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Writing to Learn: Learning to Write

Roger Graves, Professor, English and Film Studies Director, Writing Across the Curriculum

WAC @

Roger Graves

http://www.ualberta.ca/~graves1/index.html

Writing Across the Curriculum

http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/WAC/

Centre for Writers

http://www.c4w.arts.ualberta.ca/

Rule # 1: No heroes  Don’t try to do teach students all

they need to know about writing by yourself

  If you try to teach everything there is to know about writing to every student in every course you teach, you will burn out

  Identify what you can do, and identify for students (and reinforce for them) the resources they can use

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gradin/168875652/

Resources   The instructor: syllabus, assignment handouts,

online postings, email communications, Twitter feeds, Facebook postings

  Textbooks: Little Penguin Handbook, The Brief Penguin Handbook, The Garrulous Penguin Handbook

  The RDC Writing Skills Centre

  The library

RDC: Writing Skills Centre

http://www.rdc.ab.ca/future_students/high_school_students/student_services/ counselling_centre/writing_skills/Pages/default.aspx

Rule # 2: Assign some writing 1.  Identify ways you can incorporate graded and

non-graded writing into what you are teaching (WAC)

2.  Create writing assignments that support your course learning goals

3.  Provide scoring guides (rubrics) to students so that they know what you value

Today we’ll start with 1, do 2, and then work on 3

What is Writing Across the Curriculum?

• Writing-to-learn activities are short, impromptu or otherwise informal writing tasks that help students think through key concepts or ideas presented in a course • Based on learning to write research in 1960s-1970s in US/UK • First programs emerged in 1980s

The WAC Clearinghouse, http://wac.colostate.edu/intro/

WAC Philosophy   that writing is the responsibility of the entire

academic community,

  that writing must be integrated across departmental boundaries,

  that writing instruction must be continuous during all four years of undergraduate education,

  that writing promotes learning, and

  that only by practicing the conventions of an academic discipline will students begin to communicate effectively within that discipline.

Writing and Learning  writing plays an indispensible role in developing

critical thinking skills, learning discipline-specific content, and understanding and building competence in the modes of inquiry and dissemination specific to various disciplines and professions

Georgia State WAC Program, http://wac.gsu.edu/content/introduction/what_is_wac.shtml

NSSE and Writing   To what extent had your experience at RDC

contributed to: Writing Clearly and effectively?

  To what extent had your experience at RDC contributed to: Speaking clearly and effectively?

WAC and Student Engagement   student engagement with the subject matter

being taught increases significantly when they are more frequently asked to write about that subject, particularly in courses in their junior and senior years.

Richard J. Light. "Writing and Students' Engagement " Peer Review 6.1 (Fall 2003): 28-31.

Strategies for Improving Student Writing  WAC: Short, brief writing in class (unmarked or

minimally graded)

 Assignments: Clear, well-structured assignments

  Rubrics: Clear statements of evaluation criteria

 Writer Skills Centre: Facilitate Peer Response in writing groups and one-to-one tutoring

Good Writing Assignments   Tie the writing task to specific pedagogical goals.

 Note rhetorical aspects of the task, i.e., audience, purpose, writing situation.

 Make all elements of the task clear.

  Include grading criteria on the assignment sheet.

  Break down the task into manageable steps.

 Choose your verbs carefully (p. 17, LPH).

http://wac.colostate.edu/intro/pop10a.cfm

Sample Writing to Learn Assignments   The reading journal

  Generic and focused summaries

  Annotations

  Response papers

  Synthesis papers

  The discussion starter

  Focusing a discussion

  The learning log

  Analyzing the process

  Problem statement

  Solving real problems

  Pre-test warm-ups

  Using Cases

  Letters

  What counts as a fact?

  Believing and doubting game

  Analysis of events

  Project notebooks

  The writing journal WAC Clearinghouse http://wac.colostate.edu/intro/pop5.cfm

WAC Strategies

http://www.upei.ca/uwc/wac/strategies/basic_tools.html

Write a prompt  Write a prompt to get students writing in one of

your classes. You may or may not decide to collect these.

  For our purposes today, I would like you to share them with others sitting around you and perhaps the entire group.

