Blogging Pedagogy - student feedback

Video Feedback for Advanced Students

Kate Stevenson — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 19:56:27 +0000

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Wikipedia, uploaded by Afrank99

I knew as soon as my students turned in their first papers this semester that I would need to come up with a new style of feedback for them. The juniors and seniors in RHE 309: The Rhetoric of Tourism write very differently from the freshmen and sophomores I worked with in RHE 306. I've spent very little of this Fall semester working on MLA format, grammar, and organization, and lots of time being impressed with how insightful, critical, and articulate these older college students are about the complex issues that come up in discussions about travel and tourism. Line editing and basic revision techniques were out in this class from day one.

After my students turned in their first drafts, we met for individual "paper conferences." When asked what they liked and didn't like about the course so far, almost every student said something along the lines of, "I like how small the class is. I like how we really get to talk." In many cases, this class--at twenty-one students--was the smallest they had ever been in at UT. It was obvious that they valued and enjoyed the intimacy of the course. I decided that they needed feedback that extended the atmosphere of the classroom to the work they completed outside it.

When I first saw my digital classroom this semester, I was sure that the computers would reduce this kind of personal attention and make it harder for me to get to know my students and for them to get to know each other. But there are so many ways to turn the digital classroom to our advantage, and video feedback is now one of my favorites.

I switched to Canvas as soon as UT started offering it a few semesters ago, but this was the first semester that I asked my students to turn in all of their work digitally and began using the "Speed Grader" system online. Canvas has a "Media Comment" option build into this Speed Grader, in the form of a little webcam button in the bottom right corner:

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A pop-up appears, and after checking the "allow" button, you're recording an audio and video comment on your student's paper, which Canvas then saves for them to view later:

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At first, I was wary of making a video recording of myself talking about my students' work. What if they didn't even watch the videos? Worse, what if they did watch them and decided that they were hilarious? But I decided to give it a try and see what happened.

My students loved it, and so did I. Instead of a sentence or two of praise for their writing and a couple of questions for them to consider in the future, I actually discussed all of what my students had written, in much greater depth than I would have in the little text comment box that I usually used. Instead of making some general statements about a whole paper, I also brought up specific sentences and phrases that I liked or had questions about. The feedback was both more specific and more holistic than when it was put into writing. My students felt like their papers were part of ongoing discussions inside and outside of the classroom, and they liked being able to tell that I had "really read" their work.

This is a fantastic tool for more advanced writing students, one that's worth getting over the embarrassment inherent in recording yourself speaking!

Distance Peer Observation

Axel Bohmann — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 16:06:18 +0000

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Axel Bohmann

Image Credit:

Klearchos Guide to the Galaxy

One of the greatest resources you can have as a teacher is other teachers’ experience, suggestions, and comments. At the DWRL we are lucky enough to have Blogging Pedagogy, Lesson Plans, and other platforms that help us benefit from each other’s great work. I use these regularly, but there is one aspect of teacher collaboration that so far I have not been able to incorporate in my practice as much as I would like to: immediate feedback and conversations about my (and others’) teaching as it unfolds in real-time classroom interaction (as opposed to feedback on artifacts derived from these interactions, such as lesson plan entries).

Attending the Center for Teaching and Learning’s Graduate Teaching Scholars seminar a couple of semesters back has given me the opportunity to both observe and be observed by fellow assistant instructors, and this has given me some of the most valuable insights about my own classroom presence that I’ve gotten so far. Now, the obvious downside is that it is relatively time-consuming to organize peer observations. I still try to do at least one every semester, but there are some activities that only fully make sense in the context of an entire unit’s trajectory. This semester, by accident I’ve come across a way to facilitate ‘distance peer observation’ over a longer period of time without imposing too much effort on anyone involved.

My supervisor kindly agreed to observe one of my class sessions and in preparation I added him to the course wiki. The initial purpose was purely for him to be able to have a look at the syllabus before coming to class. But as the semester went on, I would get occasional messages from him about new assignment prompts I’d uploaded or comments left on the front page. These would often develop into conversations about specific instructional goals, about future iterations of an exercise, etc. I’ve come to greatly appreciate the light-hearted, informal nature of these conversations and the feeling they give me of someone else being interested in what is happening in my classroom.

