For example, this year, before explaining the concept of rhetorical situation, I had my students search out blogs and write a quick response to them. They were to consider the blog writer’s credentials, his presentation, hosting website if applicable, prospective audience, and specific content of a post or two. The idea was to get the students to think about issues of ethos, pathos, logos, audience, genre, discourse and context prior to actually introducing the terms and concepts. Additionally, I also hoped to garner information on topics that students cared to discuss for future lessons as well as demonstrate to them the variety of topics on which they could write persuasively.

Posts to this response ranged from CNN and Fox News to ESPN and Perez Hilton. This activity helped lay the groundwork for discussing rhetorical situation. My lecture on that topic was grounded in their responses and followed by an in-class dissection of a video clip from The Onion. We treated the piece with two approaches: first, we discussed the elements of the video on a surface level, assuming it was a true news story; secondly, we examined the satire involved. This was a fun and well-received method of discussing the historic moment and cultural context of any given piece.

These two activities, inevitably, led to discussions of rhetoric and media, which I had anticipated. The unit on Rhetorical Analysis was capped by a reading of Brooke Gladstone’s The Influencing Machine which discusses the relationship between media producers and consumers. Through an individual responses before class and an in class group writing activity, my students worked on introductions, theses, and transition sentences of rhetorical analyses of The Influencing Machine. This sequence of assignments provided opportunities to examine multiple examples of discourse in a variety of media while maintaining the focus on rhetorical situation concepts.

Over the course of the last two semesters, I played around with the scheduling of these assignments and classwork in my three sections of 1020 (e.g. one section had the rhetorical situation lecture delivered prior to the blog activity). The above description represents what I feel may be the best approach. The two individual responses were graded while participation in the classroom activities affected the participation score at the end of the semester. The culmination, the rhetorical analysis paper on their chosen work of media discourse (I include documentaries and speeches) was valued at 15% of the overall grade.

Bradley Stabler is a PhD student and GTA in the English Department at WSU. Although he is primarily concerned with chivalric romances of the late middle ages, he enjoys the challenge of molding his 1020 students into critical thinkers and efficient communicators.

Take a hat. Place slips of paper with typed out quotes in said hat. Shake well. The hat was a wool fedora and, though it may have been equally productive, I wasn’t trying to pull a Dadaist poem from the hat but rather was trying to open up classroom discussion to all of my students, those ready and willing to speak as well as the meek, the disinterested. That the exercise (to be described in greater detail below) was only partially successful was due to a few factors that I’ve identified upon reflection: first, there was my own over-eagerness to force the exercise to work and then, second, my too quick mis-assessment about students’ attitudes toward work both inside and outside of class.

Mini miscalculation number one: admitting to the class that I had been assigned to complete the hatful of quotes exercise in my practicum. It seems kind of meta to me now, thinking of how I tried to explain this to them, “I’m a student in a class about teaching this class and this is both my homework assignment and our class exercise,” and I have no idea why I thought it wise to even try. On reading through Stephen Brookfield and Stephen Preskill’s Discussion as a Way of Teaching, I had identified the hatful of quotes exercise (described in Chapter Four, “Getting Discussion Going,” page 81) as something I would like to try out; so it seemed fortuitous when I was assigned the exercise. Rather than just accepting the chance and rolling with it, I felt some small desire to distance myself from the exercise by talking about it like I knew it was slightly silly or out of the norm but, sorry, I have to do it for class!

I had cut up slips of paper with quotations from the previous evening’s reading assignment—that ad assignment stand-by, Thomas Frank’s “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent”—and put the slips in the hat. The idea was to have each student pull a slip, free write on the quote with some direction (we had read about putting other people’s arguments in our own words in They Say/I Say, so their “if all else fails” directive was to put this quote and/or Frank’s main point in their own words), and then generate some discussion from each student’s reaction to their quotes. Point of clarification, there were four different quotes from Frank in the hat. My plan was to first ask for a volunteer to read his or her quote aloud and then for everyone else who pulled the same quote to speak before opening the quote and the points raised in relation to the quote up to the whole class.

