas she can put to use in further revising or in drafting the next text on her own.
So why have I structured my Professional Writing class with lots of class activities and readings this fall? Wouldn't it have been better to have set it up to revolve around regular conferences? Of course it would! That's the way I'll do it next time--since it's now too late to build in very many more conferences this semester.
And the books that I love--books like Bird by Bird and One Year to a Writing Life and Fearless Confessions and Eats, Shoots & Leaves--maybe I should make fewer reading assignments in this course. Since I get so much out of them, maybe I should take activities and short quotations from them into the classroom and give students short in-class assignments but stop expecting them to take away the gold from whole-chapter reading assignments.
I should know by now that most students will not read assignments if they are not tested on the reading, and they define learning in terms of the least they need to do to get a satisfactory grade in a class. But I read writing books that inspire me and make me excited about writing and I (foolishly?) imagine the students will love to read about writing and will suck up these ideas like thirsty sponges. Perhaps I'll continue to be a misguided idealist, counting on these English majors and Comm Studies majors and pre-service teachers to appreciate the writing advice these wonderful writers share.
So why have I structured my Professional Writing class with lots of class activities and readings this fall? Wouldn't it have been better to have set it up to revolve around regular conferences? Of course it would! That's the way I'll do it next time--since it's now too late to build in very many more conferences this semester.
And the books that I love--books like Bird by Bird and One Year to a Writing Life and Fearless Confessions and Eats, Shoots & Leaves--maybe I should make fewer reading assignments in this course. Since I get so much out of them, maybe I should take activities and short quotations from them into the classroom and give students short in-class assignments but stop expecting them to take away the gold from whole-chapter reading assignments.
I should know by now that most students will not read assignments if they are not tested on the reading, and they define learning in terms of the least they need to do to get a satisfactory grade in a class. But I read writing books that inspire me and make me excited about writing and I (foolishly?) imagine the students will love to read about writing and will suck up these ideas like thirsty sponges. Perhaps I'll continue to be a misguided idealist, counting on these English majors and Comm Studies majors and pre-service teachers to appreciate the writing advice these wonderful writers share.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
How much first-year writing instruction does a college student need? Are changing standards for writing instruction at the high school level going to have any real impact on the first-year writing requirement?
When I look at standards for high school students--our Virginia SOLs and the draft of the national standards--it looks to me as if those who develop the standards want students to leave high school with the writing skills we have taught in first-semester composition courses for the last forty years, at least.
But will that mean we no longer have to teach the same skills? Will creating standards for high schoolers to write well-developed argumentative essays actually make them college-level writers? Or is there a maturation factor involved that we can't hold high school teachers responsible for? That is, will they--like the 18-year-old students of my generation--simply write jejune essays that have a somewhat more polished surface?
I believe that young people can engage with joy and intelligence in intellectual debate in writing, but I don't believe they can bypass first-year writing courses (or writing-intensive courses in other disciplines) by doing more writing and receiving more writing instruction in high school. And standards, by their nature, tend to standardize writing. Good writing, by definition, is individual--not standardized. By all means, have students do lots of writing. But for heaven's sake, don't evaluate their writing ability with a standardized writing test.
Good writing is not just a product of thesis sentence + paragraph development + transitional wording + documentation + proofreading. Good writing comes out of a lot of thoughtful practice, and things to say--things which we learn over time. Most published writers at age 30 or 40 or 70 would be embarrassed if not downright mortified by their youthful scribblings. When we read the juvenilia of canonical literary writers, we read it as juvenilia.
On the other hand, that need for things to say is a strong argument for courses in various disciplines that include a significant writing component. The problem with writing courses--as a general requirement for all students--is their decontextualized nature. The "skills" don't transfer. Moving this first-year-composition approach into the high school will just produce more writing-that-doesn't-really-matter, writing-to-prove-I-can-write (no matter how gifted or passionate the teachers).
By all means, have students write more. Have them keep journals in all of their classes, write summaries of what they've learned in the last 5 minutes of a class, write collaboratively for projects in the subject areas, write creative pieces, write to make a difference in their communities, correspond with students in other states and countries, write their way through trauma, write poems for their grandparents and their mothers and their friends, create Webpage guides to their communities and reviews of their favorite music and books--write, write, write. Let's see them, from age five to age ninety, write for real audiences.
