by Anna Allen
Misconception #1: the more time and effort I put in, the better students will learn.
Written down, this suggestion seems slightly more irrational than the same wordless notion I carry around in my heads from day to day: if I spend hours crafting the perfect writing lesson plans, writing assignments, and feedback, students will be better writers. If I work harder, students will learn more about writing. But how much of this thought is actually true?
Logically, this thought makes perfect sense. The amount of work I put into something does have a relationship to the outcome—there is no denying that. If I spend every day practicing ballet, for example, as dance pedagogy is the subject of my WIP course, then I am bound to have better results than if I were to practice once a month. To a degree, this is true about the time you put into teaching writing. What is equally true about both learning an art form and teaching writing, however, is that time and effort alone will not cause my students or myself to thrive. But the quality of time I allot for preparation in both cases will.
Sometimes I can prepare an effective Five Minute Teach—an active-learning-focused activity targeted at improving specific aspects of writing such as source citation or using UGA’s library website for research—in no time at all, while other days it will take much longer. I’ve come to realize that how I spend my time doing these preparatory tasks is infinitely more important than merely the amount of time I spend doing them. The same goes for giving feedback. The amount of time it takes to give feedback on an assignment should not be the lone force that drives my own sense of quality control. Spending more time writing feedback to students does not guarantee it will be quality feedback, just as extra time editing those essays for my own classes does not guarantee I will do well. Self-imposed time stamps for success leave out the variability (and the fun) in the process of teaching.
Misconception #2: always stick to your prepared plans.
This approach to teaching writing seems perfectly reasonable: if I stick to my carefully crafted plans, there is no way I will “miss” any important material and therefore no way students will struggle to understand the concepts I am teaching. In a recent assignment, a digital narrative with pictures designed to convey a moment or collection of moments of their past dance experience that has led them to their current values and beliefs about dance pedagogy, I became so wrapped up in the creative aspect of crafting a narrative for these stories that I had not realized that most students were not at all comfortable with any type of creative writing, despite their abounding creativity in dance. The narrative was not meant to be a recount of their history as a dancer, but that was what I received when the assignment final digital narrative were presented in class.
Before running away with the creative possibilities of drafting their own narratives, I now realize I could have taken more opportunity to explain the connection between choreographing a dance and writing a narrative of any kind. Both creative activities include a period of discovery, full of questions, research, and development of theme followed by a period of organization and drafting. Finally, there are the steps of revising and editing—steps which are essential in dance rehearsal but are often not talked about in regard to learning how to write effectively. Whether or not they knew it, my students already possessed the ability to write a great narrative for their digital stories; they simply needed to be reminded that they already knew the process so they could transfer their skills.
Misconception #3: if students miss the point of an assignment, grade them harshly against the original criteria.
Sometimes, no matter how clear an assignment appears to me, students will miss the point. I used to think: if students miss the point of an assignment, their grades should reflect that. Through my recent experiences as a WIP TA, however, I have to come to realize that when enough students fail to accomplish an assignment as directed, there might be a misjudgment in regard to my own expectations of their writing and therefore the original grading criteria should be slightly adjusted.
The reasoning behind this flexibility in grading is not meant to make the assignment any “easier” for students or to inflate their grades, as some would suggest, but rather to communicate with students that I understand the difficulty they had in completing the assignment and that I respect their effort and work they put into it. I have found giving students credit where credit is due more helpful to their overall learning process than simply failing students when their writing doesn’t match up to the rubric. While sometimes necessary when there is a true lack of effort, failing grades often discourage students from learning because they don’t see what they need to do to improve their writing; they only see an “F.” And sometimes student work does deserve a lower grade. I find it more helpful in these situations to allow students to bring up their grade with a mid-stakes reflective analysis of their work; what they feel they did well and what they feel they need to improve in the future. This strategy helps emphasize feedback as a learning experience, not a punishment.
Learn from each other. Learn from our mistakes
Hopefully my blunders will give other writing coaches some insight as to “what not to do,” but also let other graduate students know that it is okay to be an imperfect teaching assistant at times. Like our students, we are learning and trying our best, and we are bound to make mistakes. The key is to realize those mistakes, reflect on them, and try to make them less and less often as we move through our graduate careers.