April 3, 2004
Collaborating on Assignment Guidelines
My colleague in the English program at Seton Hill U, Dennis Jerz, posts a superb reflective entry on teaching in his blog today, discussing how he routinely uses the internet to distribute handouts to students and how he might better meet student needs with them. The post focuses on what he calls "Just in Time Handouts" -- a method for typing up guidelines for the paper "live" on a computer, in a sort of collaboration with the students, in order that they might better understand the expectations for the paper and that he might know what questions they'll have before-the-fact (and so he'll be able to anticipate them in the future). I liked this idea a lot, at first blush. Get the students involved in producing the guidelines, and maybe they'll understand them better, if only because they're responsible for them to some degree. The more you can involve students in their own learning the better. And the teacher, via this process, can learn a thing or two, too. But as I re-read the post, the more skeptical I became that "just in time" handouts would really work, despite their good intentions. Who are these handouts "just in time" for? And how collaborative are they, really?
I can't really tell from Jerz' discussion whether students are free to determine any of the specifics in these guidelines -- or if he's just typing up what he wants when he discusses the assignment in class and addressing student questions as they come up while he types and talks. Probably the latter. I would worry that I would forget something important if I were doing this 'live' rather than thinking it through carefully before the fact. I assume he's got some scribbled down notes or a rough template to work with before he begins this exercise. Beyond my own forgetfulness, if I were to compose this way, it also might send the message to students that I'm totally unprepared and making things up as I went along -- rather than reflecting the fact that the teacher is trying to be flexible and adapt to current needs. Distributing polished handouts in advance sends a message that you're a prepared teacher, working with a master plan. Students tend to respect that, even if they don't understand what that plan is all the time. I know that students will drop classes with vague syllabi that don't map out homework assignments and deadlines in advance, for example. And sometimes a poorly-written handout can unconsciously/accidentally generate poorly-written papers. Would creating them "live" with up to thirty other people make them better or worse? "Too many cooks..."
I do admire Jerz' creative idea and his desire to write these things in a way that serves the students and the online community of teachers. And it would probably work well with handouts that summarize course content (like, producing a class handout on "themes in Flannery O'Connor" if they read "A Good Man is Hard to Find" that day) but I'm not sure it's appropriate for generating paper guidelines. It has good intentions, but if it isn't collaborative in the true sense of the word, then it probably won't work well.
One problem: it takes up valuable class time that might otherwise be spent on the course content. Another: if the "just in time" handout is as sketchy as Jerz's example (an actual .rtf file made in his lit class) suggests, then this would penalize absent students and not really empower the students, ultimately, to address the assignment. Jerz writes: "it probably won't make much sense if you weren't there in the class as we were constructing it -- which only shows just how much effort goes into preparing an instructional resource for the Internet." True, but I also think it only goes to show that you need to put that much effort into the resource (for students, not the internet) before the fact. If a document "doesn't make much sense," then it probably isn't worth posting or printing out, is it? I think there's something convoluted about generating a sketchy first draft of a handout "live" and expecting that that process will somehow produce a more polished paper from the students as a result. If anything, it tacitly endorses "just in time" writing: which sounds a lot like it might promote procrastination to me.
I empathize with Jerz' lament that he wishes to emphasize the students' writing process over the end product -- but that they still inevitably "protest that, if they had known what I wanted in advance, they would have given it to me in the first place, and then they wouldn't need to revise it so much." Jerz suggests that the "just in time handout" might emphasize process over product...and I'd like to believe that's true, but I wonder. While the discussion of a handout might model the "process" of planning, it isn't the process of writing the paper, really. Wouldn't it be better to spend class time having students brainstorm, write and talk about their papers and peer edit drafts than dicker over the guidelines in a handout?
Perhaps contributing to the problem is that Jerz is serving a dual audience: the freshman students in his class and those who read (and probably borrow from) his guidelines online. While this dual audience is always in place (any administrator or colleague or parent might read your assignment guidelines in a student portfolio, for example), Jerz seems to suggest that it takes more time to develop a handout for an online audience, whereas his students are a pressing need that he has to address immediately. I don't see these as competing interests -- the students, of course, should come first. The teacher can always post a revised copy of the guidelines online later (but not if it radically changes the assignment...because then students will cry "unfair!"). I don't see this as a problem with Jerz' teaching, per se -- I see it as a problem endemic to making your class public and almost "live," warts and all, on the internet...particularly if one is overloaded or has very little preparation time. I liked the moment in Jerz' blog where he wrote "I tell myself that it's OK for me, once in a great while, to create a handout that's just for the students of one class, and that is OK for me to use the Internet like a photocopier, simply to distribute that handout without turning it into a respectable online document." That's the way most of us teach, I think. One class at a time. Although Jerz' handout repository is a wonderful resource (I mean it -- check it out!), the classroom needs to come first, of course.
