I first learned the importance of process in France in 1978. I was an undergrad escapee from an Illinois college town surrounded by cornfields. Writing, reading, and language were my passions. But at the time and place of my undergraduate education, English majors studied the old-fashioned anglophone canon, which meant, literally, white men from England, and sometimes from Ireland or the US. Everything else was considered “sociology.”  In practice this usually meant that all writers of color and all women writers of any background were excluded. 

My disappointment and frustration were profound. Then an academic advisor suggested I switch to French; they told me I could use my Illinois State Scholarship (a needs-based, non-merit program no longer in existence) to study in the college’s junior-year-abroad program in France. 

As an undiagnosed neurodivergent 20-year-old second-generation American white woman college student in 1978, I did not think about the future.  At the time, heavy postgraduate student loans payments and the inflation-compromised rates of exchange for the US dollar were not on my radar screen. Instead, I felt deeply that leaving Illinois and the United States for 9 months would, as James Baldwin has suggested about exile, “save my life.”

And my 9 months in France saved and changed my life in an everyday practical sense– and in perceptions that are often beyond my immediate understanding.

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In France, I took my first painting courses. All of our classes in the program were graded pass/fail. This meant that I could experiment with unfamiliar disciplines without worrying about grades. Also, my art classes were taught only in French, and there were few, if any, anglophone students available for commiseration or translation. I learned to speak French because of the painting courses, and I also learned about Process.

Process meant slowing everything down. Rather than making several paintings with different subjects or styles, I focused on 1 painting for most of the semester, an oil painting of a statue. I was instructed to draw the statue first, then fill in the drawing with small brushstrokes of color. I would not map out the colors in advance, but use my palette, my brushes, and my intuition what colors would work best. 

This art-making process, in retrospect, seems very much like Peter Elbow’s process-based freewriting that was in vogue when I began grad school in English in 1986. But that was still several years away.

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In 1985, in the midst of high unemployment and closing factories in the Midwestern rust belt suburb where we were living, my partner and I decided to go to grad school. They would work as a teaching assistant in English, and I would study art and art history and take out student loans. For both of us, this course of action seemed preferable to unemployment. 

At that time, my sub-standard GRE scores, below average undergraduate GPA, and general lack of interest in the formal study of literature kept me out of the English department. We would live in the Northern Appalachian town where public university was located, and where the cost of living  would be much lower.

In grad school, at first I painted in oils and acrylics on flat canvases, using the stream-of-consciousness process. Eventually, through that process, 3D shapes began to emerge from the paintings. These were the dolls I had learned to make in textile class, covered in Gesso and highlighted with deep blue and green nail polish. The painting professor was encouraging. Grad school was a time for experimentation that might not be available in the future, even as the future still felt too far away to be certain  or predictable.

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Throughout that first year of grad school, my partner came home from class and we would discuss their teaching. To my initial surprise, my partner taught first-year writing (a course I had not taken as an undergraduate), not literature. I was intrigued by our discussions, and I began to imagine teaching first-year writing myself. While still immersed in art and art history and no longer having to struggle with math and science gen ed requirements, my GPA improved substantially from my undergraduate struggles. 

At the same time, I learned from my art history professors that, because of limited funding,  I could not count on a teaching assistantship in my second academic year of the Masters program. 

With that in mind, I applied to transfer to the English Department for a graduate teaching assistantship, and I began teaching first-year writing in Fall 1986.

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As an English teaching assistant, first in the MA program, and later in my PhD program at a much larger northern Appalachian public university, I learned different approaches to teaching the writing process, all of which felt antithetical to growing students’ writing, and much different from my stream-of-consciousness art-making processes.

At that time, we had no internet and no social media. Writing meant words only, and not electronic or virtual multimedia. We still used paper and pen to compose, and, as my partner reminds me, mimeograph machines to reproduce our assignments and syllabi.

The process approach required in my MA program included conferences on rough drafts of all major papers with all students. In memory, this was approximately 4-5 major papers in a 10 week term on the quarter system.  Drafts were submitted in advance, and every draft required the teacher’s comments in advance of the conferences. All too soon the novelty of teaching writing wore off, and exhaustion set in. 

Additionally, in our MA program, we were told not to give the students any readings outside of boilerplate textbook directions. Outside readings, as I recall, were thought to interfere with the spontaneity of the writing process. Process, in this case, meant that students were to write from their own experiences.

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In my doctoral program, readings were allowed in first-year writing, but only if history and context were excluded, and only if the course was general first-year writing. Readings were to be used to analyze how arguments were constructed, with a heavy emphasis on logos, ethos, and pathos. In practice, this meant reading “diverse” arguments such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” or James Baldwin’s “If Black English isn’t a Language, Tell Me What Is?” without reference to the Civil Rights Movement and without any historical context at all. We were to study only how (but not WHY) the text used specific argumentative strategies.

In both programs, the study of literature (or literary texts), including reading whole books together as a class, was reserved for honors sections of First-Year Writing. In Basic Writing no texts, either literary or rhetorical, were to be used in the classroom. The readings, it was suggested, would become the central focus of the course, and the writing process would not be prioritized

These approaches to the writing process seemed to call on New Criticism, a literary analysis strategy that excluded any concern outside the text, including all considerations of positionality and historical context. At the same time, in the 1980s and 1990s, I was studying what were then somewhat newer approaches to literary theory, including Reader Response, Deconstruction, and (what in that era was called) Multiculturalism. In the second year of my PhD studies, I took on a doctoral minor in theory, criticism, and aesthetics. With the English department required courses in canonical Anglophone literature and language out of the way, I did most of the rest of my coursework in the Comparative Literature and Philosophy departments. I was studying French again as well, and took a deep and refreshing dive into French feminisms.

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The contradictions between what I was learning in theory classes and what I was required to teach seemed irreconcilable. So I did what many of us did before (and, of course, long after) we had access to the internet. We improvised. 