So, in future I will make sure to add one or two colleagues to my class websites and give them a chance to stay in the loop about what is happening in my class (and hopefully to share theirs as well). Especially with classes like RHE 306 or 309 that follow similar structures, I can see the benefits working both ways. I get inspiration from the exercises you design and you get feedback that will help you get the most out of these exercises. And it’s fairly non-committal: if I have a set of 7-page papers to grade this week, perhaps I won’t have a chance to look at my colleagues’ course sites, and that’s fine. But once these papers are done I’ll start a new unit and will be grateful for some inspiration on how to tweak my teaching.

I’m not suggesting this is a substitute for in-the-flesh peer observations, but it could work well to supplement them and to keep conversations going beyond the individual class session. And most of us have some sort of course website already, so the effort to get it going should be minimal.

To Poll or Not to Poll

Jeremy Smyczek — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 16:12:00 +0000

Author:

Jeremy Smyczek

Image Credit:

Screenshot via SurveyMonkey

*The final unit of my RHE 309K: Rhetoric of Animal Rights course features an oral presentation based around a multimedia advocacy project that each student must design. As the major part of the evaluation, I create and use online polls (using tools such as SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics) that the students complete in real time after every presentation. Each poll asks four trait-centered questions, followed by a holistic evaluation, allowing for a variety of data combinations to see how students respond to each other’s work. Polls can be more elaborate than this, naturally, but the point here is to capture initial impressions while the memory is still fresh.

Students are familiar with polls, of course, as they not only complete a course survey evaluating their instructors and teaching assistants, but also are asked to fill out an exit poll for a wide array of campus services. Using polls in the classroom no doubt predates computer-assisted instruction, and could certainly still be done without it, but computers provide a number of services that pencil-and-paper methods would not, such as multiple permutations and combinations of the data. They also allow for total anonymity of response, generally a good thing for any democratic evaluation.

Technological convenience aside, however, using polls in determining grades seems a subset of a larger pedagogical problem: the ethics of peer evaluation. It’s easy to anticipate a response both from students and other educators something like, “well, you’re the one getting paid here; farming out evaluation is at best lazy and at worst negligent.”

But I disagree with this, for three overlapping reasons. First, one of the central problems that we face as rhetorical educators is getting past the single-audience problem. By this, I mean the idea that the only purpose of college writing is to crack the teacher’s code, to figure out what she wants to hear, and to write it. When I tell students that the persuasive appeal of the final oral presentation is aimed at the rest of the class, online polling shows that I mean it.

Second, as Peter Elbow tells us, teachers are not the typical readers that most writing in the world encounters. Fellow students provide a diversity of perspectives and concerns that are far more representative of a typical public discourse’s audience than the one I offer. If activism is more than an academic exercise, then other voices ought to count.

Finally, students are more discerning than I would have initially thought. Sure, they grade each other a bit more kindly than I do, but ultimately the ordinal rankings that they produce in terms of best and worst performances end up looking very similar to mine. They can tell when someone hasn’t done his homework. Hearing that from a peer is, ultimately, probably a bigger stick than hearing from the teacher.

*As many of my blogging ideas do, the idea of crowd-sourced grading grew in part from a conversation with DWRL Assistant Director Beck Wise.

Benefits of Paper Workshops

Stephanie Odom — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:13:10 +0000

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Stephanie Odom

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DigiDreamGrafix.com

This spring I’ve been teaching RHE 310: Intermediate Expository Prose for the second time. The first time I taught it was two years ago, so I had plenty of time in between to think of ways to improve upon my first effort. I love teaching this class. I’m not sure I’ll get to teach a class like it in my new job, but I will definitely try to work in the practice of in-class paper workshops in future classes. Workshops are a cornerstone of RHE 310, and in this post, I’d like to describe how I run workshops, what I think works well, and what I will change in the future.

First, a little context about the class is in order. RHE 310 is a class about style. Instructors (usually graduate students) teach the class in many different ways, but practicing the prose style and genre conventions of a number of types of writing is usually the norm. When I was first planning how I would teach the course, I wanted the students to be able to select the type of writing they wanted to master. I didn’t feel entirely comfortable selecting styles for the whole class since I didn’t want to make pronouncements about what style/s of writing were superior to others and didn’t want to spend time on genres and styles that were uninteresting or unimportant to students. (I have since come around to re-thinking that stance and would feel more comfortable teaching a range of pre-selected styles now.) So, in my class, each student selects a prose model that they admire and the assignments give them opportunities to analyze and imitate that model. The range of models students have chosen has been incredible, as have their creative imitations.

