Sustaining Your Writing Productivity

Two fairly recent posts in Tomorrow's Professor capture very succinctly the skills and approaches toward writing that we will be developing during Metro State's Scholarly Writing Workshop on May 28 & 29.

In their post How to Write Anything, Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent argue:

The strategy of waiting for large blocks of time to work on major writing projects has two significant flaws. When you finally get to a block, it's been so long since the last one that it can take hours or days to build momentum again and you're likely to run out of time before much gets written. Also, as soon as the block arrives other things rush in to fill it, such as your family, whom you've been neglecting for months and who now legitimately think it's their turn.

A much more effective strategy is to make a commitment to regularly devote short periods of time to major writing projects. Thirty minutes a day is plenty, or maybe an hour three times a week.

And in a more recent post, Gina Hiatt urges, very simply, to "write before you're ready."

Both arguments are expanded on in the respective blog posts, and both are attributed to Robert Boice, Professors as Writers (Stillwater, OK: New Forums Press, 1990), which will figure prominently in the Scholarly Writing Workshop.

All Metro State faculty, administrators, and staff are invited to be part of the Scholarly Writing Workshop. Registration closes on May 8.

Presenting and Explaining, or, The Lecture

I'm in the middle of reading Teaching First-Year College Students, and I've come across a section of the book where yet again the suggestions and examples given can apply not only to courses for first-year students, but to all of our courses. In this case, it's with regard to how we lecture, or, as the authors prefer to call it, "present and explain".

Most of us lecture at least some of the time we spend teaching, and for good reason: "a clear explanation or demonstration is often a good place to start instruction." (87)

What the authors would like us to do, though, is move away from the 50-minute non-stop lecture:

Our content is important, and we can cover a lot of it in class if we are not interrupted. Most of us will, of course, acknowledge that it makes no sense to cover material if students do not understand it and do not remember it. Nevertheless, covering content is a powerful drive, and it often rules that day—usually at the expense of activities that would result in greater learning. (91)

This is the thinking behind the active learning movement. But what if we want to hold onto lecture? There are some adjustments that we can make to cultivate what students need to learn and make meaning of the content presented. Just of a few of the recommendations offered are:

• Define objectives. Specify what students need to do with the information. Will you be asking them to remember definitions, procedures, or factual information? Will they be expected to recognize new examples or illustrations? Will you want students to use the information somehow?
  
• Highlight the major points. Better yet, pause during the lecture for 5 or 10 minutes and ask the students to do this either through reflective writing, small group discussion, class discussion, or any combination thereof.
  
• Select appropriate examples. So-called "seductive details", though interesting, can divert students away from the key learning objectives, as a recent student has found.
  
• Check for understanding. A simple Classroom Assessment Technique, the "minute paper", is a useful tool for this. There are many descriptions of the minute paper on the Web, including this one.
  

Source: Erickson, B.L., Peters, C.B., and Strommer, D. W. (2006). Teaching First-Year College Students. Revised and Expanded Edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

 

Knowing When Students Are Learning

The faculty learning community on course (re)design meets Friday to talk about evaluating students, and in preparing for that discussion, I was rereading chapter 6 ("The Purpose and Processes of Evaluation") of Maryellen Weimer's Learner-centered Teaching. In it, she refers to "a classic article, 'Angels on a Pin' (Calandra, 1968)." Intrigued, I found the article online. It's short, funny, and well worth the quick read.

I don't know that the final paragraph of this story really captures the lesson of the exchange between the student, his physics professor, and the arbitrator/author. The postscript that you'll find appended to this particular Web version of "Angles on a Pin" raises some questions about the origins and context of that final paragraph.

Rather, I think Maryellen Weimer has it right when she states that the story "is actually a damning critique of how our evaluation methods fail to measure some important kinds of learning" (p. 120).