Thursday, May 8, 2008
Thoughts on writing assignments
It is always useful to read over someone else's writing assignments, especially in terms of how they imagine and lay it out for the students. There is always a certain degree of tension between providing too much information on how to do it, versus providing too little. You don't want to snow them under with guidelines, but then again you want to be very clear about your expectations. In terms of my own writing assignments, I would like to build in drafts, but I don't necessarily want to be the one who looks them over. Perhaps use peer review? I wouldn't mind hearing more about this technique. As we discussed, there is the ideal of good teaching and fostering good undergraduate writing, but there is little support for it, especially for assistant professors, who to be perfectly honest, should be attending to their research, not developing new and interesting ways of teaching. It was useful to learn a bit more about exactly what happens when a student comes to the writing center. I certainly plan to utilize it to a greater degree in the future.
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One effective way of having students do the commenting on drafts is to give them two or three points to read for and provide feedback on. So, for instance, have students read for 1) the thesis, 2) evidence, and 3)citations--the peer reviewer's job is then 1) to restate, in his or her own words, the thesis of the paper, 2) to list the key points of the argument and the evidence given for them, 3) to check for compliance with the assignment's required citation style, number of sources, type of sources. You collect all the drafts and peer review sheets and skim them. If you give clear enough guidelines, a lot of the work will have been done by the students who are doing the reviewing, and you'll have only a few pointed comments to make. Students whose papers are highly problematic, you send to the Writing Center.
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