Minutes of Meeting of Department Chairs
with Marty Townsend and the WAC Committee
8/29/06
The meeting convened at 9 a.m. and concluded at 12 p.m. The format was primarily questions from department chairs about the new Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program and answers by Marty Townsend or members of the WAC committee.
Q: What are the graduation requirements for Writing Across the Curriculum, and where can this information be found?
A: Information about Writing Across the Curriculum is found on the WAC blog, at http://www.carthage.edu/campuslife/committees/wac. Located there are minutes of meetings, links to criteria and guidelines for WI courses, and the form for proposals for Writing Intensive (WI) courses, all of which can be downloaded. The new course catalog also has a description of the WAC program.
Students entering in 2006-07, including transfer students, will be subject to the new WAC graduation requirements. The WAC requirement for all new students is 4 WI courses: Heritage I, Heritage II, a WI course in the major, and a “free” WI course (which may be taken within or outside the major).
The senior thesis class will commonly be the WI major course, as long as it offers 4 credits.
Q: How should departments decide what courses to designate WI?
A: We hope that students will take WI courses throughout their time at Carthage, so it makes sense to designate some mid-level courses as WI, which commonly enroll mostly sophomores and juniors.
Q: Can courses taught in languages other than English be designated WI?
A: Yes.
Q: What about the following loophole: If a department has only one WI course offering and it is a free elective, won’t that essentially turn the elective into a requirement for majors?
A: Yes, that is a problem the CPC will need to address.
Q: Will transfer students who have transfer credits that exempt them from a Heritage class also be exempted from the WI requirement?
A:
Q: Will there be any situation in which transfer students can be allowed WI equivalency (i.e., for the free WI course) for a transferred credit?
A:
Q: Who will have the final say – the department or the WAC committee – in whether a transfer course can be approved as fulfilling the WI requirement in the major?
A:
Q: Some departments require courses for the major that are outside the department. The language in the WAC proposal states that students must take one WI course in their “major,” not a particular department. Can such departments “farm out” the WI requirement in the major to another department?
A: Potentially, yes. Marty Townsend suggests the committee close this loophole by specifying that the WI course be in the major department.
Q: What about people who change their major? If they have already completed a WI course in the initial major, must they then complete another one in the new major?
A: This is still under discussion.
Q: What about double majors?
A: It will be up to the departments of the student’s various majors to decide in which department the student should take the required WI course. Students are only required to take one WI course in one major, even if they have multiple majors.
Q: What about team-taught courses? Can such courses double their allowed enrollment if they are WI, since there will be two professors?
A:
Q: Is there a certification requirement to teach WI?
A: Yes. Instructors are required to complete one annual workshop sequence.
Q: How will department chairs know which faculty are certified, and how can we make sure faculty take the workshops?
A: It is the responsibility of the department chairs to make sure their faculty have taken the required writing workshop, before teaching a WI course. Chairs can find out who has taken the workshop by going to the WAC blog. They should probably keep a record of faculty in their department who have completed the certification.
Q: How are we to induce faculty to teach WI courses? If arms are to be twisted, how will we prevent the situation of faculty with least power or status being those to teach WI?
A: The department chairs have the responsibility to spread the teaching of these courses throughout their faculty, both senior and junior. Also, chairs should be models and teach WI courses themselves.
Chairs should also look at courses the department is already teaching that are appropriate for WI; and also, to choose courses that most or all majors take, and designate a section of such a course as WI.
Q: What about J-term? Will instructors be allowed to teach limited-enrollment WI courses, given the need to fill J-term courses? And if classes are smaller, how are we going to serve the students who need J-term courses? Where will the extra staff come from?
A: Instructors may offer WI J-term classes, and the Dean who oversees J-term supports this. In general, WI’s limited-enrollment courses create a long-term personnel issue. Departments that need to break large sections into two sections, so as to create a WI section, may need additional staff. The Dean of the College is committed to supporting the WAC program, so departments should address their needs for additional staff as soon as possible with the Dean.