As I said, workshopping is a key part of this course. The first time I taught it, the requirement was that everyone submit writing--any writing--for the class to comment on. Many students submitted imitations of their prose model. These models included magazine writing, sports reporting, technical guides, academic philosophy and film articles, and many more. But in that first attempt, I didn’t require students to provide an example or of describe the writing style they were going for, and that made our workshops ineffective at times. Students would offer advice based on what their general understanding of “good style” was, and the writer being workshopped would reply that their choices were justified based on the type of writing they were practicing. The students would shrug and trust that the writer was correct.

This time around, I changed the workshop submission template to give students a space to describe and/or provide an example of their prose model, which could be the main one they were working with that semester or anything else. Having the opportunity for students to read high quality examples of that type of writing has made our workshops more effective. During the workshop, when someone has a question about whether the writer’s choices are appropriate, it’s easy to turn to the target prose and analyze it to see whether the more experienced author made that choice. For example, we’ve talked a lot about pronoun usage and what that means in terms of rhetorical distance. If the student writer makes I-statements and someone asks if that is an appropriate choice (sometimes invoking the “I heard you should never use ‘I’ in papers” rule), we revisit the target prose and see if that author used the first person pronoun. This is one of several analysis and imitation techniques I’m able to model during workshops.

Other such techniques that I hope they internalize and take with them include reading prose out loud, making a reverse outline of their or another writer’s text, getting a thought down in rough form and playing with the style later, and just generally getting others’ input about clarity and style. I’m lucky that the students in this semester’s class are respectful and forthright, so I don’t need to do a lot of delicate balancing of egos or communication styles. Especially in the early part of the semester, students were nervous about getting their writing critiqued, but that feeling has subsided after seeing how their peers are not dismissive, rude, or totally off-base in their comments.

In this class, I love how these workshops expose students to a wide range of writing styles, some of which they will themselves write someday but others that they won’t. The range gives us the chance to see how writing varies and how what’s “wrong” in one rhetorical situation is “right” in another one. For example, one student wrote a reflective essay about a baseball game that he wanted to publish as a sports column. His style is casual and blunt, two qualities that you often see in sports writing. We talked about how in his case, it was acceptable to use slang words and even profanity in story telling, and how he created dramatic interest by using a series of short simple sentences, whereas in other workshops, we had worked with the writers to combine simple sentences into more complex ones to lend a more sophisticated tone. We’ve seen how in science writing, the passive voice is standard and appropriate, but in personal statements, we want to see more first-person pronouns. It’s also been helpful for writers to get feedback about where their readers want to see more evidence, what they think the argument was, and how they personally responded to the piece.

In the interest of space, I’ll briefly list here other practices that I’ve found facilitate productive discussion and some that I’ll change in the future.

What is working:

Having writers upload their papers to our class wiki 24 hours before their workshop (by 9:30 a.m. on Monday for a Tuesday class) to give classmates time to comment.
Asking everyone to post at least one positive and one constructive comment on the wiki before class to prime them for participating.
Distributing printed copies of the paper even though we can all read it on the projector. This is not necessarily for the writer’s benefit since receiving 18 marked-up copies of their writing can be overwhelming, but it’s been great for keeping everyone else more engaged with the writing.
Speaking with each student about their participation during our midterm conference and letting them know if I want them to participate more or give others a chance to speak, and what I think their strengths as a participant are.

What I will likely change:

Spending 20 minutes instead of 30 minutes on each student to give us more time to analyze and imitate at least one additional type of writing as a class.
Requiring everyone to revise their writing based on our feedback so that the stakes are higher and they practice weighing conflicting comments against each other.
Practicing close line editing techniques, though this is a maybe. Some students are doing this anyway and I’d like to be more involved in what they are suggesting, but I would rather they practice minimal marking and ask questions for clarification instead of making changes to the papers. Depending on the goals of the course I’m teaching, I may or may not encourage line editing.

Learning how to run a writing workshop is a valuable skill for anyone who will be teaching composition, and it requires practice and being open to change. It focuses the class on student writing instead of polished professional writing, it opens up the writing process for discussion, it teaches students that getting feedback on their writing is not going to kill them, and it lets them see how different readers react in different ways and that that’s ok. I will definitely be using this pedagogical tool in future classes and I hope my description of it here gives others some ideas about how to use it in their classes, too.