For instance, my graduate student and non-tenure-track colleagues and I used xerox machines and copy centers to make prohibited coursepacks of readings in literature, rhetoric, history, and other aspects of cultural studies and the writing process that we considered critical  for our students’ growth as writers. How could students learn to write without reading or to analyze what they read without understanding a multiplicity of contexts for writing? What was college for in the late-20th-century?

A great technological change was on the horizon, even as that change creeped in so softly and slowly in northern Appalachia that it was barely noticeable to many of us.

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Improvisation continued unabated. In 1993 my partner and I defended our dissertations and  received our doctoral hoods, but we had still not secured full-time employment and our long-deferred student loan repayments appeared on the near horizon.  Inflation and unemployment still lingered. We did have summer school work, and the promise of adjunct work on campus in the fall. But even with the lower cost of living in northern Appalachia, part-time work did not seem sufficient and there would be no financial support from either of our families.

That summer, I was assigned to teach a basic writing course. “Basic Writing” was a remediation requirement for all students with low college placement test scores. With a few exceptions, the students had graduated from local high schools only weeks before, and were living at home, hoping to clear the remediation requirement before the beginning of the regular semester that fall. 

The Basic Writing course did not offer credit for graduation or transfer, and could be used only to fulfill financial aid enrollment requirements. Students in remediation had even more stringent restrictions on what they could or could not read. The thought was that without reading, the students could focus more intently on “the writing process.”

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The summer of  1993 remains one of my most indelible memories of improvisation. Spike Lee’s 1992 film version of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (with a script adapted from James Baldwin’s original never-produced screenplay) was at the height of popularity. X swag was everywhere, even at our predominantly white university (PWI) in our small rural college town. 

That popularity extended to a new paperback edition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (created in part through interviews with Alex Haley). The college bookstore stocked abundant copies of The Autobiography, prominently displayed on a table near the cash registers. With this confluence of events, after turning in my official syllabus to the department, I added The Autobiography to the students’ version of the course syllabus. Additionally, a grad student colleague loaned me a bootleg video of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X movie that the students and I watched together in class on a VCR.

In memory, I recall serious discussions under shady apple trees next to the agriculture building. Reading, despite departmental prohibitions, was an integral part of the writing process. While I was not as familiar with and would not have used the term kairos at the time (that would come later), our main consideration was the immediacy, timeliness, and historical and cultural contexts of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, first published in 1965 in the wake of Malcolm’s assassination.

With the word “text” more broadly defined to include multimedia, the students in the basic  writing class undertook a thorough examination of The Autobiography, as well as Spike Lee’s film version. We analyzed similarities and differences we found in the book and the film and discussed what each retelling of Malcolm X’s life emphasized, and what was left out. Our class was mostly, but not entirely white, and there were uncomfortable moments. But we tried, if imperfectly, to grow a greater understanding of the various interpretations of Malcolm’s life, and the appeals to audience made in both the book and the film.

Geographically, as well as rhetorically, because of our deep immersion in historical and then-current popular culture contexts (kairos), our class was located far away from the English Department offices. 

But this is not a hero’s story. Many of us broke the rules, quietly and without fanfare. Mostly, we did not abandon writing process work. We still taught the 3 appeals of logos, ethos, and pathos. We still assigned journals (in notebooks that weighed down our backpacks!), rough drafts, and multiple revisions, and the differences between editing and proofreading. In other words, we were learning how and why immersion in the processes of writing matter to undergraduate education.  In other words, we were learning how and why to teach.

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The writing process seems even more relevant in 2025, although the world has changed immeasurably since the late 1980s and early 1990s. Students are living and attending college in the wake of vast cost increases in college tuition and fees, as well as in healthcare, food, housing, transportation, and other necessities, while state and federal aid for college students continues to decrease dramatically. The Illinois State Scholarship that helped pay for my school year in France, as well as many other similar non-merit, needs-based state scholarships no longer exist.

At the same time, students are expected to own electronic devices, to compose and submit their assignments, increasing the costs of a college education, even as such costs are not included on the bill from the bursar’s office. Under financial strain and in the midst of multitasking, students might experience an imperative to finish writing assignments quickly. An assignment becomes one more item to complete on an already too long to-do list. Among other items, that to-do list might include multiple jobs, childcare, and elder care, and other everyday realities that, in the wake of the exigencies of the pandemic, have become the responsibilities of individuals, rather than the shared concerns of communities. 

Even so, sustainable growth in writing cannot be done quickly. Farming out the production of an essay to AI cannot sustain growth. Students are not machines and an essay is not a commodity. 

Instead, process pedagogy offers students an opportunity to slow down, and to experience the incremental processes of allowing the form of an essay to emerge from the materials that the writer has at hand: not only electronic devices, but students’ lived experiences and active reading and analysis of a variety of texts, including multimedia. 

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So my teaching practice has shifted over time. Journals and drafts began to seem very disconnected from the process of allowing an essay to emerge. Students struggled with seeing the connection between a free-flowing journal entry or draft, and the final writing project essay.

I struggled with this new development. It was difficult to let go of the idea of an emergent process that evolves as the writer grows a deeper understanding of form and content. I still wished, as unrealistic as it might seem, that every student could experience a process similar to the emergence of my statue painting in art class.

Nevertheless, I soon discovered that an essay, like a painting, can emerge through a seemingly linear process of specific steps undertaken to achieve a clear goal. This linear process, in fact, seemed very similar to the more fluid writing process we were taught in grad school: proposing, drafting, revision. When the metaphor changed from a flowing stream to concrete building blocks, the process of  completing specific steps seemed to offer enough structure, and even comfort,  for students to shape and grow their own writing over time.

In practice, my writing project assignments now have  5 component parts that include process work and a completed essay, as follows:

• Response: invites students to carefully read the writing project assignment to discern and summarize the requirements, as well as to voice questions and concerns about any aspect of the project.

• Proposal: asks students to select a prompt from a choice of 3, to explain why they chose the prompt, and to consider how they will approach the prompt, for instance, what examples they might use to support their evidence.