Q: Will there be an assessment process to determine the success of each WI course?
A: Yes. Assessment goals and procedures are being developed this year. Assessment will be two-pronged: does a course fulfill the general goals of WAC; and does the course fulfill departmental goals?
Q: Will the teaching of a WI course be dependent on having already gone to the certification workshop?
A: A professor can apply to teach a WI course without yet having attended the workshop. However, departments should encourage as many of their faculty as possible to attend the workshop this year, or else next year.
Q: If the intent of WI courses is to develop writing within a discipline, how do we teach the mechanics of writing? And what outside support will WI instructors have?
A: All the research on the teaching of writing suggests that is not productive to teach correctness as a separate part of the writing process. There must be an integrated approach to content and structure/mechanics. Further, the College’s grading rubric indicates that writing success is based on a combination of high-quality content and adequacy of mechanical skills.
Q: Are there any outside support services for teaching writing?
A: Yes. The Writing Center is available for students and instructors for help with writing. Further, department chairs can ask the WAC committee for writing workshops to be offered specifically to their department, and for other mentoring.
Q: Will there be any general WAC mentors or gurus?
A: Yes.
Q: Won’t students be scared away from taking an elective course if it is designated WI?
A: Possibly, but those students may be balanced by others who will take the course especially because it’s WI.
Q: How do we change the Carthage culture to support WAC?
A: First, we have already begun by adopting the WAC program. Second, chairs should emphasize maintaining high WI standards, and should provide support for their faculty by distributing the responsibilities so a few faculty don’t have the whole burden.
It is important to make WI courses, especially the “free” courses, attractive to students by letting them know WI will help, not hurt their chances of success in the course, because of all the support they will receive with the writing process. Studies show that students get better grades in WI courses.
Likewise, students should not see their WI coruses as “the courses where they write”; these courses are part of an overall emphasis on writing throughout the students’ years at Carthage. This message needs to be emphasized repeatedly. Over time, a culture of WAC leads to more writing throughout college.
Q: Given that a lot of classes emphasize writing, what if a students asks for WI credit for a given course, that has not been designated WI but has involved a great deal of writing? Should exceptions or substitutions be made?
A: No. WI credit should be given only for those courses designated WI.
Q: Why do schools abandon WAC programs?
A: Overwhelmingly, because of lack of support from upper administration, both fiscally and philosophically.
Q: What about Broad Field Social Science majors? They can choose from a “cafeteria” of options. How not to force them to take a particular course because it’s the only WI offered? This issue arises in a number of majors, like computer science.
A: We can create courses that are part WI and part non-WI, to accommodate different needs. But we don’t want a lot of such courses, where the writing goals are not the same for the whole class. Another possibility is to split the WI requirement over two courses [?]
Q: How many WI sections do departments need to offer?
A: We will, by three years from now, need 51 sections a year to serve all the students, i.e., 17 per semester. This is a minimum. There is no fixed number per department. Rather, each department chair should determine how many WI sections to offer in order to serve their own majors.
Q: What should chairs do right now to begin implementing the program?
A:
• Have a department meeting this fall that addresses WI.
• Have as many as faculty as possible attend this fall’s writing workshops, and next year’s if they miss this year’s.
• Figure out how many WI sections will be needed for your department so that majors will have two WI courses available to them in the major.
• Proposal forms for individual WI course proposals will be available online within the next few weeks. Faculty should fill them out as soon as they are ready to propose a WI course and submit them to the committee. Faculty may propose a WI course even if they haven’t yet taken the writing workshop (it can be taken in fall 2007).
• The WAC committee would like to have a large number of applications to consider by January 2007. The committee will work with individual instructors on revising syllabi when necessary to conform to the WI standards.
Q: If we apply this year to teach a WI course, when can it be taught?
A: In the 2007-08 academic year, in most cases not until spring 2008 because schedules for fall 2007 are made in fall 2006.
Q: If a department creates a WI course for its majors, what if it gets filled with non-majors wanting to fulfill their free WI course requirement?