Miscalculation number two (a calibration I’m still trying to gauge): assuming, even if my students had completed a reading response to the Frank essay, that they had read through the entire essay or read it carefully enough to have more to say than just “Frank thinks advertising is bad.” So one of my more talkative students readily volunteered to read his quote and his response first but, when asked for clarification or elaboration on his points, said student responded that he didn’t know because he had only read a little bit of the article. Ok. The next student repeated the pattern, “I thought ____ means ____ but I can’t say any more about it because I didn’t read the whole essay.” So, over-reacting to the prospect of my class activity collapsing, uncomfortable with the silence and just a wee bit aggravated, I went on a rant detailing the finer points of what Frank was up to in the quote under discussion, its relation to the main line of his argument. I’m still working on developing wait time, enjoying the silence like a good Depeche Mode song, but my slight case of paroxysm seemed, at the time, to do the trick. Subsequent clusters of quotations had some understanding of where I wanted the discussion to go but it was all too pat. I’d done the heavy-lifting, drawn the links or whatever and now they were parroting my points back to me. I’d taken a few strange admissions of guilt as symptomatic for the whole class and then overcompensated, stifling whatever original material, dissenting opinions, questions, the class had written on their lined sheets in favor of hearing my reading of Frank in redux.

I left class feeling somewhat satisfied. I’d achieved some of my goals: everyone spoke! they understood the Frank article! But then I realized that, who really cares about the Frank article? I’d wanted to work on developing the kind of “democratic discussion” that Brookfield and Preskill describe in their book, a classroom in which, to quote these authors quoting Henry Giroux, we “struggle together within social relations that strengthen rather than weaken possibilities for active citizenship” (19). Instead, I’d told them how I read Frank’s essay. Looking back those few weeks (the semester seems so long and the hatful of quotes session seems ages ago now), this was but some first baby steps towards the kind of discussion I want to encourage in my classroom. I think I shamed some people for daring to not do their reading (or at least shamed them for publicly declaring that they hadn’t read). And maybe, being generous to my teaching practice on that day, I’d modeled the kind of reading I wanted students to do at home and then carry with them to discussion the next day in class. But really what was most useful, I started to recognize that for discussion to be worthwhile sometimes I had to shut up, enjoy the silence and pass the hat.

Jonathan Plumb is a PhD candidate at Wayne State in Literature and Culture after 1870 with a research interest in the Avant-Garde and spatial dynamics. He is currently teaching his first section of 1020.

You might want to use today as an opportunity to fall in love with our archive (here and here), where you can find over three dozen posts sharing tips, tricks, and reflections about teaching writing at Wayne State University.

Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B” keeps reappearing in my teaching life. When I taught high school, I remember it being especially valuable in a unit on developing identity. In this sense, it was useful to me as a potential spark for personal introductions in the composition course. But a couple of years ago, I began considering the poem in a new light, and looked at it in terms of how the speaker of the poem exhibits the ability to play with the assignment he has been given. Instead of a paper, he writes a poem. Initially, I was attracted to the concept of play this poem seems to highlight, and thought about ways that I could introduce this concept to my composition students, to begin to get them to think differently about the ways they composed their writing in response to course assignments.

Last winter, I created an introduction assignment asking students to “play” with the instructions and to create whatever kind of text they felt best worked with the ideas they were presenting. The results were several poems, a video, a comic strip, and, of course, many “regular” essays. While we continued to keep this concept of play in mind throughout the semester, I began to understand that such an emphasis (for example, on play) needs to be central (not just occasional) to the work of the course if students are to really take it up as a practice. While I worked with students to meet other course outcomes, this interest in play took a back seat, and I filed it away in my mental folder of things to work on in the future.

This semester, because students respond to the poem, and because I am particularly interested in making sure that students have opportunities to announce themselves to the class, as the speaker of the poem does, I came back to the poem as a starting point, as a way to begin to think about another personal introduction assignment. The poem begins with an instructor’s directions to (his) students: “Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you— / Then it will be true” (Hughes). The way this poem is structured—as a teacher’s prompt followed by a student’s response—allows us to look at it not (only) in terms of its literary qualities, but also in terms of how the poem might operate as an example of a student’s response to a writing assignment. This quality seems, to me, to be an especially interesting aspect of the poem, and one that makes it suited for use in the composition classroom.

