I really hate test prep, and to a large extent I feel as if that’s what we did on Monday night. The students were stressed about the upcoming essay. I wish I could be tough like many other professors and say, too bad, here’s the question, figure it out. But as a teacher educator, I feel compelled to model good instruction – or at least as good I can be. So we spent the whole class taking apart the essay question, reviewing the past readings, and thinking and talking about how those readings fit into the essay question.
The reason I did this was to provide a way in to talking about the last two sets of reading we did as well as provide support for the essay. After all, two of the subquestions really were intensively linked to the last two sets of reading.
I gave the students a heuristic for thinking about the essay question. It was an outline that broke down the essay questions and provided a strategy for using the texts for attacking that question. I was of two minds regarding that heuristic. It felt in many respects too prescriptive, yet I realize that this is the first graduate class for many of my students and they have not yet developed the skills for tackling a dense question like this. I have to remind myself that in many respects I am still dealing with undergraduate type of thinking. It is a tough balance between providing support and being an enabler. After all, I can’t write the essay for them.
The essay serves as a formative assessment to see if there are still gaps in the students’ understandings, but it is also a writing to learn activity. By writing this essay the students are really forced to think through these ideas and to make connections. They come out on the other side with a much deeper understanding of the issues than they had before writing the essay. But it is a painful experience.
It’s painful for me too because I feel as if no matter how much support I give, it’s never enough.
One thing I’m going to do next time not give the students the heuristic all at once. They tended to focus on the first subquestion and had to be prompted to move on to the second and third subquestions. But was important for them to do so, because that’s where they would be talking about the new readings. So next time I’m going to do this almost as a progressive problem based learning activity. I’ll give them the first subquestion, then after a set period of time, give them the second, and so on.
During the second half of class I did a minilecture where I just recapped the readings we’ve done thus far. Nothing exciting, but hopefully it served to remind the students of the different texts.
We ended with writers’ workshop. I provided a model for how to synthesize readings and then had them work in groups to create a synthesis of some of the readings. Each group was able to create a synthesis, so I’m hoping to see that in the paper.
I need to continue reminding myself that this is an induction course and that I’m trying to move them toward thinking as literacy professionals. Yes, the content is important, but more than anything it’s the ways of thinking I want to see developed.
October 26, 2008 at 9:01 pm
I really appreciated the outline that you provided in class to support the writing of our midterm paper. INot only did it show me how to pick apart a question such as “What is the role of oral langauge in literacy acquistion?” it also showed me the key understandings that needed to be included in order to effectively answer the question. Prior to Monday nights class, I had written my own outline for the midterm, but after comparing it to the model you provided in class, I realized that I had missed some key understanderings that were expected to be included in the paper. When writing my midterm, I was able to use the outline you gave and my own, to answer the question. It was a hard paper to write because it seems like we have covered so much content and trying to synthesize it all was a challenge. I am glad that we went over an example in class and were given the time to attempt to write our own paragraph. I struggled with synthesizing in my midterm, but at least I had an example to refer to as I tried! All in all, I do feel that it was a good class and I left feeling more confident about the midterm. I am glad so much class time and group work was devoted to it.
October 28, 2008 at 9:35 pm
I agree with Lisa that the outline for the midterm essay we were given was very helpful. It helped to see the main points we have to cover in the essay broken down into simpler questions. Since this was the midterm essay and first major piece of writing we’ve had to do for this course, I think I just felt intimidated and overwhelmed with the assignment. However, the outline served as a helpful learning tool – it did not give us the answers to the questions or tell us what to write, but it let me know what general track to follow when writing my paper. Although I still was not feeling 100% confident, I felt a heck of a lot better after class on 10/20.
I also felt it was helpful to go over the main points of each text we’ve written as a whole class. The mini-lecture was effective in refreshing my mind about all the authors we’ve come across thus far in the semester. Although we have discussions with our groups about the readings we’ve done, it is always nice to have them recapped and touched upon just to confirm our understanding of the articles.
I also found it somewhat difficult to synthesize all of the readings in my essay. It was certainly challenging because there was so much content and so many readings to choose from.
October 28, 2008 at 11:23 pm
I agree with Jillian and Lisa. Without the outline we were given, I don’t think I could have successfully completed the midterm essay. The essay, itself, we definitely a challange for me as a writer…and I was an English major! Synthesizing the material and information was grueling at times but I feel it helped me in my overall comprehension of the material. It’s hard to imagine how much material we have covered in only half a semester. I’m looking forward to see what the rest of the sememster holds. I know Dr. Jacobs said that we were going to start dealing with how technology and literacy interact. Seeing as how we are in a time where new technology is being created every minute, I will be curious to see how it all can be related to literacy and maybe even used in the classroom.