In such a milieu of writing, first-year composition might be a course in which students focus specifically on developing an academic tone and awareness of audience and hone their research skills--useful, but just a little piece of all the writing they do. And let's not try to move that foundational college writing into the high school, whether with "higher standards" or with AP or dual enrollment or promises of first-year-composition exemption on the basis of high SAT Writing scores. Their first-semester writing course is still a means of acculturating them to the expectations of the specific college writing community that they are joining. Let's keep it as such.
When I look at standards for high school students--our Virginia SOLs and the draft of the national standards--it looks to me as if those who develop the standards want students to leave high school with the writing skills we have taught in first-semester composition courses for the last forty years, at least.
But will that mean we no longer have to teach the same skills? Will creating standards for high schoolers to write well-developed argumentative essays actually make them college-level writers? Or is there a maturation factor involved that we can't hold high school teachers responsible for? That is, will they--like the 18-year-old students of my generation--simply write jejune essays that have a somewhat more polished surface?
I believe that young people can engage with joy and intelligence in intellectual debate in writing, but I don't believe they can bypass first-year writing courses (or writing-intensive courses in other disciplines) by doing more writing and receiving more writing instruction in high school. And standards, by their nature, tend to standardize writing. Good writing, by definition, is individual--not standardized. By all means, have students do lots of writing. But for heaven's sake, don't evaluate their writing ability with a standardized writing test.
Good writing is not just a product of thesis sentence + paragraph development + transitional wording + documentation + proofreading. Good writing comes out of a lot of thoughtful practice, and things to say--things which we learn over time. Most published writers at age 30 or 40 or 70 would be embarrassed if not downright mortified by their youthful scribblings. When we read the juvenilia of canonical literary writers, we read it as juvenilia.
On the other hand, that need for things to say is a strong argument for courses in various disciplines that include a significant writing component. The problem with writing courses--as a general requirement for all students--is their decontextualized nature. The "skills" don't transfer. Moving this first-year-composition approach into the high school will just produce more writing-that-doesn't-really-matter, writing-to-prove-I-can-write (no matter how gifted or passionate the teachers).
By all means, have students write more. Have them keep journals in all of their classes, write summaries of what they've learned in the last 5 minutes of a class, write collaboratively for projects in the subject areas, write creative pieces, write to make a difference in their communities, correspond with students in other states and countries, write their way through trauma, write poems for their grandparents and their mothers and their friends, create Webpage guides to their communities and reviews of their favorite music and books--write, write, write. Let's see them, from age five to age ninety, write for real audiences.
In such a milieu of writing, first-year composition might be a course in which students focus specifically on developing an academic tone and awareness of audience and hone their research skills--useful, but just a little piece of all the writing they do. And let's not try to move that foundational college writing into the high school, whether with "higher standards" or with AP or dual enrollment or promises of first-year-composition exemption on the basis of high SAT Writing scores. Their first-semester writing course is still a means of acculturating them to the expectations of the specific college writing community that they are joining. Let's keep it as such.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Former Students' Writing
Homecoming at Bridgewater College--I had a long conversation late Friday afternoon with one of our former English majors, who told me, "Dr. Trupe, I'm writing two books," and eventually asked if she could send me a manuscript. I was delighted. I told her, "Sure. Just make sure to send it at the end of the semester, so I can look at it during the break." I'm passionate about writing, and when someone else is passionate about writing, I love sharing the enthusiasm. I am looking forward to reading her novel.
Homecoming, Saturday night--I was at a party, where I talked with a recent alum, who said, "Dr. Trupe, I'm really doing 'professional writing' now. It isn't very creative, but I write on my job every day." Once again, I heard the enthusiasm--and that underlying message that yes, my conversations with students about writing have some long-term effect, even if it's only that my former students recognize me as someone who cares to hear about their development of talents they honed as college students.