On the second day of class, I asked students to read the poem (and to watch a video performance of the poem) with the following questions in mind:

* How does the speaker of the poem respond to the assignment given to him by his English teacher?

* What do we learn about him through this response (in both what he tells us and what we can infer about him)?

* What is he doing in this poem; that is, what tactics or approaches does he use to complete the assignment and to describe himself.

* Did you get anything from listening to the poem that you did not notice (as much) in reading it on the page?

* What questions or responses did reading this poem invoke in you?

I have asked these questions in previous semesters, and they have led to valuable comments from students. The results of this semester’s discussion were unexpected for me, though. First, I have to say that discussion works significantly better at a large conference table where students can see each other than it does with them in rows, all facing me. They are suddenly accountable to each other for what they say, not just to me (or, at least, it feels this way). This seating arrangement has also been tremendously helpful in helping students form supportive peer relationships in the writing classroom. Discussion also works better now that I am more comfortable with letting it go wherever it may and with asking students follow-up questions to get them to more clearly articulate their ideas and extend each other’s discussions (this takes practice, and it is worth it to watch people who are really good at it in action—we should be asking around about these people). All sorts of interesting threads came out of the students’ initial discussion of the poem:

* Comments on and responses to expressivist styles of teaching (as modeled in the teacher’s instructions in the poem)
* Discussions about development of ideas: from the basic to the complex; from outward appearance and geography, to thoughts, feelings, and questions
* Comments on the writing process (“I wonder if it’s that simple?”)
* Questions about the speaker’s goals: What does he want to say in this poem? Is he speaking for others?

This is not a comprehensive list, of course, but the ideas students discussed that day will likely be relevant as we work through students’ writing projects this semester: Where is your voice in this writing? In what ways do you see yourself speaking from within a particular community? What do you want to argue or accomplish in this piece? What stages did you work through in developing an idea for this essay? How can you best organize this text? We will be able to recall our initial discussion of the poem as we enter into these conversations.

My point is that during the first week of class, students showed their knowledge of these writing issues in their discussion of the poem. Given the opportunity to talk about what they knew about writing (and to do so in the context of discussing someone else’s writing—albeit fictional, in a way—instead of their own) allowed students to showcase their knowledge, and allowed me to get a feeling for the kinds of things my students feel are worth talking about in the writing class. I believe this interest in discussing certain aspects of writing will lead to more meaningful learning experiences for students (a concept argued for by Dewey and later Macrorie).

Our students are not coming to us as blank slates. Part of what I like about this poem is how it highlights what one student brings with him to his college English classroom—his complex feelings, experiences, and background—and how knowing this catalogue of information about him might somehow be important to the instructor, too. I was amazed this semester by how something as simple as letting my students talk about their responses to the poem (instead of me trying to get at something, like play) allowed them space to say so many interesting and important things about writing.

Adrienne Jankens is a Ph.D. candidate and lecturer teaching ENG 1020. She is interested in inquiry pedagogy and collaborative research practices.

“Necessity is still the matter of invention,” says Al Manners (a character in Alice Childress’s play Trouble in Mind). Helping composition students find the content and context by which necessity might invent some meaningful argument or analysis can be somewhat of a tricky task. Especially for students who enter our classrooms with attitudes about writing, or skill sets in writing that deter their ability to see themselves as apprenticed rhetoricians constantly negotiating the rhetorical situation.