The Case for Digital Submission

Cate Blouke — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:53:39 +0000

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Cate Blouke

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Cate Blouke

It's the end of the semester, and across the nation an all-too-familiar sight is littering the hallways of English departments: the box of student essays. Sometimes it's an envelope, sometimes it's a stack of papers half-shoved into a mailbox or under a door. But the sight of these final papers abandoned by their students and/or professors reinforces my conviction that it's time for us to move to digital submission.

While assessing student essays on a computer screen isn't without challenges (I find myself making many fewer positive comments in the marginal remarks, for example), there are a lot of good reasons why I made the decision to go digital. And I encourage you to consider making the switch for the semester ahead. First and foremost, digital submission improves work flow - for everyone.

No more misplaced assignments: word processing software has its risks regardless of how the final product is formatted. Students will inevitably forget to save documents or suffer computer crashes and viruses before an assignment is due. But digital submission means that once an assignment is turned in (via e-mail or the class wiki or website), there's no longer a risk of any assignment going astray. With the date and time stamping of any digital platform, there's also never any question of when an assignment was submitted.

Coursework isn't restricted to class time: when assignments can be turned in from a computer, the time-frame for submission is opened up well beyond the one hour window two or three days a week. This expansion can benefit both students and instructors. Digital submission gives you the freedom to allow students extra time to revise after Thursday's useful class discussion, but they can still get their papers turned in before your weekend grading binge. It can also reduce turn-around between assignments. You can ask your students to submit short papers each Tuesday, but you won't have to kill yourself to get them graded by Thursday if you can provide your feedback over the weekend.

Feedback becomes a semester-long process: when your comments are stored in a digital file, you (and your students) can access your feedback at any time. You can say farewell to the days of file folders filled with multiple drafts and assignments (which often go astray or unexamined). When grading a student's essay 2, you can look back at essay 1 to see how they've improved (or if they're still struggling with the same problems).

Grading revisions is a lot easier: when you have digital copies of both the original and the revised version of an essay, comparing the documents is a snap with Microsoft Word's "compare documents" function. The changes a student has made will be highlighted, and you can quickly discover if they followed your suggestions and how rigorously they revised.

Smaller environmental impact: this might go without saying, but digital submission is obviously a way for composition instructors to feel better about the environmental impact of their assignments. Given that the U.S. paper industry (alone) consumes 83 million tons of paper each year, requiring 40.5 million trees, and "clear cutting an area half the size of Texas" - I like to think I'm making some small effort to reduce those numbers.

All this being said, I do agree with my colleague, Jay Voss, who argues for the value of seeing one's writing in print. While I encourage digital submission for my students' final assignments, I always hold peer review workshops in print. Though I'm dubious about the efficacy of the feedback they receive, the physical act of marking up a paper (whether their own or a fellow student's) has proved extremely valuable for my students.

No system is entirely perfect. Digital submission means that I can't generally grade papers on the bus, and I'm less prone to use Word's comment function for positive feedback. But in the age of e-readers and social networking, I can only think that asking students to submit assignments electronically is an exercise that better prepares them (and me) for the times to come.

The Many Upsides of the Student Conference

Megan Gianfagna — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:37:42 +0000

Author:

Megan Gianfagna

Image Credit:

via Winter Love

Even for a small class, student conferences take a lot of time and energy. I often hold conferences to discuss a plan for revision of their essays. That means that 6 hours of conferences (15 minutes each x 23 students) usually follow long nights spent grading the essays that are the basis of our discussion. I’ve often left the campus coffee shop after I’ve met with half the class in and felt like I’ve been stuck on repeat—drained from keeping my enthusiasm up during so many different versions of the same basic conversation.

So if the conference process means extra time, extra logistics, and extra pressure to meet tight grading deadlines, why do I continue to do it, semester after semester? It’s not because every student turns out a comprehensive and polished revision of his/her essay as a result of our short meetings. It’s because those brief but focused sessions give me a chance to hear my students talk about their writing process and their experience with the project. For me, it gives the essay a backstory and helps me understand the thought processes behind some of their decisions. It builds a relationship that makes them more comfortable in the classroom and more invested in the work. I also think it makes them more likely to come to office hours or to visit the Undergraduate Writing Center about subsequent assignments. For students accustomed to professors in large lectures knowing them by EID rather than first name, seeing that the instructor is willing to invest the time in their work makes a big difference, at least to some.

