by Al Byrnes
As I have worked as a writing coach for the Writing Intensive Program (WIP) at the University of Georgia, I have learned the importance of supporting students. Through facilitating meaningful opportunities for practice and through explicitly teaching writing as a process, I have helped students develop their writing skills. The training I have received through WIP has availed me the opportunity to learn techniques for encouraging students through the writing process, while supporting their learning.
In GRMN3770W, Heritage German, I have learned how implementing small, low-stakes writing assignments can augment in-class discussions about homework and readings. This practice has allowed students in our class to more consistently and deeply engage in class discussion and has assisted the instructor and me in gaining further insight into student understanding and progress. Members of the class have been working to co-construct knowledge and understandings pertinent to heritage languages in German and Germanic languages in an American context.
Low-stakes writing assignments and the feedback we have collected about student understanding through these assignments have also supported the design of summative assessments throughout the semester, using the results to identify both strong and weak points of understanding. This information has been and can be used to adjust the pace of instruction and make more holistic adjustments to a course’s trajectory. Some examples of these low-stakes writing assignments have included in-class free-writing in response to key arguments and frameworks analyzed in our course readings and pre-writing activities before and after discussions. It is amazing the amount of support a small-handwritten half-sheet assignment can provide students in a discussion or at the beginning of a larger writing assignment.
It is amazing the amount of support a small-handwritten half-sheet assignment can provide students in a discussion or at the beginning of a larger writing assignment.
I have also taught writing as a process to students during this semester. Through these experiences, I have experienced firsthand how direct instruction about writing as a process can provide the necessary scaffolding for students to improve the clarity and focus of both low- and high-stakes writing assignments. After explicit, direct instruction about revision, students were conveyed expectations and strategies for effective revision. These strategies and the contents of this lesson were informed not only by student performance on the first drafts but also by the strategies and pedagogical techniques for teaching writing as a process learned through the WIPP7001 seminar. This type of support made the revision process more meaningful for students, helping them to hone in on specific elements related to the content of the writing through scaffolded presentation of writing as a process. Through a series of activities in class, students were asked to connect their prior experiences with revision and were introduced to some new ideas through two writing workshop-style class meetings. During these meetings, the class and I were able to co-construct the revision process and the expectations to which students would be held as part of a learning community.
Explicit instruction about revision and more generally writing as a process takes the guess-work out of writing for students. Too often in my own academic experience, writing has been structured as a purely summative assessment. This approach to writing unfortunately disallows students important experience for opportunities to grow and learn and apply skills that can be transferred into writing in all fields and disciplines. For that reason, the course instructor and I have implemented the explicit instruction of writing as a process to provide students with a clearer idea about how to engage in commonly assigned writing tasks such as revision and peer review that are relevant and necessary to students’ future careers.
To support students in the peer-reviewing process, we have encouraged students to identify, through the readings and experiences they have had within the context of our class, those elements critical to a paper in linguistics and more specifically in historical-sociolinguistics. Students have developed themes and questions in our course to critically examine the work of peers pertaining to organization, cohesiveness of argument, and relevance of supporting qualitative and quantitative data to an argument.
Along the way, I have grown as a teacher through my experience by gaining a repertoire of tools and strategies in teaching writing as a process and using writing activities in and outside of class to encourage students to engage in active learning. For me, writing has become a means through which students can co-construct knowledge and make the best of student and instructor learning and teaching time, respectively.