Pick a Model And Go With It

This week’s focus on assessing student writing could not come at a better time as I prepare to receive final drafts on my student’s first essays this Friday. Evaluating student writing (and heaven forbid, assigning grades) is one of the most anxiety-inducing aspects of starting to teach. Reading articles or hearing panels on this topic in the past has always left me feeling like there is an endless conundrum between what freshman composition teachers would like to do with assessment and what institutions require. Mainly, teachers would like to provide detailed feedback using grids and scales and extensive suggestions using anything but a red pen but are instead forced to assign final, single course grades to each student without the opportunity for further explanation.  As a student, I feel the bitter reality of this conundrum too. I have spent countless semesters of my life stressing about grades, attempting to keep my “perfect” GPA, all to have my hopes dashed by two A minuses in painting (PAINTING?!! People, I implore you).  As a result of this conundrum , it seems composition teachers and composition and rhetoric theorists have devised any numbers of negotiations that get closer to promoting the optimal environment and development of writing skill in their classrooms.  In A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers (2001), one of the first books I read that directly addresses teachers responding to student writing, Erika Lindemann encourages an approach similar to best practices for tutors in most writing centers. She encourages teachers to look at higher order concerns (HOCs), focusing on the main purpose for the writing assignment itself. She then encourages teachers to use suggestions and questions rather than authoritative mandates in their comments. This is all well and good, but of course students still know that you, as teacher, hold the key to whether they pass or fail English 1000 and even what their eventual GPA will be in four years (one word: painting).

So, the authors we have read in preparation for our discussion this week want to suggest much more radical approaches to the way teachers assess student writing.  I started my reading with Asao B. Inoue’s (2005) “Community-based Assessment Pedagogy,” which is a rather jaw-dropping defense of a completely different model of the composition classroom and negotiating grades. This completely student-led approach assumes a social constructivist position in requiring students to literally negotiate the criteria for their own assignments and the rubrics they will use in order to asses one another’s writing. The goal, as Inoue articulates, is not only for students to “learn to assess themselves, taking active learning stances in the classroom” but also to be able to take a step back and “theorize” about how “assessment and writing work in their own practices” (209). Thus, the beauty of Inoue’s community-based assessment pedagogy is that it accomplishes a number of pedagogical tasks at once, including the obvious politically inspired purpose of revealing hegemonic structures of authority. I kept asking myself how, exactly, such a system could possibly work, and Inoue anticipated most of my reservations throughout.  The questions that remain include the following: What do you do with students who are very vocally opposed to the entire class structure from the beginning? What do you with extremely shy students? What do you do about assessing other elements of the class like participation, attendance, positing on blogs or posting the multiple drafts of writing each student is assessing on time? Finally, what does Inoue do with minority positions? The answer to my first question may be the particular course that Inoue uses this model for in this article.  A 300 level English course (Writing and Rhetorical Conventions) is not exactly the same as a 100 level required composition course.

My final reservation about “minority positions” is somewhat addressed in Peter Elbow’s response to Inoue in Assessing Writing (2006; part of our optional reading). I read Elbow’s response because, frankly, I was extremely compelled to give Inoue’s model a try (and also because I can’t resist a good comp/rhet debate: Bitzer, Vatz, and Consigny; Bartholamae and Elbow, Geisler vs. Gunn and Lundberg etc.). He argues the following:

Despite Inoue's brilliant design and execution and the obviously deep learning we see students taking from his class, I have a serious reservation about how he designs his laboratory for studying value. The problem comes from a central premise that underlies the whole operation: he insists on a single unified set of criteria for judging all writing in the course – a single picture of effective writing. Even final course grades derive from this corporate agreement. When he makes the class vote and agree on a single standard of effective writing and stick to it for all evaluation, he seems to be saying, ‘This is a picture of how valuing works in our culture or our institutions. You may not like it, but that is how power is deployed: it flows from group agreements.’

What students are really agreeing on is conventions rather than value. As an answer, Elbow suggests that Inoue’s process be adapted so that students would be allowed to produce their own individual (or smaller subsets) of criteria for what constitutes “good writing.” Thrown into this hybrid system is Elbow’s notion of the unilateral grading contract.  As if Inoue’s system isn’t difficult enough, Peter Elbow wants to further complicate the matter. At this point in my three-week teaching career, his model seems unattainable.

Though the type of contract grading Elbow and Danielewicz (2009) propose in “A Unilateral Grading Contract to Improve Learning and Teaching” seems more realistic, it is obviously too late to implement this contract at this point in the semester. I agree with Elbow that teachers a lot of times use this kind of standard in grading anyway and such a contract just explicitly places the power in the student’s hands. For example, in my course, I can see that students will probably earn a B average if they simply do all the assignments (following guidelines for the major writing assignments) and attend class. Yet, I still wonder what Elbow or Danielewicz do with students who do not quite make all the requirements but are still “good” writers.  I would think that almost as many students would fall into this category and the “exceptional student” category as in a regular classroom, requiring just as much care in teacher’s deliberating over grades. Of course, I could be wrong, as Elbow seems to indicate.

So, on the most practical level, I am left with Elbow’s “Good Enough Evaluation” (2010), which aligns largely with the way I was intending on evaluating this first stack of papers but also provides the very useful tip of creating rubric sheets that list three ranges of scores on each individual assessment criteria:  strong, okay, and weak (or the more stodgy excellent, satisfactory, or poor). This simple scale seems like it would be easy for students to interpret and also easy to translate into some sort of points range to calculate a final grade for the paper.  However, I am open to the class’s critiques of this system and the suggestions of you all as much more experienced teachers.