Homecoming, Saturday night--I was at a party, where I talked with a recent alum, who said, "Dr. Trupe, I'm really doing 'professional writing' now. It isn't very creative, but I write on my job every day." Once again, I heard the enthusiasm--and that underlying message that yes, my conversations with students about writing have some long-term effect, even if it's only that my former students recognize me as someone who cares to hear about their development of talents they honed as college students.
Nervous about Sharing Writing
I hate showing my own writing to other people. This puts me in a contradictory position because I incorporate response--peer response, my response--into my writing classes and expect my students to use the feedback in revising. I should probably tell them how uncomfortable doing this makes me.
When I submit chapters for inclusion in books, I hang onto them forever, doing as many as 10 or 12 revisions. When I was past deadline for my book on young adult literature, the editor kept begging me for my manuscript, but it wasn't perfect yet. It's hard for me to let it go.
When I get a chapter or a book back in galley form, I procrastinate about editing it, because I know that it's set at that point and, while I can make minor editing changes, I can't reorganize the text or completely change my thesis.
When something is published, I usually don't look at it. When I got copies of my book, I couldn't open it for weeks, even though I gave away the copies I intended to. The first time I opened it up, I saw a sentence with a mixed metaphor.
So, when I read something I've written aloud to a class (unless it's something like a writing assignment!), I cringe. I can hear all the flaws. I want to sink into the floor.
But I keep writing anyway.
When I submit chapters for inclusion in books, I hang onto them forever, doing as many as 10 or 12 revisions. When I was past deadline for my book on young adult literature, the editor kept begging me for my manuscript, but it wasn't perfect yet. It's hard for me to let it go.
When I get a chapter or a book back in galley form, I procrastinate about editing it, because I know that it's set at that point and, while I can make minor editing changes, I can't reorganize the text or completely change my thesis.
When something is published, I usually don't look at it. When I got copies of my book, I couldn't open it for weeks, even though I gave away the copies I intended to. The first time I opened it up, I saw a sentence with a mixed metaphor.
So, when I read something I've written aloud to a class (unless it's something like a writing assignment!), I cringe. I can hear all the flaws. I want to sink into the floor.
But I keep writing anyway.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Time for another fresh start
We're blogging in my Professional Writing class, so it seems like a good idea to start up here again. The fall semester is pretty full for someone who teaches three classes, directs a Writing Center, and runs a placement procedure for first-year students and works with selected students on a one-to-one basis. Committee work and assessment get squeezed in around the edges. Time for scholarship? Hmm. When will I get back to that writing project?
I get really excited about students' excitement when they are writing. I find writing not only relaxing, but necessary, and it's very difficult to make time for it. This is a challenge we all must cope with, students and professors alike. So far this fall I've been able to maintain my personal journal, writing 3-4 times a week, but I haven't done much experimenting, as I'd planned to do following Natalie Goldberg's writing suggestions in Old Friend Far Away.
I like to tell students that I write along with them because it "keeps me honest." But I didn't write a personal essay with them over the past couple weeks because I became a grandma Sept. 17, and the baby and her parents live with me--so my personal life has sort of overtaken my professional life. I've sent out quite a few longish personal emails to the people who want to know about her, and I texted my other daughter at some length yesterday, describing her and taking guesses at who she looks like. Speaking of baby--I think it's time to go home and see if her mama's ready for a break.
I get really excited about students' excitement when they are writing. I find writing not only relaxing, but necessary, and it's very difficult to make time for it. This is a challenge we all must cope with, students and professors alike. So far this fall I've been able to maintain my personal journal, writing 3-4 times a week, but I haven't done much experimenting, as I'd planned to do following Natalie Goldberg's writing suggestions in Old Friend Far Away.
I like to tell students that I write along with them because it "keeps me honest." But I didn't write a personal essay with them over the past couple weeks because I became a grandma Sept. 17, and the baby and her parents live with me--so my personal life has sort of overtaken my professional life. I've sent out quite a few longish personal emails to the people who want to know about her, and I texted my other daughter at some length yesterday, describing her and taking guesses at who she looks like. Speaking of baby--I think it's time to go home and see if her mama's ready for a break.
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