A: Departments should consider adopting prerequisites for its WI courses for majors, so as to keep out non-majors, if section size is a problem.
Q: What support will be given to departments to implement WAC?
A: The committee will provide various forms of support to departments, including discussion of individual proposals and individualized writing workshops. The Dean of the College will discuss with any department the need to add additional sections of course so as to limit the enrollment of a WI course.
Q: Can an instructor do an experimental WI course in spring 2007?
A: Yes, if they have been certified by taking the fall 2006 writing workshop. If not, WHAT DO WE SAY HERE?
Q: How will advisors, departments and students know what WI courses are being offered?
A: The information will be available online. The Committee will keep faculty and advisors informed as to what WI courses will be offered in the coming year.
Minutes of Writing Workshop for Faculty
Led by Marty Townsend
8/30/06
An Introduction to Teaching with Writing
Standard written English is only a tiny part of the discursive and linguistic variety in our world. We are comfortable with it, partly because of our long histories of reading and writing. But we are the exceptions. We have to convey to our students why it’s valuable to move them into our “community of discourse,” into a narrow kind of academic expression; it’s a long road for them.
General topic for the day will be: designing writing assignments.
Some basic challenges in addressing a writing task
• Time; deadlines
• Identifying audience and writing for them
• Figuring out what you want to say; thesis
• Length; subtopics
• Deciding what is common knowledge and what needs to be cited; sources
• What does the editor want?
• Style
• Is what I’m saying worthwhile?
• Balancing many tasks and finding time for writing
• If you write about everything, you write about nothing
• Finding the affect, the personal voice, in a piece of academic writing
• Co-authorship
• Technical aspects
• Getting started
• Avoiding polemic; clarifying your own assumptions
• How much to elaborate; focus
• Organization
• When to stop
Exercise in critiquing a writing assignment
Strengths of assignment “Myths in TV commercials”
• Students have a lot of choice as to topic
• Gives them direction
• They are experts (about TV)
• Concrete, tangible, explicit
• Structure
• Format and mechanics are spelled out
• Promotes critical thinking
• Implied order
• Involves different media of communication (visual and written)
• Allows both objective and subective responses
• Involves data collection
• Concise
Weaknesses of assignment
• Asks for a coherent essay without simply listing, but gives assignment as a list
• Purpose is unclear; multiple purposes are implied
• Big terms are used but not defined (would need to be defined in class)
• Better to ask just one question – either eliminate multiple questions or synthesize them
• Too much to be done in space allotted (3-4 pages)
• Hard to create a specific thesis from separate questions, although it’s easy to answer the questions
• For freshmen, evaluating is a difficult task – too much to ask right away?
• Elements of the writing process are all left out:
o Who is the audience?
o What are grading criteria?
o Mechanics requirements?
o Elements of process?
• But should all these aspects of the process be put on the assignment sheet? Would be very lengthy and intimidating
• This would be hard to teach and grade
• Goals are uncertain
• Impossible to come up with a thesis with all these tasks
• Typo in the assignment
• Instructions need to be organized better
• Too many verbs: select, compare, analyze, answer, write, describe, evaluate. Huge range of cognitive tasks, and way too much for a new student.
Verbs are critical!
Predicting how a student will perform on this task
• Lots of serial responses
• Students won’t develop their good ideas, because they will be rushing on to the next task
Exercise in grading three student papers
Participants read a grading rubric, and then read three student papers on the assignment “Myths in TV commercials” and assigned grades; then discussed in small groups and came to a consensus on what grades to assign. The grades of different groups were then tabulated and discussion followed.
Some observations on grading:
• There was a fair degree of accord on the range of grades
• This was disputed by various people, who said that the consensus requirement forced an accord
• How we really grade papers is different from how we think we should grade papers
• The rubric did not match the writing assignment
• One should always have a specific rubric for a specific assignment, so that grading is parallel to the goals of the task
• Papers in the middle range raise difficulties, because they frequently show a disparity between quality of content and mechanical/structural elements; there is disagreement about how heavily to weigh mechanics
• Rubrics are problematic in this middle range. We know a good paper and we know a bad paper, but there are many ways to be mediocre. How should the rubric reflect this?