• Discovery Draft (also called Zero Draft): offers students suggestions for expanding their proposal into a longer draft. The Discovery Draft can be submitted as a google.doc that students can continue to revise with feedback from the instructor, peers, and writing center tutors.

• Essay: presents the culmination of the students’ efforts and experiences with their processes of writing.

• Reflection: requests that students take a wider view of their writing, considering what they learned, how they grew their writing, and what aspects of their work would benefit from more practice.

This configuration isn’t perfect, and is continuously under construction. In other words, curriculum building remains a process like any other.

At the moment, I have excluded AI from being part of this process. Even as there are uses for AI that I have not yet experienced, I remain uncomfortable, and perhaps naively so,  with  farming out any part of the writing process to machine-based learning. 

I remember the high hopes for social media, and the power of social media in its relatively early years for movements like Occupy Wall Street, and afterward, for organizing the post-hurricane mutual aid support of Occupy Sandy. While still used to organize activist movements, social media is now entrenched in  the attention economy, a potential distraction or disruption for any of us addicted to doom scrolling on our screens.

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What matters most,  it seems to me, is for students to experience the deeply embodied processes of writing, and that writing is more than just a matter of completing assignments. My conceptions of process mean that I must constantly reassess the ever-changing conditions for teaching and learning, in the students’ lives and in my own. In other words, I make mistakes– and attempt to recognize and  to learn from those mistakes.

What are your own experiences and struggles with teaching and learning about processes of composing, across time and your own education and as a classroom teacher? What assignments have you tried with your students, and what have you and your students learned from trial and error? What are the successes and the uneasy passages? What role, if any, does AI play in your dreams, your nightmares, and in your day-to-day practices as teachers and writers? How do you imagine the future of process pedagogy, and how might process be enacted to inspire students’ potential as writers and the hope of a better possible world?

Greetings and welcome to my blog, “Practices of Process.”  I define the word process as a verb, noun, and adjective. For example: Students and teachers process our experiences of the writing process through journaling and other process work.

 I have been doing process work for all of my life, and it was the hope of exploring practices of process that drew me to writing studies back in graduate school in the 1980s. Since then, across several decades, practices of process have become my life’s work. I have published several editions of a textbook with Bedford-St. Martin’s used in basic writing teaching practicums, wrote a blog for Macmillan Learning for several years, and have published articles on documenting processes of reflection, most recently in Community Literacy Journal and the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics. Immediately before starting as an adjunct at Queens College in Fall 2018, I worked as co-coordinator of the now discontinued Stretch First-Year Writing Program at Arizona State University. All of this work in writing and living across time, space, and place informs my practices of process as a teacher and a writer.

Anticipating English 110 course revisions for Spring semester, I had intended this first blog post to be about my assignments for teaching the writing process. But my orange tabby cat Destiny suddenly became critically ill the Monday of finals week, and died the next day, a week before Christmas eve and two days after my birthday.

While reading through my students’ final essays, I considered what I might do differently next semester, and I will share those ideas in my next post. In the interim, I can offer another impression of process:  What I learned looking through almost 11 ½ years of Destiny’s photos, when he adopted my partner and me as a kitten in Arizona, through the month before he died at age 12. 

The most important lesson is, perhaps, obvious. A writer (or any creator) can tell a different story using the same details and examples. But the theme or the argument or the moral of the story can change. Writing, and creating, in other words,  can allow us to understand the same story in many different ways. 

Destiny, a winking orange tabby cat, poses next to the book James Baldwin: The Cross of Redemption

This lesson seems similar to how the writing process is often taught, especially with a strong concentration on revision. 

Yet, in everything he did, Destiny, who often appeared in my course introduction videos and sometimes in my Bedford Bits blogs, showed his adventurous spirit and his unyielding courage. He taught me more than I have words to express. Instead, I share his videos. 

The first video was made in 2019 a year or so after my partner, Destiny, and I moved back to New York. Destiny was about 6 years old at the time. The video was made from an iMovie trailer and includes various photos of Destiny as a newly adopted stray kitten and, five years later, as a transplanted New Yorker. The video shows his transition from living in a two-story rental townhouse with stairs, to a one-bedroom apartment in Queens. To my solace, I found this video in my iMovie drafts, did a few quick edits, and then posted the video on YouTube. The video is titled: Destiny: Catastrophes Averted.

Then, several days later, I took some of the same pictures, added a few later photos, and made another video with a different iMovie trailer template. It is a memorial video and it is a celebration of Destiny’s life. This video is titled: Destiny: Dare to Dream.

In videos, Destiny’s life story can be retold in many forms, and in each of those iterations, I find a changed focus and a revised purpose. I look forward to translating these reflections in my own teaching and learning in the coming semester.  My invitation to you, my audience, is to consider your own practices of process in teaching, writing, and everyday life. What is it, as James Baldwin emphasizes in “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” (The Cross of Redemption ebook p. 65), that “compels” and “corrals” you in your practices of process? In times of struggle and in moments of joy, what draws your attention inside and outside the classroom, as you teach, write, and learn alongside your students? What motivates you to carry on?  

Many of us have started the research portion of the semester, or we will soon. A few folks have reached out to me to ask about resources that I use to scaffold the teaching of research, so this is what I’m writing about for my post this week. 

Being able to locate, read, paraphrase, and synthesize research is…..hard. Most students will be developing this skill throughout the rest of college. I feel like I’m still learning how to synthesize sources. And in English 110, trying to get a handle on sources that exist across disciplinary lines can feel really hard, especially at the end of the semester.

Still, I love this part of the class. Students often get to explore some of their own interests, which are varied and fascinating. It also feels great to teach a “just-in-time” skill that so many of them are immediately using in other classes.

Teaching research also feels like giving students some cheat codes for reading more effectively and strategically: codes I sure wish I had had when I started undergrad and just attacked all of my printouts with a highlighter and then still showed up to class not understanding what I had read. Learning how to read research across a variety of fields—not just in the humanities—can prepare students to say “oh, I can handle this” when they get a really complex reading in one of their other classes. I feel that if students can walk away from this unit with more confidence about how to locate and read a scholarly source, and more of an understanding of what research is at the college level, we’ve accomplished the goal of this unit.