I make the first conference of the semester mandatory and all subsequent conferences optional. Because I use the Learning Record as the evaluative framework, student effort and reflection on that effort gets captured and considered in the final grade for the course. As a result, I find that most students sign up for subsequent conference meetings of their own volition. In my current class, Rhetoric of Going Viral, I have mostly sophomores, juniors and seniors. With this group, I’m finding conferences especially productive and energizing. Because we use memes as the objects of our rhetorical inquiry, I get to learn a lot about my students’ personal interests and relationship with online information.

Though the primary purpose of the conference is talk through my comments on their essays and address any questions, I try to talk about something else first. For instance, I like to being by commenting on something I found interesting about a blog post or asking a question about something I noticed in one of their Learning Record observations. This signals to students that I’m there to engage them in conversation and not talk at them about the paper. I’ve found that students use the one-on-one opportunity to ask about how they might apply what they’re learning in class to the kind of writing they do in their majors, to ask about other assignments or class policies, or to tell me how they think I’m strange for letting them interrogate popular texts instead of writing research papers with scholarly sources. I’ll take it. Watching them think about writing in a more expansive way is, for me at least, one of many fulfilling conference benefits.

Even though I build these conferences into the course schedule in addition to peer review and revision workshops, revision can often be an afterthought for students. To help them leave the conference with a concrete plan of action, I like to have them do a brief activity ahead of time. I find it can really help focus our discussion. Some that I’ve used in the past include asking them to rank my comments in what they perceive as the order of importance or having them choose the top three things they think they should focus on in their revision and explain why. I’ve also asked them to write a brief outline of what they would do to the essay if they had more time (to be completed before I send them my comments).

Though not all students are always prepared and some seem like they are ready to basically sprint out the door the second we’ve finished our conversation, I’ve yet to feel like the process wasn’t worth it. I do wonder, though, if other instructors have a very different view of conferences or use more creative strategies to maximize the experience for both teacher and student. I wonder too what will happen when I have to teach more courses in a semester and have to adjust my approach. Individual conferences may not always feasible, so I think I’ll just enjoy the luxury while I have it.

Communication in the Classroom

Prentice — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:31:10 +0000

Author:

Chris Ortiz y Prentice

Image Credit:

David Sky

This semester I wanted to develop the Mass Effect lesson I devised in the fall. That lesson used the video game as a rhetorical modeling technology, which (I hoped) would have student thinking about how rhetorical decisions afford and foreclose others “down the line.” In my discussions of this lesson with many of you, I was encouraged to develop a writing lesson that would give students a chance to make their own Mass Effect-style modular arguments. The lesson I’ve learned from devising this exercise is the advantage of letting students in on the lesson-making process.

I’ll admit that, when I made the copious materials my lesson required, I wasn’t too sure myself how to turn persuasive articles into the sort of rhetorical prompts given to the player of Mass Effect. The relation between these prompts and what Shepard says is by no means obvious but an interesting rhetorical question in its own right.

So I brought the lesson to class without having mastered (or even fully understood) the skills I was asking the students to practice and develop. This made me nervous. The students perceived that I could not communicate to them precisely what I was looking for them to do. I referenced what we’d learned the previous class playing the game; I told them that I wanted them to take the provided material and make “modular” arguments; I gave them a sense of my thought process, the difficulties I’d encountered, and my ambitions for the lesson. And then I stopped talking, half-expecting insubordination. “You’ve no idea what you’re talking about! How can you ask us to do this when you can’t even do it yourself? What gives you the right to grade us when you can’t model what an A would look like?”

What I got instead was collaboration. “Wouldn’t it also be possible to write the prompts like this?” “Isn’t there another decision going on behind these words?” “Couldn’t we connect these two lines, like this, since they go to the same place from here on out?”

As luck would have it, I recently came upon a young Raymond Williams arguing for the pedagogical superiority of communication over transmission. In some educational contexts, his words (at the end of Culture and Society) might strike one as hopelessly optimistic. But in the rhe306 classroom, and last week, his argument held true:

Communication is not only transmission; it is also reception and response. . . . The very failure of so many of the items of transmission which I have listed is not an accident, but the result of a failure to understand communication. The failure is due to an arrogant preoccupation with transmission, which rests on the assumption that the common answers have been found and need only to be applied. (309, 314)

This may seem like teaching 101 to all of you, but I guess I didn’t fully trust it. I was surprised when my students turned collaborators, but I don’t know why I should’ve been, since working towards an answer is a much more satisfying experience than being told one. (Bo’s April 4^thpost is worth reading for insights into how to devise lessons that purposefully make the learning process communicative and collaborative).