A guerilla grammar mini-lesson

Okay, since Rosa asked, here is a mini-lesson I use in my classes. So far, it has worked with developmental writers and traditional freshman composition students. Please bear in mind that this is a plan only. I frequently have to adjust in mid-stream depending on how students react to the ideas they are working with.

So, the mini-lesson on complete sentences - alias independent clauses.

1- Have students identify at least two sentences from their work which they are especially proud of, or feel express their idea clearly. This needs to happen at least one class period before the mini-lesson. It builds a sense of the positive, often sorely needed by these students, and gives me a chance to prepare materials made of their work for the mini-lesson.

2- Next class, put students in small groups - really small - 3 to 4 works best, and give each group five different sentences. This gives them a specific number of sentences to look at and keeps them from becoming overwhelmed by looking at all the sentences their classmates provided.

I always include the writer's name with each sentence. This helps to reinforce their sense of ownership, it gives them a "real" audience for the next time they write, and it lets them show off their best work to each other.

While in their groups, they need to answer two questions. What makes these sentences good? What do these sentences have in common?

While they are working, I am circulating around the room, listening, asking, but never answering the questions. This is an important time for students to reinforce their own knowledge of language. For some, this is the first time they have been allowed and encouraged to show they they do know quite a bit about ideas that work well in written form.

I keep this activity to no more than 15 minutes. Part of the magic is that they aren't focused on discussing the structure of the sentences long enough to realize this is a [gasp] grammarish moment. I collect their work to read and return later.

3- Next class, have class discussion about their responses to the questions from the prior class. Again, this needs to be short - 15 minutes ish. Some groups want to go into parts of speech, some want to identify what the words do, some want to talk clauses. I know these are all different labels for similar ideas, but depending on the make-up of the class, I may or may not make that connection. Some classes are happy to say "oh.....that's a sentence when it has......." Other classes leap right to "oh....so a sentence is an independent clause......."

My goal is to help them see the patterns that are available to them. By taking this little bit by little bit, we can build on their prior knowledge and allow them time to incorporate ideas that are new.

My take on mini-lessons is that they are a part of numerous writing activities. They don't ever take a whole class period. I use them to help students notice patterns and options in the structure of the language they use. Oh.....and I'm never satisified with mini-lessons because they are the practical compromise that reflect trying to work with 28 students in a limited amount of time.

One Helpful Portfolio Cover

Hearing faint echoes of complaint in clc's posts about portfolios, I'm writing on evaluation at quarter or term's end — particularly so since in noting "meta-cognitive" work on writing, clc seems to be seconding something I've long assigned. For my final, two-part writing assignment encourages a few wider, deeper thoughts, thoughts meant to induce reflection on larger concepts. Students often find my assignment helpful. Yours might, too.

Part one is a regular, out-of-class essay assigned with a common title form. It aims to promote understanding of writing as an "art." To that end, I ask students to add two other, self-chosen concepts framing suggestive ideas like "Punctuation, Rhythm, and the Art of Writing," "Concepts, Connections, and the Art of Writing," or — as in Jason Johnson's fine title — "False Rules, Conventional English Teaching, and the Art of Writing." Here is Jason's lead:

For me high school English was a bore and the writing was always a very arduous process; never did the teachers let us students write what we wanted, how we wanted to write it. Rather than teaching us how to use our language effectively, my English teachers were always too busy setting up rules and guidelines to follow for our papers. Book reports and story summaries were about the extent of it, work that could be easily checked to its source to make sure the information was correct, leaving little attention on the writing itself. A quick check is performed for contractions, sentence fragments and other errors that should "never" be in a paper; once the papers were not-so-thoroughly checked, a grade was slapped on. Little did I know that college English would take my definition of writing and change it from a chore-like task into a truly liberal art.