In what follows, I’ll first discuss my end-of-unit assignment (an annotated bibliography) and the sub-skills that I need to teach to get students to produce one. If any of these materials are useful to you, please and adapt them to fit your goals!

End-of-unit assignment

Different people have different feelings about whether to assign a “full” research paper or something like an annotated bib. I can see arguments for either one, and I know lots of people teach a full paper in our department really successfully. I personally do an annotated bib because I feel like the full paper can make the unit feel very packed: usually when we arrive to this point in the semester, we only have about a month left of classes. 

Here’s my prompt, which includes a video that I made explaining what academic research is, what journals are, what databases are, and some other stuff about researching at QC. A note about this: in previous semesters, I have experimented with flipping the research unit and the lens analysis unit, so this is why it says that research is happening in Unit 2. 

This unit is scaffolded around getting students to produce the annotations on this list. To do that, there are several things that they need to be able to do: come up with a question, refine that question, look for sources, be able to read the sources, be able to determine whether the sources are a good fit, paraphrase and summarize them, and format everything correctly.

Goal #1: students can write researchable questions.

We start generating curiosity about potential topics as early as the first unit. But I don’t call these “research questions” yet. I just ask students, usually in the reflection to a major assignment, to talk about what else they’d like to know about this topic. And students will often develop great questions that are not yet research questions but that might become research questions eventually.

Namely, they speculate about the future, like “what would it be like if all schools adopted bilingual education?“ Sometimes, they ask questions that are kind of easy to just, like, Google and answer, like “how many languages are spoken in Corona, Queens?”

By the time we get to the research unit they’ve got a lot of questions. To set them up for completing the library workbook exercise on “research” vs. “regular” questions, I have students return to these questions that they’ve generated so far. After the workbook is due, I’ll have them return to those questions again to label them: are they research or regular questions? If they’re regular questions, how can we make them more like research questions? These are the slides that I used last semester to help students develop (and refine) a research question. 

These days, I’m also bringing in our good friend chatGPT to help. I want to be clear about this: I’m not sure it’s a good idea, for a variety of pedagogical and environmental reasons, and I never require it. But I do sometimes model for students how could look, in the same way that I model curiosity at the very early stages of the research process. Research, for me, doesn’t look like sitting down at the library databases and entering the exact search term that I need to select the perfect source to slot into a pre-determined argument. Instead, it’s a way to find my argument, just like the entire writing process. So, to get started, I do a lot of Googling, reading Wikipedia entries, looking at social media posts about it (if relevant), and just getting a general handle on the topic’s dimensions and what I think is interesting about it. While not traditional “research” tools, they are tools that help me to broaden my understanding of the topic’s dimensions and fuel my own curiosity.

Goal #2: Students can develop researchable keywords

Students can get understandably frustrated when they get to the databases, type in some keywords related to their research question, and nothing comes up. Rather than adjusting their keywords, some students completely abandon their question. So once we have researchable questions, my goal is to help students develop a ton of keywords that might help them to get to the right information and also to develop their sense that trying out a lot of combinations of things before finding what you want is just a normal part of the process.

I might model this in class with something simple. Let’s say that my computer is making a weird “takeoff” buzzing sound, and I want to know why it’s doing that. But I don’t have the right language for it. What would I search? Together, we look at relevant Google articles, Reddit forums, Apple’s helpdesk page, and the comments section of articles. We might watch some videos on YouTube. All of this might lead me to the actual language that I need to find relevant information to fix my problem. But finding the right words involves a lot of aimless poking around first.

And this is pretty much what we do when we look for keywords. If we don’t understand what we’re really asking yet, and our research question is “How does texting affect people’s thought processes?” and our key words are “texting” and “thought processes,” we’re probably not going to get much back.

After we talk about this in class, the library workbook entry on developing keywords is really helpful here. Along with having students complete this library workbook exercise and complete the library workshop itself, I will often reiterate what the librarians teach students to do by having a few conference hour sessions or portions of the class dedicated to modeling the generation of additional keywords, and then modeling finding stuff in the databases.  

And AI tools can be helpful here too! And I don’t mind that students use it to help them find more keywords as long as they’re not using it to find sources (or as long as they’re vetting the sources that they do find independently): to me, this is using it as a helpful tool.

Goal #3: Students can locate relevant, scholarly sources to answer their question using the databases.

The library workshop is great for this! I do find that one workshop is not enough, though, and I’ve got to get them to practice with the databases a lot before they can remember the steps.

After the workshop, I make sure to model finding a source in class at least 3-4 other times. Not for the whole session of course! And not necessarily for the whole class. But taking out some time to say “OK, who wants to volunteer their research question?” (or having a question or two in my back pocket in case I get crickets) and then modeling how to generate additional keywords, and then eliciting from them how to get to the right database, and then eliciting from them what to put in the boxes can help.

I also try to do this to model my own nerdy research fascination! I will often go “ohhhh this source looks cool! Let’s see if it would work!” And I’ll click on it and we’ll talk about what we can see (e.g. Well, it comes from an academic journal, but it’s a little old. Could we check out some of the key terms and try those instead of the ones that we have? What else can we try?). Since we’ve already talked about how to vet a source, this is also a good place to practice / reinforce what we’ve learned about the CRAAP test or lateral reading skills. 

Goal #4: Students can (kinda, sorta) read scholarly sources across a variety of disciplines and (kinda, sorta) understand what they read well enough to determine if the source helps to answer their question.

Do I understand the research in an astrophysics journal? Definitely not. I don’t expect first-year students to read and understand everything they find in an academic database.