The fact is, that even teachers who don't post their work online make the mistake of writing guidelines for their administrators or colleagues, rather than for their students -- and -- even more often -- in an effort to "preemptively strike" against commonly received errors in papers (the ones that drive us teachers crazy -- like unsourced citations), they overload the guidelines with limitations: "make it this long, do it this way, utilize this font, and for heaven's sake don't write about XYorZ, let alone ABandC." Ironically, I attended a conference panel just yesterday related to this very topic. Our campus is hosting a great conference for the East Central Writers Association called "The Many Faces of the Writing Center" and I sat in on a session called "Making Critical Writing Pedagogy Visible in the Writing Center: Creating a Synergy of Student and Scholarly Voices," led by writing center professionals out of Indiana University-Purdue University. The gist of their presentation was that assignment guidelines tend to suppress student voices by focusing quite a bit on what should NOT go in a paper -- or otherwise saying what the teacher wants rather than what the student wants to explore. We need to make room for -- if not enable -- student voices and well-written assignment guidelines can accomplish this.
So, thinking in that vein, I would recommend "just in time" handouts only if the students truly had a hand in the content of the guidelines -- not just in terms of answering questions, but possibly writing the guidelines themselves. They can construct the rhetorical task. Have them type, while the teacher sits down and stimulates conversations about what needs to be in the document. Have them come up with the wording of the assignment, in addition to limitations. Have them bargain with issues of length, research requirements, and so forth. If the teacher isn't comfortable giving students this power and truly collaborating with them in this way -- or if the students simply are too green to know what an assignment guideline sheet needs to include -- then the teacher would probably do better to design these things before the bell rings and the class begins.
But in a doubly-ironic spin: the presenters in that panel were jotting down comments from the audience on the overhead. This is related to Jerz' method: collaborating visibly, taking down notes for visual learners, and organizing group ideas in print "live." But whereas we produced a two-column list of thoughts in blurry Sharpie ink, I wouldn't call that document anything other than, well, 'notes.' It certainly didn't give me any guidelines for producing my own assignments...just a loose batch of ideas.
One brilliant idea I took away from the panel yesterday that I never would have considered before: instructors can bring assignment guidelines to the writing center and get their feedback on it, just as a student might when they take a draft to the center! Who is in a better position to know the truth about student confusion over instructions than the campus Writing Center? Of course, teachers are loathe to seek outside help in this way -- as if it admitted that they didn't know what they were doing -- but I think it might be a way to solve the problems that Jerz brings up.
Finally, here's a few pages to look at if you came to this post looking for help in putting together your own assignment guidelines. The Manoa Writing Program has a wonderful discussion on Designing Writing Assignments that explains point-by-point what misleads students. Here's an anonymous Heuristic for Designing Writing Assignments. Univ of Toronto (which may have been co-written by Dr. Jerz himself!) has some good prompts. I also posted an entry here on Remembering the Objective of Learning Objectives last year that might be of help.
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Comments
Wow... great feedback. and lots of good points.
I'm not so sure that constructing a handout in Microsoft Word in front of the class takes any more time than writing details down on the board, so I don't think it took up too much time. And I had already given the assignment instructions (such as what goes into the various sections of the assignment), and I'm a fairly fast typist -- and any student who's gotten a paper back from me can attest that my handwriting is atrocious.
The "just in time handout" works best when it's a review, or when I'm simply trying to assess how much students already know about a subject. I did this on the board in the front of the room a few weeks ago after I introduced the "Intro to Lit" students to four modes of literary criticism -- it turns out that, based on the examples and suggestions they called out, they knew two of the four fairly well, were a little unsure on one, and needed a lot of help on another. At the end of class, I regretted writing all that info on the board, becuase it would have been very useful for me to collect it all and use it next term; thus, when the next opportunity came to construct a model of knowledge within the class, I did it in a word processor.
It's also important to note that these are guidelines for constructing the rough draft, based on where the students feel they are in terms of making progress on their paper. These aren't the guidelines for evaluating the final draft.
I was trying to compile all the advice about constructing an argument that students had learned from their various "Seminar in Thinking and Writing" instructors.
