1st Response to Engaging Ideas

I’ll admit that I haven’t finished chapters 1 and 2 yet, but I want to get an initial response done after starting my reading. I’ve read these chapters in the first edition, and I can say that I am very impressed with the 2^nd edition. I continue to be a “Bean disciple” practically hanging on every word he says. I saw him at a conference last March, and he is the model of an elderly statesman. Tall, lean, attentive, very articulate, but not in a didactic way. I also like seeing the way he has incorporated much new research and scholarship since the first edition.

I guess in this post I want to share where I am with critical thinking in my writing class. I see now that I have used short critical thinking assignments in my Freshman Comp I class for years called “Process Journals” where students write about their writing experience. But I see now that these are open-ended questions that ask students to consider many of the different problems connected to writing: based on what reader’s value, what should we strive to do as writers? What is the connection between speaking and writing? How do you go about getting started on a writing project? My more formal writing assignments, though, have not been so critical thinking oriented but more geared toward learning the writing process and conventions of essay form, development, and the integration of other people’s ideas in writing. The assumption is that I am teaching students practices of approaching writing tasks and strategies for meeting the common requirements of writing tasks that students will take with them and build upon in other classes. Research has shown that these assumptions are not well founded...

I’m facing two deep questions or problems:

1)   What should Freshman Comp I be about? I’ve been reading Anne Beaufort’s College Writing and Beyond, and it brings up the grim realities about freshman comp that for most students the “skills” taught in the class don’t transfer and that most students don’t get or see the larger rhetorical goals we strive to achieve when attempt to create authentic writing tasks. It is always “school” writing, and students don’t get the larger concepts about communication in this setting. Smit and others have argued for the end of composition courses in favor of discipline specific freshmen seminars that would incorporate writing. Students need to write about a subject, and so often comp teachers lasso in subject matter that they have no real expertise in, so it is inexperts writing to inexperts (the blind leading the blind). I see now why so many of my colleagues hold on to Comp II as a literature-based class because literature is our field and we can make the writing in there discipline specific. But then, how many of our students become literature majors?

So my first bigger question is what to make the content of my course to be about? A writing about writing movement has taken hold in comp studies in recent years, and perhaps I need to jump more on board with it. If I am to use critical thinking in my course to get students more engaged and learning more, then what exactly is the content of my course and how then do I use critical thinking writing tasks to promote this learning and engagement?

2)   My second quandary has to do with creating developmentally appropriate writing tasks. Where is the sweet spot for my students? I purposefully redesigned the second half of my Freshman Comp I class based upon my earlier reading of our Bean text, and I quite honestly had horrible results. As I have found in the past with other critical tasks I have designed, I have a few students who dig deeply into the task and accomplish everything I would have hoped for from wrestling with the problem and difficulty that the task presents. But, as happened this semester, I have far too many students who practically fall off a cliff. No matter what sorts of scaffolding I provide, they appear out of their league.

So I’m confronted with how to design the kinds of assignments that are difficult enough to push them to grow, but there is a kind of downhill nature about them—students can feel like there is a path for them to follow and accomplish the task and they can glide down it. I know those two aspects of the assignment seem contradictory, but I want the assignment to be do-able for them, yet challenging. In our context, it also must have a quality of being expandable so that stronger students actually can be challenged.

I’ll close by bringing up something Tripp Pressley mentioned on Thursday at the P-16 meeting at Travis Elementary. He has been involved with K-12 education for years, and involved with these efforts to integrate higher ed and K-12 to promote better college readiness in our students coming in to college. What he said he has seen and learned from his 2 ½ years working with Pathways groups from four different disciplines is that what our young students lack is not so much disciplinary knowledge or skills, but they are weak in the area of cognitive skills: the ability to read critically, to formulate inferences and generate logical conclusions based upon available information. There are more cognitive skills, but I see that the difficulty my students had in confronting a question with no easy answer and then the complex literacy task of investigating this problem was too much for them. It was like I had asked them to run a mile when they had not even been jogging lately.

The conclusion arrived at by this P-16 group, and it may shape my rethinking, is how to design my writing curriculum to develop these cognitive skills. Here are the College and Career Readiness Standards and you can section called “Cross-Disciplinary Standards” p. a59

http://www.thecb.state.tx.us/files/dmfile/CCRS081009FINALUTRevisions.pdf

These cross-disciplinary standards are really pretty darn good as I look at them again. Check them out.