But reading a piece like How To Read a Research Paper Without Freaking Out  can introduce the basic sections that research in a lot of fields outside of the humanities uses. They read this (usually in class, because at this point in the semester, doing a lot of out-of-class reading is frankly not really happening), we talk about some of its advice, and then I show them a research paper with these “predictable” sections. Then, they spend a little bit of in-class time picking out some of the major claims from following the steps in this article. My goal here is to help them to not completely freak out when they see a 30 pp. jargon-filled academic text and to give them a scaffold to guide them through reading it. 

I love using “Students Perceptions of Plagiarism Policy in Higher Education: A Comparison of United Kingdom, Czechia, Poland, and Romania” for this (in these slides) because students are interested in it, it has jargon but is not TOO inaccessible, and there are pretty “standard” sections.

To reinforce all of this stuff, students complete the Reading Research Guide: an exercise that I give them once they’ve had the library workshop and we’ve read How to Read a Research Paper together, and once they’ve picked out their first source for the annotated bibliography project at the end of the research unit. This guides them, step by step (using the advice in How To Read a Research Article Without Freaking Out, through reading it to develop their first Annotated Bib annotation. 

Goal #5: Students can paraphrase and quote from a scholarly source

 Once students are able to understand the structure of at least some research, I want them to be able to paraphrase a study in an annotation AND to get sufficient practice in doing this, screwing it up, doing it again, screwing it up again, and finally succeeding at it. Paraphrasing is tough! It is not something that someone who had never done it before August is going to be amazing at by December! But students can get some practice and at least learn that paraphrasing is not replacing words from a sentence with your own words. If I can just communicate that this is not a good practice and have students start to try something else, this is a win. 

The Paraphrasing and Quoting Guide is another exercise that I developed to help students work on paraphrasing and quoting within the context of developing annotations for the Annotated Bib. And we practice this a lot, lot, lot in class, like like in this set of slides (start on slide 8) where I have them read a paragraph, and then I turn off the projector and make them tell their partner what they just read, and then we try to reconstruct the major ideas together as a class, and then we turn the projector back on to check (to model a process for paraphrasing). 

Or here’s a kind of dumb exercise I call Who Wore It Best, slides 8-16, where students compare two quote integrations and then workshop a “bad” annotation on their own, with a partner, and as a whole class. Basically, this is just a ton of modeling work.  

Goal #6: Students can distinguish between and choose valid, timely, relevant sources

This can actually come before the lesson on reading scholarly sources does, because students can vet some sources (in some ways) before they even know what it really says. For this purpose, I introduce the CRAAP test: a heuristic for figuring out whether or not a source is “good” to use. Here are some slides I’ve used to do this in class.  

After introducing the acronym and what it stands for, I show students a bunch of sources that are similar to the ones that they’re looking at in the academic databases. Then I set some “traps” (i.e. sources that look like they’d be fine to use since they came from the databases, but that actually have various problems with currency, relevance to the research question, and authority that students often encounter when they’re compiling an annotated bib with scholarly sources). Students have to figure out whether or not a source passes the CRAAP test.

I’ve also used this lateral reading exercise to introduce information literacy. I love Stanford’s information literacy exercises for first-year students, especially if you’re not only asking them to locate and select scholarly sources. These exercises teach the kinds of skills that many professional fact-checkers use. Whatever resources you use, the goal here is to help students to understand how to choose between sources.  

Goal #7: Students can conduct inquiry-driven research (or, at least, they kind of know what it is)

In my experience, most students come into the class with an orientation toward research that is not inquiry-based. Their goal is to find sources “prove” their position about an argument that they’ve already determined. Many imagine that this is the purpose for integrating quotes: I am finding an expert who agrees with me so that I can add credibility to my existing argument.

I don’t think this is a productive way to approach research. But it’s really hard to shift this orientation in four weeks. So I’m not sure that I’m doing it very well. Still, my long-term goal is to encourage students to develop a more inquiry-based researcher stance.

I think that I do this in small ways throughout the achievement of the other goals on this list. One way that this happens is at the beginning of the unit through the development of research questions. Asking questions like “Why are grades so bad at motivating students?” instead of a questions like “Is there an impact on motivation when a first-year writing student gets a failing grade early in the semester vs. later in the semester?” shows this orientation clearly. One of these questions assumes that grades are bad at motivating students, and the other is asking a question about whether or not there’s an impact. Helping students to understand the difference (usually by giving them some “leading” questions and then having them identify more inquiry-driven questions — more modeling!) can be helpful here.

I also model uncertainty and curiosity as often as I can. One of the library workbook exercises talks about how our research questions shouldn’t be questions that we already know the answer to, and they should be questions that take multiple sources to answer. I think that having students make direct connections across their sources and structuring an assignment around reflecting what they’ve learned (rather than producing another form of argumentative writing) can be helpful, too.

I think this can also happen as students’ research questions evolve based on what they learn and the resources that are available to them. In the Process Log portion of my annotated bibliography assignment, I ask students to trace the evolution of their project over the course of the unit. In recent semesters, I’ve also asked students to make some connections across at least a few of their sources as part of at least 3 annotations in their annotated bib.

But I still don’t think I’m nailing an inquiry-based approach. I also feel like when students spend the majority of the semester composing things that focus on academic argumentation, it can be difficult to get them to switch course, especially with only 1/3rd of the semester to go, at a time in the semester when we’re all pretty tired. So, if anything, this is an aspirational learning goal and something I’m still actively working through.

Thinking toward the next steps

Ultimately, in my mind, the research unit is a place for students to start what will definitely become a much longer, more discipline-specific process when they move into their major coursework and learn about research for their specific field. So, I think of this unit as a taste test: a quick introduction to the quirks of academic research that will allow them to develop a few skills that they can build on later.

I hope this helps, and I’m happy to talk through any of these resources or any part of this process as it is useful to you. I would also love to hear about things that you’re doing in your research unit that you find really successful, or places that you don’t think that you’re nailing it yet!  