What is Writing in the Disciplines? Writing in the disciplines focuses on instructing

students in the language conventions of a discipline as well as with specific formats typical of a given discipline

Writing Intensive courses at Simon Fraser  A writing-intensive course is one in which

writing is used as a tool for learning and developing understanding of subject matter and is taught as a means of communication in discipline-specific ways. Students are shown, rather than simply told, how to write in the genres most valued in the discipline and are given opportunities to use skilled feedback in the revision and rewriting of major papers.

http://www.lidc.sfu.ca/teaching/writing/resources/W-CourseCriteria.php

Writing Intensive courses  WI courses incorporate revised assignments,

sequenced assignments, peer review, and student assistance from a writing consultant. [Georgia State]

 Question: Is this a format that fits with the realities of RDC and Alberta higher education funding?

Assignments as instructions

Creating good writing assignments

Roger Graves Director, Writing Across the Curriculum University of Alberta

http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/WAC/

Orienting Your Readers

 Define your terms

 Write a brief overview or rationale of the entire assignment

 Provide a list or concepts that the student needs to know to complete the assignment successfully

Orient your readers Purpose

This essay should demonstrate that you can identify the audience, ethos, and purpose of a written text (Chapter 1). You should also demonstrate the ability to apply the concepts from Chapter 2—visual and verbal explanations, organization, point of view, focus and frame, and interest in texts. Your essay should explain

  the purpose of the news article,

  the ways in which the visual interacts with the verbal to accomplish this purpose,

  how the language of the article contributes to this purpose and communicates with the audience

  how the context of this article (it appeared in a student newspaper at a university) affected the way it was written, the selection of the topic, and the framing of the topic

Break Instructions into Steps   Use numbered lists for steps that must occur in

chronological order

  Use bulleted list for items that do not have to appear in sequence

  Limit each sub-procedure to 7-10 steps

  Each step should describe one action

  Packing more than one action into a step invites errors

Keep Steps Discrete Invention/Drafting/Research strategies

1.  Identify a scientific topic that you are already familiar with or that you want to learn more about.

2.  In the research class on Oct. 31 in UC 2, find 5-10 sources that you might be able to use in the research essay (Assignment 4)

3.  Email pdfs or full-text copies of these to yourself.

4.  Write short (50-100 word) summaries of these articles describing what they add to your knowledge of the topic.

5.  Write the introduction to your proposal in which you make the argument that researching this topic benefits you in some way or improves your scientific knowledge and background—why do you want to study this topic?

Use imperative sentences   Use the imperative (command) sentence order:

“Verb + Object” [This sentence is itself an example of this principle]

  If conditions apply to the action, include them in a dependent phrase or clause before the imperative. [This sentence is itself an example of this principle]

Strategies for Effective Instructions – A Summary  Overview

 Group into chunks

  Step-by-step

 Clarify key points

  Include alternatives or substitutions

  Tips, warnings, cautions

  Troubleshooting

 Adapt to reader’s level

  Use imperative

 Define terms

  Use logical order

 Maintain uniform tone

Guidelines for writing instructions

  Topic/description

  Purpose

  Audience

  Invention/drafting/research strategies

  Length

  Drafts/workshopping deadlines

  Revision policy

  Drafting

  Criteria/rubric/grading Glenn, Cheryl, Melissa Goldthwaite, and Robert Connors. The St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing

Discussion  Did you need all these categories?

 Do your students need other kinds of information?

 Conflicts?

 Observations?

How students read assignments  Questions we ask—“why” and “how”—need to

be elaborated to make obvious the implied argument we want to read

 Directives (“discuss,” “consider”) need to be elaborated to identify the argument from sources you want to read (see p. 17 of LPH)

 Open-ended assignments: turn them into questions

O’Brien, Emily, Jane Rosenweig, and Nancy Sommers, “Making the most of College Writing.”

More advice to students  Analyze: find connections

 Compare and contrast

 Define: make a claim about how something should be defined

 Describe: observe and select details

  Evaluate: argue according to criteria that something is good, bad, best

  Propose: identify a problem and argue for a solution

The Little Penguin Handbook, p. 17, Canadian ed.

Instructors as audiences

Students should aim:

 To please

 To entertain

 To engage

O’Brien, Emily, Jane Rosenweig, and Nancy Sommers, “Making the most of College Writing.”

Question

 How would you characterize yourself as an academic audience?