Within the past few weeks I’ve been roaming through scholarship on Writing about Writing (WAW), teaching for transfer, language and identity, retention, and symbolic power. The writing priorities privileged by writing about writing instruction (e.g. rhetoric, genre, writing process, subject matter, and discourse community knowledge) have strong implications for Wayne State University’s student retention issues (also articulated as WSU’s black/white educational divide)—mostly because of it’s ability to provide students with a complex and sophisticated tool kit for navigating various writing situations. But what WAW and teaching for transfer don’t seem to consider is the “hybrid conditions of multiracial America or the pluralistic demography of the new American school” (Kirkland “Black Skin, White Masks”) or the fact that even the best set of writing theories can be jeopardized by what Arnetha Ball and Ted Lardner call “teacher efficacy,” the ways in which racial, religious, socioeconomic, social and cultural identities shape and inform teaching practices (xvi). With that being said, I’ve been reflecting on my work at the MSU Writing Center (WC), my time with “at-risk” students in programs like Upward Bound, or DREW Scholars, and Office of Supportive Services (Academic Affairs). Many of these programs (like that of WSU’s WC) promote safe houses where groups of students work with writing experts in informal professional settings outside of the composition classroom over a two-to-four year time frame. Working with students who often frequented the WC or discussing writing in say a dorm cafeteria or coffee house established mentoring relationship that helped students repurpose and renegotiate new rhetorical situations. Also, when considering my experiences in writing communities (as safe houses) to the transfer of learning scholarship and WAW curriculum, the idea of seeing/showing students their role as apprenticed rhetoricians was coupled with: 1.) Using Writing for Advocacy, showing students how to strategically advocate for themselves (e.g. visiting instructor office hours, clarifying what’s expected based on observations of a given writing assignment, writing persuasive emails to professors, asking good questions, suggesting new ways of looking at a writing assignment) 2.) Writing & Resilience, teaching students how writing can also be used to problem-solve, and counter personal struggles with inquiry, and 3.) Writing & Identity Negotiations, In African American vernacular English the saying “keepin’ it real,” implies being true to oneself, and one’s ancestry (Smitherman 36). The idea of keepin’ it real can be a valuable concept when unearthing issues of discourse community conflict, where performed academic identities seem forced, “fake” or monotonous. The idea is to teach students writing skill sets without insider/outsider dichotomies so that they can integrate into the structure and become “beings of themselves,” instead of beings of someone else’s communal identity (Friere 74). In my next blog post, I’ll talk more about these three elements as I’m very much interested in establishing student writing communities using WAW. Namáste.

LaToya Faulk received her MA in Rhetoric and Writing Michigan State University in 2009. She joined the department as a lecturer in 2011 and is currently teaching ENG 1020.

The discussion on multiple intelligences and what that can mean for the 1010 classroom was quite fascinating. I was particularly attracted to Ruth Ray’s discussion of multiple intelligences and what the implications of that may be for the composition classroom. I believe that nearly all teachers already understand on some level that individual students learn in individual ways. Now how that is articulated and then applied to the classroom is another matter. There are elements of my 1010 pedagogy that are directly relatable to the discussion on multiple intelligences, particularly cultural criticism and conferencing.

First of all, as stated by Dr. Ray, our intelligences are developed within cultures and tend to be culturally dependent: how we learn and understand the world is tied into our cultures. One thing I believe every student understands to a greater and lesser degree and is curious about is his or her culture. We all have the ability to some degree to read our cultures as we would a text. This is also a topic that students seem to be eager to write about. Further, as Ray mentioned, it can be good to throw students a bit off balance, and discussing culture in a way that students are not completely familiar with can achieve that objective.

Additionally, because students learn in their own way and at their own pace, plus may not be detail oriented when it comes to their writing, I find that it is very helpful to conference with students on their essays. In my 1010 classes, I conference with students on three of five of their graded essays, so instead of taking the shotgun approach to writing instruction and discussing elements that some students may not be doing well in the class, I can discuss directly with the students what they are doing well and not so well. This has become so popular in my 1010 classes that some students have requested that I conference with them on all of their papers.

A third point made by Ray was that greater depth, rather than breadth, may we called for in teaching students with multiple intelligences and I find this approach indispensable in my own pedagogy. I have found that it is best to teach 1010 students one essay form, the five-paragraph persuasive essay, throughout the semester. I integrate the modes required by the department into the assignments and vary the subject matter with each essay. It has been my experience that trying to teach too many different kinds of essay forms to my basic writers means that they will not learn how to master any of the forms, and particularly, one essential form, a form that I believe prepares them for the more complicated formats that they will have to learn in more advanced courses.

Teaching for multiple intelligences could well inform any pedagogy, but I believe it is particularly useful for teaching basic writers. These writers need something interesting to discuss in class and write about in their papers. It is useful to discuss their writing one on one because no two basic writers are the same, and each has his or her own weaknesses and strengths which can be more readily pointed out in face-to-face meetings. Further, teaching 1010 students how to master one basic form is more useful than teaching them many different forms, at which they may or may not become adept.