We’re about 8 weeks into the semester, so we’re almost exactly halfway through the term. In my experience, the midterm is always where things start to fall apart a little bit. Students lose motivation as they days get shorter, the weather starts cooling off, assignments get harder, and they start to take high-stakes, GPA-defining tests that don’t always go the way they planned. Most of us are fully immersed in lens analysis and source integration: challenging topics for everyone, and maybe especially for students who had negative feelings about writing before they even met you. If a student is going to disappear, stop turning in work, or start to despair (and this hasn’t already happened), it often happens now.

One thing that I like to do around this time is to share with students about my own first-year college story and how UTTERLY FREAKED OUT I was for my first-year midterms. My transition into college was rough, and I really struggled with feelings of belonging because I didn’t know how to study, I felt like I was not absorbing anything I was reading, I was far away from home and didn’t really know anyone, and I was convinced that everyone around me had everything figured out already. But I made it out of my first year, and then through a whole other decade of school after that. And now I work in one!

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how to better integrate stories of struggle (and eventual triumph) into my first-year composition course–both my own, and the stories of current students and recent graduates–because of the compelling research on belonging.

A recent national study found that minoritized and first-generation students at four-year universities are much less likely to feel like they “belong” in college than their two-year college counterparts. And another recent study on an intervention designed to increase students’ feelings of belonging suggested that simply showing students examples of people who didn’t feel like they belonged at first but whose feeling later changed can help students to persist when the going gets tough (as long as there are additional resources in place to continue reinforcing those feelings of belonging past the initial intervention, I should say).

Stories like the ones in the #WeBelongInCollege campaign offer models from real college students and recent graduates about struggles that they’ve faced as working students, multiply marginalized students, students with disabilities, first-gen students, and more. These can help to show students that lots of people who go on to be successful in college initially feel like imposters or face setbacks. During conference hour this week, I showed my students a few of these, chosen strategically to echo some of the concerns that students have shared.

I will often also use this as a springboard to remind them about how many people care about them on the campus and are committed to making sure that they succeed and have a good experience here. I’ll remind them about the resources that we discussed in the first few weeks of class: FYE, the Knights Table food pantry, the Petrie emergency assistance grant, the Writing Center, counseling services. I’ll remind them about where they can find the info for that stuff on our course site, and encourage them to take advantage of all of these free resources while they have the chance to do this.

In years past, depending on the class, I will sometimes also facilitate a conference hours session where we talk in a small group about study tips, time management tips, and just general “we are all struggling and this is hard for everyone, even people who seem like they have it all together” commiseration. I will often reinforce that “study tips” will not add time to anyone’s day or make you know things that you don’t know any faster, but getting into some good habits can still be helpful to make things feel less overwhelming. Here are my slides, in case these are helpful.

Sometimes I’ll also do something called a KQS evaluation: a really quick, no-prep list of things that students want to Keep doing, Quit doing and Start doing, and what they’d like for the class to Keep doing, Quit doing or Start doing. Taking the general temperature of the room can help me to integrate students’ suggestions before the end of the semester when we get our course evaluations. For more suggestions about ways to structure more or less elaborate mid-term evaluations than this, check out this handout.

The bottom line is that the midterm can be an especially great time to remind first-year students that failing or screwing up in the first semester is not irreversible or an indication that they should just give up, that lots of people have struggled and ultimately figured it out, and that lots of people all around the campus are rooting for them. This reminder can really help students who are already struggling to get back on track, and can give students a welcome reminder that you’re in their corner.  It can also be a great time to gather some preliminary feedback and to clarify, reset, or celebrate your own practices that are already working really well.

When I first started teaching, I blocked out hours and hours for giving feedback. I felt negligent if I wasn’t commenting on things in enough detail. My feedback generally functioned as a justification for the grade that I was giving. All of this meant that I wrote way, way, way too many comments, and grading completely bummed me out.

Over the years, I’ve learned from people like the Writing Studies scholar Bill Hart-Davidson that a lot of teacher feedback, depending on how it’s deployed, doesn’t even make much of a meaningful difference in improving student writing outcomes. Why, then, was I spending so(ooooooo) much time doing it, especially when it was making me miserable?!

I haven’t figured out The Solution™️ or anything. Giving feedback still takes me time. Sometimes I still write too much and can’t get out of my own way. But a few shifts in how I’m spending that time have significantly made me hate it less. I think they’ve also made feedback more effective and comprehensible to students.

Here’s what’s changed.

I changed my grading system.

Inspired by the work of people like Peter Elbow and Jane Danielewicz, Asao Inoue, and several people in my PhD program at The Graduate Center, I started grading writing with a grading contract about 10 years ago. Grading contracts can look differently depending on the context, but my contract is labor-based, and this means that grades are determined by how much work students do that meets minimum requirements. Anyone who looks at the work should be able to agree that they have or haven’t met them (e.g. you either wrote 500 words or you didn’t; you either answered all of the questions on the peer review worksheet or you didn’t.) Assessments of essay “quality” remain separate from the student’s grade.

Working with contracts (or what I now call “grading agreements”) has been a journey. My first contract design was….bad. It was long, confusing, and haunted by the point system that had preceded it. It read like a condescending Terms of Service agreement (sorry, former students!)

I still change my contract a little bit every year, but I think it’s much clearer now. While I still have a point system to deal with the ambiguities of what happens when a student never comes to class but does all of the work, or always comes to class but never turns anything in, this version fits on a post-it note: come to class, do the homework, and do the process-oriented major assignments.

Using a contract grading system means that my feedback no longer functions as a justification for a grade. I don’t feel like I need to explain their grade to them. This means that I get almost no grade pushback: students know exactly how to earn an A in the class, and when they don’t, they generally accept that it was because they didn’t do something that they were supposed to do. My slow, gradual shift to this system has allowed for so many other possibilities.

We read (only and exclusively) to write.

What we read and how we read it are much more directly connected to my feedback approach than in the past. I used to assign readings to fill class time and to, nebulously, “do class discussions.” While I hope to choose readings that my students want to discuss, these days, my purpose in assigning any reading in my 110 is almost never to discuss the content.