Writing for other audiences

 Non-academic Audience For the article review, your initial audience for this assignment is your instructor; readers of Occupational Therapy Now form the primary audience.

NSSE, Outcomes, and you  Assessment tools, like NSSE (National Survey of

Student Engagement) and other “benchmarking” or outcomes statements, increasingly rely on explicit statements describing levels of student achievement

  Scoring guides (rubrics) are useful ways to control this process because they allow you to self-define the learning outcomes for your course

  The cumulative effect of these scoring guides is to control the assessment of your institution

References   Glenn, Cheryl, Melissa Goldthwaite, and Robert Connors. The

St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing. New York: St. Martin’s, 2003.

  Faigley, Lester, Roger Graves, and Heather Graves. The Brief Penguin Handbook. Toronto: Pearson, 2008.

  Graves, Heather, and Roger Graves. A Strategic Guide to Technical Communication. Peterborough: Broadview, 2007.

  O’Brien, Emily, Jane Rosenweig, and Nancy Sommers, “Making the most of College Writing.” Harvard Expository Writing Program, http://www.fas.harvard.edu/%7Eexpos/EWP_guide.web.pdf

Evaluating Writing: Designing scoring guides (rubrics) that work

Roger Graves Director, Writing Across the Curriculum

Key = Assignment Sheets  Assignment sheet, peer response sheets, and

grading rubrics all communicate the evaluation criteria

  They all must be consistent with each other

  They should change with the genre being evaluated

  They can be tailored to fit the topic

Peer Response: Generic response criteria   Introduction (LPH 6c)

  Thesis (LPH 4b)

 Organization (LPH 5a)

  Sources (LPH 10, 11, 12)

  Standard Edited English (LPH Part 5 and 6)

Rhetorical issues criteria  Audience (LPH 1a,b)

  Purpose (LPH 1d)

 Argument

  Style (LPH Part 4)

  Tone (LPH 22)

Argument structure

Claim

Stated reason

Grounds/evidence

Unstated assumptions

Evidence supporting unstated assumption

Rebuttal

Qualifiers

  evidence you found that perhaps qualifies or suggests the alternative readings are of limited value or useful in only certain circumstances

Criteria-specific assignment   Include phrases and criteria that were stated in

your assignment

  Phrase them as questions

 Ask them the kinds of questions you ask yourself when reading student assignments: Where is the reference to that quote? (LPH 13d)

Where is the other part of the comparison? (LPH 6b)

Criteria for editing  Connections between sentences (LPH 6d, 21b)

 Wordiness (LPH 20b)

 Active verbs vrs. “to be” verbs (LPH 19a)

 Attitude: adjectives and adverbs (LPH 28)

  Specific language (LPH 22d)

  Inclusive language (LPH 22e)

RUBRICS DEFINED

  Rubrics describe your criteria for evaluating student performances

KINDS OF RUBRICS

Holistic Descriptions of overall achievement and effect Faster to use

Analytic Separate scores for each criterion Precise

or

General description - General criteria applicable to all assignments

Primary trait scoring - Criteria specific to an assignment

TYPE A: HOLISTIC SCALES

TYPE A: HOLISTIC SCALE Holistic Grading Rubric for Writing Assessment

“A” DEMONSTRATES HIGH PROFICIENCY Excellent command of the language: Addressed the topic; appropriate to the writing prompt (also in format, e.g. a letter requires greeting and conclusion); all expected elements are included; text flows; comprehensible; writing is appropriate to current level; length is appropriate

Word choice is appropriate and varied; sentence structure shows variety if possible on this level of writing (e.g. sub- and coordinating sentences, not only S-V-O structure; use of transitions);

Some errors which do not interfere with comprehension (i.e. word order is correct most of the time; subject-verb agreement is accurate most of the time, minor slips; spelling and punctuation are mostly accurate); learner demonstrated control of the forms focused on in this exam with very few mistakes

TYPE B: ANALYTIC SCALES

SAMPLE RUBRICS The original is holistic

The revised one is analytic

WEIGHTING THE RUBRIC • Which categories are more important to the overall grade?

• This is another way of asking what are the most important • factors for you when you evaluate a student’s assignment.

• Not all categories have to be or should be evenly weighted.

• Rubrics should be different from first year to fourth year as • expectations change.