Introduction / Cover Letter
Welcome to my portfolio! This page is geared towards providing teachers with tools for integrating writing into a literature or general curriculum. It serves as a portfolio of my works while also offering a complete semester’s worth of writing activities at approximately a freshman or sophomore level. While I hope to expand it in the future to incorporate more traditional portfolio items, this should give you a good idea of how I approach writing in my own classes.
This curriculum offers students a chance to work on a full-semester research project. In doing so, I hope to prepare students for longer projects, for instance, their senior thesis, while also generating an undergraduate-journal-worthy piece of writing. You can alternatively modify this into three or more separate essays.
I have taught a total of 14 semesters, including 6 semesters as the sole teacher of a course. While a majority of that is teaching English Literature or Writing and Composition, I have also assisted in computer science and ecology courses. I have seen that, in all disciplines, student-directed writing and discussion are the core of thinking, focus, and retention.
I have also seen that teachers cannot generally afford to set aside more time in an already-busy schedule. I care deeply about making accessible materials, and part of accessibility means that materials should be easy and quick to access, implement, and grade. Fortunately, including writing in the place of other assignments, such as quizzes, tests, and lectures, can save as much time as it costs. Each section will discuss strategies for minimizing time spent lesson-planning and grading while also authentically engaging with students.
All these assignments are flexible. The reasoning behind the major choices is explained, but as long as students are writing, talking, and reflecting over the subject matter, they’re learning (For more on reflection and transfer of learning, see A Rhetoric of Reflection, particularly 24-25). You should feel good about teaching, especially if you try something new, even if it doesn’t go well.
This portfolio is meant to be a module that teachers can easily add onto their course in a way to reduce workload in the long term. I hope to continue to study pedagogy and develop digital resources for teachers. Specifically, I want to be even more ambitious in the course of five years– making resources for digital humanities projects and specific, tricky-to-teach materials.
Grading Strategies
Student writing adding to their grading load will dissuade some teachers from assigning writing. This may be mitigated– even lowering a teacher’s total work– through clever (and research-supported!) use of class time and grading schema.
Ungrading, Completion Grading, and Feedback
Only grading completion–real completion– significantly lowers the amount of work for teachers. You may (and should) still use a rubric to show that it meets the minimum standards and to help them understand where they are, but either the essay is done or it is not. You have a brief meeting with the students who need to continue to work on it and give them an extra week. In that meeting, you formulate a plan for revision. If the student puts meaningful effort into their plan and improves their work, they complete the assignment. Otherwise, they fail it and may get a pre-determined incomplete grade (50-70%), likely not lower than what you would give the student for that essay. Late work is also penalized.
This frees the student up to take risks— they can make a B paper, and it’s not a problem. Psychologically, they’ll be motivated to do better than that; they don’t want to make a B paper, and if they only shoot for a B, there’s a strong chance they need to revise– your standards can be higher with this style of grading (I do recommend having your ‘revision’ standard be at a B-paper level, at least to start). There are a few studies showing ungrading and alternative-grading’s effectivity, probably most notably in the book Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to do Instead).
This also frees you up to focus on the actual issues of a paper. Research has shown that students make more grammatical errors when performing more cognitively difficult tasks– in other words, they mostly know their grammar, although you might point out major and repeated issues. Your feedback probably should not exceed one comment per paragraph and focus on higher-order concerns– Do they actually answer the question? Do they have a structure? Is their logic sound? And then if it is, you can point out lower-order concerns: Is their grammar and style spot-on? What is actually holding this paper back, and what is it successfully accomplishing?
For smaller assignments, like weekly writings, you don’t need to go beyond completion. A quick comment is nice, but you know how much time you have. Weekly writings will be helpful to the student’s own process and exist to give them a chance to reflect, not for you to give feedback.
These assignments are modified versions of assignments originally created by Kacee McKinney.
Major Essays
Paper 1 – Analysis
For the first paper, I recommend a textual analysis meant to gauge their basic skills as writers and thinkers. In this paper’s original context, it would demonstrate that they have the skills from previous literature courses to succeed in this course. It primarily tests reading comprehension, showing evidence, synthesizing thoughts, and focus, a surprisingly difficult skill– will they answer the question they are asked? The question here is straightforward– what is a theme in the text, and what are some literary techniques that add to or change how we see that theme?