Instead, we read so that we can talk about writing choices. In everything we read, we look for claims and how evidence is incorporated. We look for a thesis statement, or its equivalent, and how this changes in different kinds of writing. We look at transitions, word choices, and calls to action. We think A LOT about rhetorical choices based on audience and purpose. We reverse outline the heck out of just about everything. We do rhetorical analysis. We think about source use and how it changes based on the field or genre.

This means that we read (way, way) less. I assign about two major texts per unit that we spend several class periods analyzing thoroughly. We just keep coming back to them and taking them apart again and again and again.

Reading in this way helps us to build a vocabulary and a process for talking about writing. When students can recognize claims and evidence in a course reading, it becomes easier for them to do it in their drafts. When I can show them what a “so what” statement looks like, they can point one out in their peer’s draft. I can ask them to try out a particular technique from something that we saw someone else do. And reading in this way allows us to talk about edits in terms of choices for the audience rather than in terms of what “every” paper should “always” include. This helps me to give better, more understandable feedback that students can apply.

I make students do more of the heavy lifting.

Many students had learned from their previous schooling experiences, as I had learned from mine, that me telling them what was “wrong” with their work and giving them a grade was my job as a writing teacher.

In this passive arrangement, students waited for me to tell them “what I wanted” for them to “fix.” The assumption was that their writing was broken, and it was my job to diagnose it and prescribe it medicine. Especially within more community-based assignments where I wasn’t the audience, this meant that I was sometimes missing their point completely or taking over their project in ways that didn’t make sense for their goals.

These days, I ask students to take on more of the responsibility in guiding me toward what would be useful at a particular stage of the drafting process by requiring students to annotate their drafts with specific questions for me, setting up student-led conferences, and helping students to prepare for them.

All students get very quick, immediate feedback about what did and didn’t meet requirements (and I do mean quick: they get a ✅ emoji if it met requirements, a ⚠️ if it needs to be revised, and a ❌ if it is no longer eligible for revision), but I don’t respond to their comments unless they meet with me. Feedback happens during conferences.

Setting all of this up takes a ton of work, especially in the first unit. But it’s work that feels more valuable to me because I’m teaching students a durable set of editing techniques that they can keep using after my class is over rather than to write “the way I want.”

Asking students to take on this work puts their project back in their hands and makes me their collaborator: especially because the grade comes from whether they wrote questions rather than my opinion about the paper’s quality. It also prevents me from the kind of stream-of-consciousness Google doc commenting bonanza that I used to do unto them between seventeen meetings and trying to eat my lunch. Ultimately, this approach ends up taking less time, because they’re doing the work of identifying what they want to know. I’m just responding.

I’ve shifted my expectations about the purpose of conferences.

The purpose of a conference, to me, is for students to think about their ideas out loud with another person rather than as time to get a list of things to change. They can also be great for building relationships.

After helping students to prep for conferences and having them practice identifying places in their draft or in the assignment requirements that they really want to discuss, I tell students that I’m going to ask them where they want to start when they arrive, and that they’re not allowed to say “wherever you want.” They need to point out specific places in the draft that would be helpful to have another pair of eyes. They practice this, first, during the peer review.

Usually, by the time they get to the conference, students have the preparation to focus on really specific goals and they come to the conference with really defined questions. I spend many conferences looking at their writing with them in the way that we look at all other writing in class: taking it apart with them, confirming what I’m seeing, asking questions, reverse outlining.

Occasionally, a student wants to use their conference time to talk about something unrelated to the class. Sometimes they don’t prepare. Sometimes they weren’t in class when we did all of that preparation. Sometimes they still say “wherever you want.” I’ve learned to be OK with this, because helping a struggling student to navigate the gauntlet of their first year in college does help them with the writing in the long term, even if it doesn’t improve the most immediate draft. I’ve found that when I approach conferences as a space that students lead, it increases their overall investment in the class.

I don’t give feedback on stuff I didn’t teach (unless students ask).

Sometimes students use sources incorrectly in the first essay that the write in English 110. However, using multiple sources in Assignment 1 is not the goal. We don’t talk about source use at all, and I don’t expect that all or most of my students will know how to do it by the end of September. So I don’t give feedback on it, unless that’s what a student wants.

I try to really focus on a certain set of skills in each unit, and to mostly give feedback on their achievement of those skills. If I didn’t teach something in Unit 1, I don’t expect students to know how to do it.

The exception: sometimes students ask me “hey, am I integrating this source correctly?” in an annotation. That student already had practice with sources in some other class, or they wouldn’t be asking me that question. I am happy to give feedback on sources in this case, because that student is ready for that information.

I will also flag source use for students if they’re doing something really egregious (e.g. copying and pasting a whole paragraph from Wikipedia) when this means that a student has failed to meet a requirement (e.g. use 500 of your own words).

But I’m still screwing some stuff up.

I am still not great at giving useful feedback on low-stakes work. I write too much (even positive stuff). It takes a long time to establish a mutual vocabulary that we can all use to talk about writing, and it takes time for students to get good at asking questions about their drafts. This means that, in the first third of the class — a part that is crucial to establishing good relationships and norms — I’m sometimes reverting to my old habits and overwhelming students with too much stuff. I tend to keep dumping too many ideas on them when they’re still in the early stages of drafting because I want them to know that I’m reading and paying attention to their work.

I’m trying to do better! In Unit 2, I’m planning to try out this method that I saw Fia Christina Borjeson and Carl Johan Carlsson present on at the 2023 Conference on College Composition and Communication in some of the low-stakes work.

Borjeson and Carlsson mark students’ work with a color coding system (which we’d want to adapt in case students are colorblind, but any code would do). For example, they mark all of students’ evidence (or attempt at evidence) in green. Then, during the class session, they give feedback to the whole class showing some specific examples from a model text of how evidence should be structured and incorporated. Everyone with a green highlight in their paper looks at the example that the instructors give. Then, they decide whether they need to make revisions. Students without green marks would know that they need to add evidence. Then, students make their own revisions, and with other members of the class, reflect on what they did and why they did it.