Bill Rouster is a Special Lecturer in the Writing Department at Oakland University. He received his Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric from Wayne State in 1994 and has continued to teach in the WSU English Department as an Adjunct Professor.

I was putting radiation in my head with my Blackberry the other day, while pondering what to write this blog post about, when it hit me like a tumor: Little Red Riding Hood and those spooky old woods of peer review.

I have never been a fan of peer review in beginning composition classes, and I have been less of a fan of peer review in technical writing classes. In composition courses, the student looking for the peer review—Little Red Riding Hood—goes walking through those nasty woods—peer review—completely unaware that there is a big bad wolf about to devour her—gender inequality notwithstanding—unintended ignorance on the part of the peer reviewers. They know as little or less about what comprises good writing as Little Red—so what’s the point? And, to make matters worse (or to make the woods a little darker and a little spookier (not to overextend the metaphor), in Technical Writing, those woods are practically non-negotiable: what, after all, do our peer reviewers know about formatting, descending order of priority, good organization, page design, etc., etc.?

However, at the end of the day, we all know that Little Red does indeed escape Big Bad and presumably gains a measure of worthwhile feedback on her writing project. How?

The answer, I think, lies in numbers. If we expand the nasty woods to include an entire class, we accomplish two goals: 1. The sheer number of people peering and reviewing leads to better results, always; and, 2. The peer review is now led by the instructor, who, presumably, knows these woods and can foil Big Bad.

So, the methodology I have adopted to help Little Red on her way to Grandma’s—a successful writing project—is to request students to bring their works in progress in for review; whereupon, we project their drafts on the screen at the front of the room. We begin, always, with what we like about someone’s draft, and we end by discussing how that draft might be improved. It has proven a highly effective method in any class with a writing project and students invariably come to appreciate the process.

Now, if there were only something I could do about those werewolves I hear howling out behind the shed…

Dave Mackinder received an MFA in creative writing and literary theory from Wayne State and has been an instructor of Technical Writing in the department since 1994. He is currently serving on the Composition Committee on Assessment.

UPDATE: Copies of the powerpoint presentation and learning outcomes group activity description from the workshop, as well as an annotated bibliography of assessment resources, are now available to download.

Would you think I was nuts? Would you immediately go into “skeptical mode?” Well, dust off your believin’ caps and prepare to hop on this train. What I’m proposing is a sure thing, man.

Let me tell you a story.

Yesterday, I finished up my first round of one-on-one conferences with my students. It took two full days to fit in all three of my ENG 1020 sections: ten-minute conferences for each student. It was so worth it. At the end of two days, my students have all told me how to pronounce their names correctly, learned where my office is, completed and talked through initial (or “shitty” as we call them, via Anne Lamott’s fabulous chapter) drafts of their first essays, garnered individual instruction from me, and reflected on their essay content and writing processes. Reading back over all of that, it does sound too good to be true, doesn’t it? But such is the power of the individual writing conference, and if you haven’t tried it yet, or don’t really do it enough, let me tell you about what you’re missing out on.

Helping Students with the Logistics
Some students do get lost on their way to their first conference. I do not let this bother me. They always find my office, eventually. And, plopping down with relief into the extra rolly-chair, they tell me about their adventure with a mixture of tall-tale drama and pride. This is a victory that helps them gain crucial confidence early in their college careers. Not only that, when we engage in one-on-one conferences, students can see me model ways to talk about their writing-moves. Patthey-Chavez and Ferris refer to this a “academic socialization,” and it helps students learn more about ways we talk about writing in the academy, as well as the instructional stances they are likely to meet throughout their college careers (54).

Helping Students with Individualized Instruction
One-on-one conferences are one of the best ways I can think of to identify students’ particular needs and strengths. We know that writers have individual composing processes, and we may even talk about it in class, but how do you provide instruction to meet the needs of the advanced student, the struggling student, and everyone in between (Harris 15-19)? Over the past two days, I have been able to talk to one student about transition words, one about strategies for crafting introductions, one about how we can work around his dyslexia, and another on thesis statements/main points. None of those students needed the same things, and being able to help them with their writing needs allowed each one to leave the conference with a tailored plan-of-action as they move forward with their revisions.