• Can be helpful to assign point values to different elements of a rubric, in order to focus the grading
• One can make rubrics even more detailed; but students may then obsess about individual elements of it and not write better
• A rubric is a set of expectations, which gives the students a sense of your standards, but is not intended to tell them how to write the paper; a rubric should not be an algorithm, which locks you into a structure for grading that won’t work
• Let’s not teach to the rubric; it limits idea generation
• But, many students need to learn writing as a step-by-step process and want an operational rather than holistic approach. So, a holistic rubric should never be used alone.
• What we want is to move from our expectations to the student’s intention; to put it into their hands
Discussion of theory of writing across the curriculum
Three functions of writing (Britton)
• Poetic
• Expressive
• Transactional
The distinctions between expressive and transactional writing are roughly parallel to distinctions between informal and formal writing (outlined on pp. 7-8 of handout). A key issue for teaching writing is how to create expressive/informal assignments that will then help students move to the transactional/formal stage.
Ideas for informal writing
• The one-minute essay. Ask a particular question to see if they have understood the material; or stop a discussion and assign a one-minute essay on how the students are feeling about the discussion; etc.
• Out of class: the meaningful paragraph, based on a set of assigned words.
• These short writings are quick and easy to evaluate, while students learn a lot.
• Explain a principle to another student, in writing
• Discussion threads
• Microthemes
Any time you evaluate a writing assignment, provide criteria for evaluation on the assignment sheet. Create an individualized rubric for each assignment.
Students are frequently mystified and skeptical as to why they are doing the informal writing assignments. We should anticipate this resistance, and take time to explain to them the connection between informal and formal writing, how exploratory writing can lead to theses, etc. Students do not see its value without our guidance. We can use our own writing as examples.
The effectiveness of informal writing is partly a function of how it’s used.
Discussion proceeded about specific ways faculty who currently teach writing use informal writing. How do we balance informal and formal writing? Informal writing is frequently a way to set up formal tasks (i.e., thesis generation for a formal paper).
Questions also arose about sending students mixed messages, for example by giving in-class essay exams which imply that students can produce finished, gradeable prose without revision.
Participants created their own informal writing assignments.
Creating problem-based assignments
• Problem assignment is distinct from a topic assignment
• Example of a topic-based assignment is the “Myths in Commercials” assignment
• Many assignments are topic-based (ex: discuss the causes of the Civil War)
• But these tend to be too open-ended
• Most academic writing is problem-based
• How can we turn a topic assignment into a problem assignment?
• “Commercials” example: “As a new consultant, how might you suggest they use the concept of myth to create consumer demand?”
• It might be harder to create a problem-based assignment in the humanities
Example from the Nigeria screenplay
A topic paper: Describe the African American experience of colonial rule in Nigeria.
A problem paper: Justify or criticize the change in the ending of the screenplay.
Discussion:
• If we give a creative assignment, like the screenplay assignment, how do we avoid the students not taking the argument or problem seriously, and focusing entirely on the “creative” part?
• Some faculty prefer topic- rather than problem-based assignments
• But topic-based assignments are not thesis-oriented
Formula for problem-based assignments
R Role for student to play
A Audience
F Format
T Task/theme/topic
Make sure students are able to do R, A and F.
Use a variety of assignments since different students favor different types of assignments.
Minutes of Writing Workshop for Faculty
Led by Marty Townsend
8/31/06
Participants shared writing assignments in small groups, then had a general discussion. Some assignment ideas:
• Using images to generate ideas
• Having students write to a friend about an assigned text, then to the professor: helps students think about style and audience; but also helps them think about ideas, rather than about what the professor wants
• Letter writing in general a good way to generate writing and stimulate discussion
• Give an assignment that allows student to make a claim and also account for the counterclaim
• What if student’s informal writing gives a wrong answer?