Essay One – Theme and Literary Technique Analysis
Paper 2 – Lit Review
Paper 2 asks students to step outside their comfort zone in a few ways. The assignment is not presented as a typical paper, but rather, as an exploratory, personal literature review. The crux of the assignment is explaining the bearings two peer-reviewed papers or chapters have on the student’s research question.
Importantly, they should not use this paper to fully answer their question– that’s what the final paper is for. They are telling their audience how other people have approached questions related to theirs in the past and finding something the field needs. Creating a good research question is surprisingly difficult. I like to break the questions into categories of philosophical, historical, or artistic (more in Writing Homework 6).
Essay 2 – Personal Literature Review
Paper 3 – Research Essay
Paper 3 asks students to do their best to emulate an academic article, with the goal of creating something they could submit to an undergraduate research journal. I strongly recommend having a first draft due early– they’ve already done the lion’s share of research, this will free up that crunchy last month for revision and further thought.
Students often reach the end of their college career without having performed a major, semester-long process on a paper. It feels difficult and weird to write and rewrite the same thing over and over. This is also a vital skill for academics, and presenting it in a safe and highly-controlled course (especially an un-graded one) will help them realize an actual process, become suffused in their research, and give them a chance to change their minds, find a nuance, add to a conversation.
There are also reasons to not cumulate to a grand research paper at the end of the semester. Even in an un-graded course, 7 pages, 3 academic sources, and an original thesis on a question that they themselves develop is a big ask, and smaller, more directed papers will build more confidence with more rapid iterations. I think the upsides of the long research paper are worth the downsides, however, especially in a pre-upper-level course.
Weekly Writings
Students learn from doing, and they learn much, much better from doing if they also reflect on what they do. These activities are meant to be done in informal style with minimal copyediting. They are meant to provide students with a space to express and refine their thoughts, but also to provide you with a space for “scaffolding” assignments, where you can ask students to outline, try out new writing techniques, try to write creatively, and edit and revise. These activities can easily substitute for other forms of homework and be used to check that students do assigned readings and have something to say about them.
In other words, these activities should actually decrease the amount of work on the teacher while not adding to the total amount of work a student does– they need to outline and think about their outline anyways. You can even do these in class, although I hope to begin their essay sessions with these and let them dig through their notes and work.
You can also have students add polite comments to each others’ posts (maybe 2 per week) to help norm the class’s writing style.
Class Activities
Free Writes
Free writes enable students to quickly generate ideas that they can support with evidence. This makes putting students “on the spot” a much better experience all around– what did they write about; what evidence do they have for that claim? It also helps practice writing quickly, a good skill to have in general (and for the GRE).
Think-Pair-Share
Awkward pauses can be quite productive after asking questions, but think-pair-shares, in my experience, are more productive. This gives them time to, again, generate ideas they can support with evidence and adds a testing ground– they only need to tell a partner their ideas before they tell the class. It teaches teamwork skills, has a layer of accountability, and replaces an awkward pause with better participation. Asking students to jot down their ideas will add a writing component to this activity.
Peer-Review
Peer review can be an awkward and tedious endeavor, but most research on the matter supports its use, including a recent meta-analysis. I tell my students that research shows that peer review benefits the people who add the comments, maybe more than the person being reviewed. I also put the actual contents of the peer review into their hands. I have 1 question which asks the peer reviewer to examine my most significant concern– in general, do they actually answer the given question, and do they keep the promises made by their thesis?
The students generate 2 other questions or concerns they have for the paper. This lets them softball peer review for themselves if they’re worried and even makes room for copyediting, if the student wants copyediting. I feel there is a pervasive aversion to copyediting in writing centers and even writing classes, and so I try to make space for it, although I emphasize that revision is very different from copyediting.