Helping Students Practice Reflection
In their article, “Writing Conference Talk: Factors Associated with High- and Low-Rated Writing Conferences,” Carolyn Walker and David Elias state that conferences provide, “a particularly effective setting for the development of a student’s ability to reflect critically on his or her own work, its content, and the cognitive processes involved in producing the writing” (267). Instructors can facilitate this, of course, by purposefully maintaining the focus on the student and his or her writing (281). This can be hard to do if, like me, you tend to be a nervous talker. It might feel most comfortable to reiterate to the student things you’ve said in class, just to make sure they got it. This approach will not help your students reflect on their own writing, however. My two main tricks for making sure I don’t dominate the conference are 1) ask questions and 2) practice wait time. “What’s up with your draft?” is usually a good, broad opener. Then, I practice wait time and literally wait until the student speaks. This gives the student an opportunity to reflect over their draft and writing process, and then articulate back to me what is, in fact, up.

The end result of these one or two days will be a stronger rapport with your students, a better understanding of where each one is in his or her writing process, and an opportunity for students to practice reflection and awareness in their composing. All for the low, low price of absolutely NO COST TO YOU!!! (Ok, except maybe two rather long days…and perhaps even some numbness in your backside from all that sitting.) What are you waiting for? Schedule your conferences today.

Nicole Guinot Varty received her MA in Written Communication and the Teaching of Writing from Eastern Michigan University in 2009. She joined the department as a lecturer in 2011 and is currently teaching ENG 1020.

Where do these students go once they have failed to move on to higher level writing courses? Are they successful the second time around? The third? Maybe some seek alternative options, such as a transferrable writing course at a community college (nearly 50% of our 3010 students have taken first-year composition outside of our department), but what becomes of them in the following semesters?

Some students are indeed successful the second time going through our courses. Having gone through the course once before and having a chance to experience the major assignments a second time, students who previously missed the mark the first time are often able to squeak by with a C (instead of that C- the first time). Perhaps they are able to connect with another instructor better the second time around, maybe they have matured as writers or found more time to devote to their courses. Maybe.

Whatever ultimately happens, I think this is a population of students that is often forgotten in our discussions of course planning and student-teacher interactions, but it is a group of students that all of us will encounter as writing instructors. So what can we do for those students who are taking our 1020 courses or 3010 courses for a second time? How can we promote a re-engagement with the material the second time through in order to motivate them? Is there a way for us to facilitate transfer not only between writing courses (i.e. 1020 and 3010), but between repeated sections of the same course (i.e. 1020 to 1020, 3010 to 3010)?

At this point in time I think I have less solutions than questions, less answers than hypotheses. Never-the-less, I offer up two unique, albeit extreme, situations of repeating students (one in 1020 and another in 3010) that could generate some discussion.

The first case is one that has haunted me for the last several semesters. During my second year of teaching 1020 I had a student register for my section that had taken and failed 1020 five times. In fact, this particular student had to seek out special permission to register for my section (in the hopes of finally being able to pass the course). While I had received word from our department of this student’s situation prior to the first day of class this student was quite upfront with his record and seemed motivated enough to do well this time through. We set up required meetings once a week and required him to attend appointments at the writing center (two appointments for every major project in 1020) to make sure that he was on task and working toward the project goals. In the end, however, this student turned in only one out of four major projects and was unable to pass through to 3010. Moreover, this student would have to re-start the composition sequence at ENG 1010 before trying ENG 1020 for a *seventh* time. I asked him just before the close of the semester about what went wrong this time around. His reply: It was just the same stuff over again. Couldn’t do it the first time, couldn’t do it now.

The second case happened in my 3010 class recently. This student was taking 3010 for the first time, was a capable writer, and seemed motivated at the start of the semester. Her first few projects of the semester were smart and well composed (though at times shorter than they ought to have been). As the semester wore on, however, her attendance became spotty and her projects infrequent. When prompted via email to come to office hours to discuss any potential problems that she may be having she failed to respond. Eventually I confronted her after class one day and asked about her standing in the class. She told me about her job and working full-time which left her little time to work on the assignments. She also mentioned, however, a feeling of writers block when it came to her projects. I offered her a chance to come to office hours to work on some brainstorming strategies, which she kindly refused (her work schedule would not permit it), but promised that she would soon turn in all late assignments and complete the remaining projects on time. Eventually these projects were turned in. Unfortunately, these projects were turned in three weeks after grades were submitted. I offered her feedback on any piece of writing that she submitted, but could not change the grade. She would need to repeat 3010 in a future semester.

