We discussed in class the exact approach that we had wanted to take in this assignment and all three of us felt that one quote in particular was important. On page 366 Nelson states; "In addition, these strategies allow students to focus on the products they are required to produce instead of on the processes they are being asked to engage in."
We felt it was important for us to address this in our assignment, so here goes;
Early in the semester (2nd or 3rd day) the students would be required to "Take a stand" on any topic of their choice. We agreed to allow the students roughly 30 minutes to complete an in class writing assignment. Since we are concerned with working on the process and not the product, these assignments would be anonymous. At the end of the 30 minutes of writing, the teacher collects the assignments and then promptly shuffles them and hands them out randomly to class. This accomplishes the 2nd students being able to respond the first paper without seeing it as a tightly defined audience.
The responding students would then take the papers home with them and write a 1-2 pages response to the stance taken up by the first writer. This response would require no sources or formatting requirements, only the addition of their names and the attachment of the first writing sample. We feel that this would be an effective way of allowing our students to see the way in which a discussion can take place not only vocally but also through the written word.
Katie, Ben and I will also respond to this assignment with more personal/individual reasoning for our choices as well as any adjustments to the assignment or parts that I may have overlooked in my summarizing of the assignment.
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2 comments:
Right, so what I was thinking here was that it'd be kind of great to hand out an assignment sheet that just says "Write a paper." I think it'd be really interesting just to see what sorts of things they'd do with a 100% open-ended assignment. Unfortunately, the odds are they'd just freak out. So we discussed how to make the extreme openness a little more palatable. We eventually arrived at what Adam wrote in the post. The way our assignment idea turned out isn't quite what I'd hoped, because the emphasis will end up being on the second part where they write a response. But still, I like the idea of something that's basically a free write turning into part of a relevant class assignment.
My one major concern would be that kids would just stare at the paper saying nothing, or that they'd write something, for lack of a better word, stupid. I've seen in some of the classes we observed and in some other freshmen a general struggle with finding things to rant about in these stand-taking papers. That utterly baffles me. How do people not know what they feel strongly about? I think that's a good thing to focus some attention on with these classes. It'd be good if they could understand and articulate at least the issues THEY feel strongly about.
But anyway, off the soap box.
Yeah, this exercise will either be a breakthrough pedagogical success or complete disaster. Even if the exercise itself is met with blank stares and empty pages, though, we would learn something about our class and students.
I think a wise addition to the assignment would be teacher response. So you'd have an anonymous freewrite, a more well-thought out response, and an instructor response to both. Just as Gerritz and Lowe point out in their article, a written conversation that includes the instructor helps close the loop on the conversation and demonstrates how parties can have a real discussion in written dialogue. We could even figure out a way for the anonymous writer to read the conversation that he or she spawned.
One test of a good assignment: what would YOU write? Crap, I have been thinking about it since Wednesday. Hardly a 30 minute foray. But the pressure of 30 minutes is alleviated somewhat by the anonymity. It would be interested to see what happens, regardless.
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