Kate & Liz... see my blog for why I wasn't on campus today. Sorry I missed it!
Oh, and I didn't actually work on that particular U of T handout. They still seem to be using the design I left for them, however.
Thanks for clarifying the process you're using for the "just in time" handout concept, Dennis. The more I hear, the more it sounds like a good stepping stone into the paper, actually. I've always fallen on the side of "less is more" with assignment guidelines, but I do think there are both risks and interesting possibilities when collaborating with the class on them.
Kate & Liz: thanks for reminding me of the conference. Wish I could have spent more time circulating. (And I wish there were more conferences like these on our campus!) Kudos to Kim Pennesi for her orchestration of all this.
Thanks for the kind words about the East Central Writing Centers Association conference--it's great to hear the session you attended gave you some insight into writing centers. One of our goals in hosting the conference was to provide faculty with opportunities for considering new ways to work with students' writing, and I'm glad that we may have had at least some limited success.
Our closing panel discussion at the conference dealt with "the four-sided triangle" of student, consultant, writing center director, and classroom teacher, and negotiating their different expectations of and roles in the writing center session. We broke into groups and discussed how to deal with problems, such as what a consultant should do if a student shows him a professor's guidelines for citation that are incorrect, or what a professor should do if a student reports that a consultant is giving her inappropriate advice on her papers. I liked what one person from Michigan State suggested--that in any of the scenarios, a dialogue between the professor and the writing center coordinator would be most helpful in clarifying and solving issues.
I think one of the best parts of the conference was that it afforded students the chance for professional development, and my writing consultants were thrilled by their involvement. The ECWCA prides itself on being a very student-friendly organization, and I believe having SHU students participate in such experiential learning is invaluable. I agree that more conferences on our campus would be great for our students--as long as I don't have to plan them ;)
Good discussion. I think part of what's at issue here is the most neglected part of the writing process: invention. Writing Centers often gear primarily to revision strategies--or they help a student interpret the professor's assignment, but not always in creative ways.
I agree with Mike that the assignment sheet needs to lay out clear expectations and criteria so a student can anticipate where and how she will be evaluated. I agree with Dennis that 'getting started' requires greater informality. I have clearly developed assignment sheets (they are on my web page), but then I devise inclass activities intended as invention techniques: I use free writes, response writing, role play, formal debate--lots of different ways of getting students enagaged with the material before they have to produce a draft.
Management theory has a useful set of concepts for thinking about this: loose and tight properties of organizations. I apply these notions to the writing classroom this way--the criteria for evaluation and grading need to be tight (highly specified), but the approach to the writing task needs to be loose (lots of different ways for students to find their way in).
John, good assessment of the situation. When I try to make my documents do double duty, as guides to get students started and as guides for evaluation, I can never find the right balance. But when I release the "get you started" handout first, and the more detailed one later, I sometimes feel students use that as an excuse to complain, "If you'd told us you wanted it that way, we'd have done it that way in the first place," and thereby attempt to free themselves of the burden of having to revise.
I found it freeing to work with the class on the activity of constructing what you'd call the loose approach to writing -- that's something I hadn't done before on traditional writing assignments (though I do use it when I have students evaluate each other's first web pages).
Some very interesting ideas. While I strongly disagree with John's characterization of writing centers (for example, my writing consultants often work with students on prewriting/brainstorming strategies), I do find that students often want more structure in their assignments and are afraid to take risks in their writing. They want to do the writing assignment "right"--that is, "give the teacher what he or she wants."
Perhaps how "loose" or "tight" the assignment or criteria is depends a good bit on the type of learners we're dealing with. My basic writing classes are primarily freshmen, sprinkled with some upperclassmen. For the most part, the freshmen are the ones saying things like "I'm not sure if I did what you wanted me to [or what I was supposed to do]" when they hand in their papers. Who can blame them when they've often been taught to write in a very structured way (5-paragraph essays, practice for writing assessments, etc.)?
I do believe that we should try to help student writers become more independent, to be more open in their invention and approaches to writing. However, if we are dealing with freshmen or other dependent learners, we may have to challenge them a little at a time--a progressively looser approach.
Whoa! A great posting followed by a great discussion on writing. I hope everyone on the faculty is reading this.
Dr. Arnzen: Thank you for attending the conference and spreading the word about how writing centers can benefit faculty. It's energizing for those of us who work in the writing center to see faculty members taking an interest in what we have to offer. It makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside. :)