While this case might feel familiar enough (many students feel the pressure of balancing work and school as well as a sense of paralysis when it comes to writing brought on by the lack of time needed to properly complete an assignment), what is a bit more unusual is her request to repeat the course with me again. Every semester a small handful of students earn grades lower than the required C, but never have any students requested joining my class a second time (though I do know of other instructors that have had this happen). What am I to do with a student that has already taken the course and completed all the projects (if turned in on time she would have received a B or better)? Could she simply turn in the same projects the next semester? Do I have her write new projects? Is there a middle ground to be had? Beyond the desire to earn a passing grade next semester, what is going to motivate her to remain engaged in the course a second time?

Perhaps on some level there is little we can do for students like the first case. We cannot convince students that our classes are more important than the jobs they work; we cannot always convince them to even turn their projects in on time. This may be indicative of a certain student “disposition” (for a more fleshed out discussion of this look for Wardle and Wells’ forthcoming work) that finds motivation difficult, but does that mean we just let them go?

Beyond simple repetition, is there anything more we can do to facilitate learning for second-time students? Is there a way to help the student see connections between sections of ENG 1020 or ENG 3010 to facilitate better writing, or at least an awareness of writing strategies? I told you I had more questions than answers.

I also told you that I had a hypothesis, but it’s a hypothesis just barely in the making.

Over the last year our department has been promoting the use of reflective portfolios to assess how well students are achieving the learning outcomes in our writing courses. These reflective moments have been trumpeted by transfer scholars as a way to teach meta-cognitive writing skills, or a more adept awareness of writing strategies and how they can be used in future writing situations. A similar strategy I believe can be incorporated into the writing classroom for repeat students (Note: I think that reflective assignments throughout the semester can be beneficial for all students, I am just thinking about how they might be particularly beneficial for repeat students).

1. Beginning of the Semester Diagnostic

Through a simple writing diagnostic at the beginning of the semester we can fish out which of our students are repeating the course. Asking them (in a writing prompt) to discuss experiences that they may have had in previous writing classrooms and then highlighting high school classes and also previous versions of this course will tell you who is a repeat most often. Additionally, you can ask them to list several key concepts that they remember from the course and how they might be useful in this section will allow them to re-engage with skills and concepts from previous courses and think forward to how they might use them in their current course. This type of diagnostic is, I believe, already in common use throughout the department, but we might consider including explicit reference to previous versions of the same course here.

2. Follow up Reflective Writings

As one of the planning assignments for your major projects have repeat students re-assess one of their written projects from a previous semester (this would be particularly useful for students who were asked to write similar assignments in a previous section, something fairly standard with the common syllabi). What worked for them last time? What didn’t? Having students articulate strategies from their own work will hopefully reinforce portions of the course that they were able to grasp and highlight other concepts and skills that seemed more foreign to them.

You may or may not allow the student to use the project from the previous section (the problem that I face with student #2). In her case, I think I may allow her to return to those previously written works, but develop revision plans that will ask her to reflect on the work that she did and develop strategies for strengthening the projects. Specifically, because she was enrolled in one of the pilot courses, I will ask her to collect additional data to strengthen her claims about writing practices in her field and then reflect on how this additional data changes the project outcomes.

3. End of Semester Reflection

To conclude the semester you can have the repeat students reflect on the process of going through the course a second time. What was similar? What was different for them? What did you do the second time around that made a difference? How can you use these strategies to successfully complete the next level of writing class?

To conclude, I feel that these reflective strategies would be the most beneficial for students who failed their writing course the first time because of higher order content and organizational issues (rather than lack of commitment to the course). Still, I can’t help but wonder about the first case. Would reflective assignments have been able to help him through that feeling of helplessness? That feeling of repetition which could not be surmounted? Would these assignments have helped him re-engage in the course? Maybe not. But then again, maybe.

Joe Paszek is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Composition. His research interests include Gay and Lesbian studies, Queer theory, and Composition history. He has taught ENG 1020 in the department for several years and is currently teaching ENG 3010.