Peer Review Activity Worksheet
Grammar Refreshers
In general, students already know basic grammar. What they lack, they improve if they keep reading and writing, and lecturing over grammar topics does not have a significant impact. Students’ grammar suffers when they have a cognitively difficult task. So, they more need to slow down than learn grammar.
Still, I think there’s value in asking students to think about and learn the edge cases of grammar. Learning from reading and doing only goes so far for prescriptive grammar. Some rules are arbitrary and only used in academic English. Additionally, getting students thinking about language is inherently helpful. So, I have some presentations which linger on the weird edge cases of grammar here.
Experience as a GWF
The Graduate Writing Fellowship, a graduate fellowship offered by the University of Mississippi Department of Writing and Rhetoric, gave me a chance to spend a year focusing on teaching writing specifically. In the English department, this means working for a 20-person pre-upper-level course, rather than being a teaching assistant and discussion leader for 60 students in a survey. Additionally, the position meant that I would not be assigned grading duties. Instead, I would be given design control over the writing aspects of the course, including the essays and weekly writings, and given weekly class time to work on writing. Additionally, I would be open for appointments with students to discuss and help with the writing. This was couple with a class, WRIT 671, designed to teach the fundamental pedagogy of writing.
This was a splendid experience, and I hope all teachers get a chance to dive deep into the theory of teaching their fields and chances to redesign their classes in a collaborative setting. Although (from other guidance from the DWR) a lot of my teaching was based on sound principles, I could only confirm them somewhat individually, by the seat of my pants. The two selected books, A TA’s Guide to Teaching Writing and Engaging Ideas were really helpful and well-laid-out introductions to teaching writing with substantive and accessible research pathways. Coupled with previous experience of The St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing and Oral Communications in the Disciplines, my goals and ethos of teaching emerged.
Teaching is pretty intractable from learning. In both, the goal is improvement, and all improvement should be celebrated and treated as an iterative process which is never quite over. Learning happens best in doing, reflecting, and communicating. Students learn best from their peers and own self-consciousness, especially in something as suffuse to the world as writing. Focusing on goals, generally two to three things at a time, is helpful, although there will be more implicit skills buried there. Cognitive burden makes writing more difficult but will be straightened out in the future.
Reading and writing, similarly, are intractable, iterative processes. Many, many students enter the English major with a hope to do creative writing. This should be considered in designing a course, and students will want to talk about their own ideas and need ways to make things personal to them. I think one of the best things writing essays does is give students ownership over a piece of text. It’s their thing that they are saying. Reading will give students the grammar skills they need, and we can just focus on the weird, formalized exceptions and the prescriptive cases qua prescriptive cases.
Learning as a GWF also helped me reflect on my own writing. I see how certain techniques can add wordiness but also increase clarity, or add clarity but decrease precision, or decrease wordiness but obfuscate meaning. Talking with students about their writing similarly helps me dialogically reflect on my own process, think about where and how I get stuck or slowed down. Adding in these reflections has helped me look at my own writing more charitably and revisit old writings with less harsh emotions.
I will be teaching 299 next semester with the same professor. I hope to use that iteration to further refine and personalize these resources, along with gathering more data and examples. The GWF was an ideal program for me, and I plan to dig more into pedagogical theories and studies. I already attend as many DWR presentations and workshops as I can, and I hope to continue to do so. I’m also talking with people in the library about possibly doing some presentations on digital humanities, and might do them in relation to education.
Sources
This website is indebted to:
People:
Angela Green, Graduate Writing Fellows coordinator
Kate Lechler, the professor of ENG 299, where I first tried these assignments
Kacee McKinney, a previous GWF whose structure I am iterating on
Academic Works:
Bean, John C., et al. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. 2nd ed., Jossey-Bass, 2011.
Dannells, Deanna P., et al. Oral Communication in the Disciplines: A Resource for Teacher Development and Training. Parlor Press LLC, 2016.
Glenn, Cheryl, and Goldthwaite, Melissa A. The St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing, 7th ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2014.
Hedengren, Beth Finch. A TA’s Guide to Teaching Writing in All Disciplines. Macmillan, 2004.
Appendix
These materials do not directly work in concert with