To end this blog on a very scary note: I am tempted (dare I say, committed), to actually trying a bit of Inoue’s community-based assessment as part of the exploratory essay assignment for Unit 2. The formal writing assignment I have designed for this unit involves an annotated bibliography and then a brief exploratory essay that proposes a question that perplexes the student and walks the reader through his or her process of research with a final reflection on how this research has influenced the direction for the next paper in the sequence (the argument essay).  I am considering allowing each class to devise its own criteria for what constitutes an appropriate “source” for this assignment. The class would then draft a rubric for how one might assess the sources each student provides, and finally, score their peer’s performance on this one portion during peer review. Does this sound like a disaster?

Baby Steps to Imagination, Baby Steps to Reflective Thinking

Boice’s chapter on “Imagination” builds on the habitual discipline of daily writing established in chapter 1 in order to implement exercises for finding the ever-elusive writer’s imagination.  Toward the beginning of the chapter, Boice discusses how “imagination leads to simplification including greater clarity” (49). I noted when I read this section that having a set method for recording notes that includes limiting oneself to a certain number of words and practicing what Boice calls “list-and-gist” strategy could be very helpful as it helps writers simplify toward clarity. I often find myself recording long lists of quotes from sources either because I am looking for thesis statements and themes and do not want to take the time to read the source first and then revisit it or because I get overly excited about the “quotable” possibilities of a text. Thus, I was intrigued when Boice declares, “As writers practice noticing, organizing, and associating ideas, imagination becomes more controllable” (49). When Boice gets to the point in his chapter where he discusses the participant’s reactions and apprehensions about his detailed system of drafting notes, reviewing and revising them, and finally filing them, one of his participants admits to taking too many notes in the past: “I took reams of notes, most of it useless” (60). Using Boice’s suggested method, this same writer felt he was able to gain focus and achieve depth in his ideas.

In my master’s program, I had two friends who both had established strategies for researching and note taking that they used for every single text they encountered. Both create brief abstracts for themselves on the source, which essentially contain the details Boice encourages writers to include. They then use an electronic and/or paper filing system to organize these sources, making sure that the keywords for the source were at the top of the page. This allows them to quickly scan what they had previously read and remember where certain ideas could be found. When their “list-and-gist” was not in-depth enough for a project, they would simply return to the source and make additional notes. In talking to them, however, it seemed that their abstracts were often adequate, freeing them from being tied to long quotations from these outside sources in their own writing. 

Such anecdotes turn my attention toward the next unit in my English 1000 classes. The version of the exploratory essay that I am having my students do involves formulating a question and then completing an annotated bibliography with sources that somehow address that question. The informative nature of the annotated bibliography is then paired with a brief reflection on how their sources have influenced their initial question: what direction can they see a paper on this topic going as a result of these sources? How have their thoughts changed over the course of their research? With all the technicalities of conducting research (I can’t even find books in the Ellis library – how am I going to expect them to?), I am worried that students will relegate the exploration and reflection of their question and process to the last minute. I am also concerned that attempting to teach them healthy research methods at this point will be overwhelming. I remember being forced to try the notecard method for a research paper in high school and disliking the tediousness of writing out citations and extremely abbreviated notes on 3x5 cards. How can I give my students tools for developing their own methodologies while encouraging them to try ones that have worked for me and other writers in the past? Ultimately, I am wondering how I can emphasize prewriting in my version of the exploratory essay by essentially casting the entire essay as a “prewrite” for the argument they will formulate in their next formal writing assignment. I might even consider introducing a few of Boice’s “rules” – without using the “r” word. Rule#6 “The most fluent, efficient, comfortable, and imaginative writers spend as much time at prewriting as at prose writing” (53), could be a great place to start.

This also leads me into Carol Rodgers’ article “Defining Reflection: Another Look at John Dewey and Reflective Thinking.” John Dewey’s educational philosophy obviously permeates the modern American school system, but I have had very limited exposure to the pedagogical theory of Dewey himself. Therefore, I was surprised to learn that Dewey placed such a strong emphasis on reflection, especially since I consciously engaged in very little school-related “reflective writing” in my secondary and post-secondary education. As a result, I particularly related to Rodger’s noting that “without a clear picture of what reflection looks like, it is difficult to talk about...practitioners find themselves using terms that are common but hold different meanings or are different but have overlapping meanings” (843). I fear I was guilty of using multiple terms with slightly different meanings last week when describing reflection to my students.

Yet, what surprises me most about Rodger’s analysis is the systematic criteria that Dewey establishes for reflection. Most of my English 1000 students seem relatively excited about our first formal writing assignment and are more or less looking forward to the chance to create a narrative that reflects who they are as writers. However, I have a few students who have been very resistant to the idea of reflection or really any type of open form writing. Letting these students know that “Reflection is a systematic, rigorous, disciplined way of thinking, with its roots in scientific inquiry,” could be a helpful way to engage students who think in more scientific or mathematical ways. This criteria is of course balanced by the rest: “Reflection needs to happen in community, in interaction with others,” and “Reflection requires attitudes that value the personal and intellectual growth of oneself and of others” (845). I realize that I was wrong in seeing reflection as an individual activity that could border on narcissism with the wrong ends in mind; a reorientation toward community helps promote the type of progress Dewey supports. I also find it fascinating that reflection, in Dewey’s analysis, is a “means to essentially moral ends,” which again leads us away from the idea that reflection involves spending endless hours considering ourselves as the center of the universe and instead points us to the type of moral “action” that will benefit the community. This also points to the fact that “reflection is not an end in itself but a tool or vehicle used in the transformation of raw experience…”(863). For me, the notion of reflection as a tool is a large incentive to begin attempting this type of writing as I try teaching for the first time.