I like this, because it shows students that we’re reading what they write, while also turning the responsibility back over to them to figure out what is (or isn’t) going well in their draft. We’re not doing it for them. We’re simply communicating “here’s where I think you’re doing X — does yours look like this?” or “I don’t see where you’re doing X yet.”

Do you have a feedback method that is working well for you and that both saves you time and also maximizes student learning? Let us know about it in the comments!

This idea was submitted by Amanda Torres on the #110 Slack channel. We are moving it here to preserve it past the 90-day limit!

Hi everyone, I wanted to share an activity I did this week that seemed to go over pretty well with my 110 sections. We played a modified version of “Heads Up” as a way to introduce genre, media, and conventions of genre. In Heads Up, players hold up a card to their forehead without previously reading it, and it is up to their teammates to provide clues to help the player guess what is on the card.

I made 5 cards with variety of genres and media that I felt might appeal to freshmen (superhero movies, KPop songs, beauty TikToks, crime dramas, and role-playing video games), but of course, you can choose any that you’d like. Five students were asked to volunteer to come up to the front of class, pick a card a random, and hold it up for the class to see.

The remaining 15 students were broken up into 5 groups of 3, and each group was responsible for coming up with 3 clues to help an assigned classmate standing up at the front of the room to guess their card. The stipulations for the clues were:

• Avoid giving specific examples of the genre/media
• Avoid using words from the card as part of the clue
• Try to provide clues based solely on the conventions of the media/genre, such as who is the audience, what are its common themes, how is it accessed, etc

After 5 minutes of coming up with clues, I asked each group to list their clues while I wrote them on the projector screen. Once all clues were shared, the players at the front of the class were given a chance to guess their cards. If they guessed correctly, they continued on to Round 2. If they didn’t guess correctly, they were asked to sit down and switch places with someone in their group.

After the first round of guessing, I asked the class what media seemed to be missing from Round 1’s cards. Many students noted there were no examples of written media or literature, which transitioned into Round 2: guessing 5 cards that had 5 different genres of writing (tweets, recipes, diary entries, fantasy novels, and cultural criticism/cultural commentary). We followed the same process of coming up with clues based on conventions and guessing the cards. Cultural criticism/commentary was an especially challenging one, but I wanted to include it as a way of ~ foreshadowing ~ “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”, which we will start reading soon.

The game ended after Round 2, and students noticed that essays weren’t included in the examples of written media, which transitioned neatly in to a conversation and lesson about the conventions of an essay, the conventions of academic writing, and how essays function as a genre and medium (and how they have their own subgenres, as well).

The students seemed to find the activity fun. It gave them yet another opportunity to learn one another’s names, and now we have a shared understanding of terms like “genre”, “media”, and “conventions” moving forward.

Over the summer, my Tik Tok algorithm suddenly discovered that I’m a writing teacher and began showing me hundreds of professional development videos. One part of me was, like, “Tik Tok, could you not.” And the other part of me was fascinated by the amount of great pedagogical content that middle and high school English teachers were making available to strangers on the internet.

One video that I found really impressive was @bee_in_the_library’s thoughtful lesson plan on opening up conversations with middle schoolers about how it’s acceptable, and not, to work with generative AI in her classroom.

I loved how this lesson explains some of the nuances of working with these tools that seemed to me to be missing from the wide variety of syllabus statements that have been circulating since last spring. Don’t get me wrong: I think statements are also very important. You can read mine here. But, to me, statements are a limited genre. They don’t really help us to get into the conversational weeds. They also function as a one-way speech rather than an invitation to a messier, ongoing dialogue.

Part of me just wants to ignore having these kinds of conversations with students. I think it’s because I feel like I’ve had to pivot and adapt more in the past three years than in my entire teaching career. Starting conversations around generative AI feels like (yet….another!!!!!!!!) thing I now how to think about cramming into an already packed semester.

But another part of me feels like facilitating conversations around generative AI present a great opportunity for my own growth. Last semester, in my early experimentation with incorporating generative AI-focused assignments into my class, I was so impressed by the thoughtful ways that so many students were already thinking about the problems and possibilities of tools like chatGPT. Some had never heard of it. But unsurprisingly, many were already thinking very critically and carefully about privacy, labor, the implications of this technology for their future within the workforce, and the ways they could partner with this technology without giving away too much of their own voice in the things that they write.

I think this was why @bee_in_the_library’s video spoke to me so much. Her materials seemed playful, generative, practical, and a great starting point for starting or facilitating more conversation. They don’t assume that students aren’t already thinking about the same questions that we are.

With her permission, I adapted her original slides and handouts for a more English 110 friendly context. She has agreed to let me share them with you, but she’s asked that we don’t make her original materials public. Because my materials are adapted versions of hers, I am linking them here under a password protected page. The password is the same as the one that you use to access the QC English Department materials. If you need it, just reach out.

I’m writing this post on September 1st, and I taught this lesson yesterday. Along with a few tasks that I took out of the samples (e.g. it’s still the beginning of the year, so we’re still doing some icebreakers and name games), it took roughly one class period.

If you’re not trying to spend an entire class period on this, I think that the activity where students have to make a mark on the continuum from “cheating” to “not cheating” took us about 20-25 minutes in total, and it really opened up some interesting avenues for further conversation. We ended up discussing a bit about the writers’ strike and the use of AI tools in the creation of film and television scripts, as well as some of the implications for these kinds of tools on the future of the workforce, which were exciting directions that I was not expecting to emerge. I also spent a bit more time than these slides would make it seem modeling for them how (and why) to disclose their usage to me, noting that this was less about surveilling them and more about understanding ways that these tools support their writing so that I can help other members of the class or future students. We’re figuring this out together.

Overall, I feel more confident that students and I are on the same page, and that we can enter into this semester partnering with each other as we explore the use of these tools: when to use them, how to use them, whether to use them, and when to make a different choice.

Please feel free to adapt these yourself for your own context (crediting @bee_in_the_library, since she was the one who made the originals) if you find them useful. And let us know how you’re talking about AI with your students this fall!