Grading student papers: finding ways that limit our time grading, while effectively helping students improve
• Comment on drafts
• Don’t overwhelm student with comments: limit to three
• Focus on ideas, rather than errors. This is something you have to train yourself to do.
• This helps you to show the student how to revise the paper, rather than justifying your grade
• At the drafting phase, focus on higher-order concerns, rather than lower-order (mechanical) ones
• Must send this message also in the classroom: college writing is about higher-order concerns, not correctness
• Demand that students deal with correctness issues on their own. Do not become their proofreaders.
This type of grading works best with frequent short assignments, rather than fewer, long ones.
Question: What about Heritage II, which assigns a long research paper?
Discussion: Break it down into smaller components with discrete goals. Send students to writing center for help with specific issues.
Problem: written comments alone are not very effective in improving papers. Need:
• Rubrics
• Whole-class discussion
• Written comments
• One-on-one meetings
Minimal marking
• It is not the job of faculty to correct errors; only global issues should be addressed
• Then how will the student learn to correct them?
• Students do need guidance; but editing can and should be left to a later stage of the writing process
• What about when students complain that you didn’t tell them what they did wrong, and then gave them a bad grade?
• Students need to be indoctrinated into the new approach, and so do faculty
• We do not teach mechanics!
• Students can be directed to handbooks or their own word-processing program
• Objection: word-processing programs aren’t always right; further, they don’t teach the students, but give them a crutch
• Respond to three most important problems
Discussion of need to be positive with students and motivate them, rather than simply being critical and punitive. If something is really bad, tell them how to get help.
What about the fact that creating a standardized rubric limits our flexibility in evaluating student writing, which is not always comparable in terms of its virtues and problems?
Encourage students to single-space their papers—helps both you and them to see the overall shape of their argument.
Rubrics
Pros and cons of using them
• Students will “write to the rubric” – i.e., boring, generic papers
• There’s always an implicit rubric; why not make it explicit?
• A rubric makes your expectations clear
Whole class discussion
• Need to give them guidelines for peer review
• Be careful to avoid students being scapegoated; create positive environment
• Give specific tasks to make sure students are willing to give criticism
• See Bean, Engaging Ideas; Robert Brook, on workshopping
• Share one draft with whole class. Choose carefully a draft that will exemplify what you want students to work on
o Objection to singling out particular students’ work: they don’t feel they can say no
o Response: we could ask permission to use the following year; or put it on the syllabus that work will be used anonymously, as examples in class
• Five-minute workshops
o www.missouri.edu/~pattonmd/FiveMinuteWkshps.html
o Use short workshops to focus on particular common paper problems
o Most effective is to use students’ actual papers as examples
• Drawbacks to whole-class discussion: takes a lot of time; may not reach all students
Written comments
• Most common method of evaluation
• Tendency of instructors is to say too much: limit comments
• Students can misunderstand comments; be clear
• Put fewest comments on the final draft
• Should we put preliminary grades on early drafts?
Participants then each graded one of the sample essays on “Myths in Commercials” and discussed constructive forms of minimal marking.
Discussion of pros and cons of holistic rubrics, and of analytic rubrics. Both kinds of rubrics have weaknesses. Example that people liked most came from Bean, Engaging Ideas. It was holistic, but had a specific set of expectations.
Discussion of group or collaborative projects and how to grade them.
Question: Are the Heritage courses different from the other WI courses?
Not essentially. Heritage is different from a freshman composition class. Heritage is NOT the class “where you learn how to write.” It is like other WI courses—writing is used as a means to engage the content of the course.
Marty Townsend’s final message for the College:
• Make writing serve teaching
• Work together to keep standards for the program consistent and high
Alan Wallace’s final thought:
Both holistic and analytic methods of evaluation can work. Different rubrics may serve different purposes. Grading holistically gives a sense of overall quality. Grading analytically helps them determine specific things to work on. Each method is artificial and leaves out key aspects of the writing. Don’t expect to find a perfect rubric.