Though Jason's a star, he's representative, surely able to reflect on what he's himself stressed. And so with my other students; they all have some good things to say. So I try to shape them in my assignment's next, second part — a final, reflective bluebook essay on a paragraph from their essays. Here's my common rubric, part of a larger exam:

Writing style is a matter partly of principle and partly of personality. It's the precise conjunction of the two that most often marks a good style. Pick a stylistic principle you think marks your own writing, illustrating it with a paragraph from "_________, __________, and the Art of Writing," explaining how your own personality and that principle intersect, and trying then to reflect on what their conjunction means. In reading your essays, I'll be looking for signs that you can shape ideas, offer illustrations, and develop implications. Strive for clarity, coherence, concision, and completeness. Develop several, fully-formed, coherently-focused paragraphs, trying to analyze and evaluate your own good style.

Naturally, though not all students can rise to my assignment's full challenge, most in fact do, providing a useful check on final grades. That's the main purpose of portfolios, provided, as I think, students reflect on their own learning. I hope you might agree. My work tries, in any case, to frame at least one helpful portfolio cover.

I'd Like a Little Ketchup for My Crow, Please

Because, after all my bitching and moaning in the previous post, our portfolio exchanges were actually rather satisfying. I attribute this to the participants; the majority of the full-time faculty weren't there, and truth be told, those of us with full-time status are the contentious ones. The part-time faculty come to talk about teaching in a productive, non-politicized way and without the baggage and agendas that the full-timers carry. It's amazing how the tenor can change when part-timers outnumber full-timers in a meeting. They are a great bunch of people, and I appreciate their commitment to a job that asks way too much of them and gives back way too little.

Because I'm going to be serving as the writing program coordinator next semester, I floated out a few ideas at one of the exchanges (we had separate meetings for basic and freshman comp), including having our in-class essay be a meta-cognitive piece on the student's portfolio and writing process rather than the sort of classic academic essay it currently is. That idea seemed interesting to a few people. I would do away with the in-class piece entirely given my druthers, but many of the other teachers feel some demonstration of on-the-spot writing is necessary, so a meta-text related to the portfolio is something I could live with.

Now, I just have to finish reading and grading my own portfolios. And then there's that Christmas shopping thing. . .

The Silly (Portfolio) Season

Yes, they're what's on everyone's mind, it seems. Certainly on mine. Between the huge pile on my living room floor and the arguments they caused yesterday at my department meeting, I can't get away from them. But yet, I still love them.

I hold to the belief that they are the best way to evaluate student writing even if, in my department's desire for something they can call "outcomes assessment" (and yes, I said "they" and not "we," since in this area, I feel very much apart), portfolios have become a different animal from what I always thought they should be. My department's portfolio does not require students to submit rough drafts and includes a mandatory in-class essay in response to a text which is written over two class periods. Every portfolio is read by another instructor, who assigns it an adisory grade of pass or not pass for basic composition and high pass, pass, low pass or not pass for composition. The instructor of record then decides upon the student's final grade.

Thus, portfolios are primarily a method for evaluation, not development and growth, which is how I always understood them. There is a page length requirement, an MLA documentation requirement, and the in-class essay requirement. The student does get to choose most of the pages which make up the bulk of the portfolio, but within those pages, he/she is supposed to be sure to demonstrate certain things: knowledge and control of thesis, essay structure, development and support, grammatical proficiency, integration of texts, etc.

When we sit down to read and evaluate each other's portfolios, certain problems always arise. Because we cannot agree amongst ourselves about such things, we argue about whether a strong voice trumps grammatical errors, whether a weak in-class essay is balanced out by strong revised essays, whether missing MLA documentation really matters in an otherwise brilliant and obviously unplagiarized portfolio. These could be fruitful discussions, but they haven't been. Instead, people have often just dug in their heels. The upside is that in the end the outside reader's evaluation is only advisory, but some department members have even questioned whether that should be changed and the other reader's assessment should be binding (at which point I fantasize about being Lucy Lui in Kill Bill Vol. 1 and jumping on the table with a very sharp sword).

It's an imperfect process, and one which for me, frankly, violates many of my beliefs about portfolios in particular and the effective teaching of writing in general. I understand how portfolios became the humane answer to institutionally or state-required assessment (See Elbow and Belanoff in Kathleen Blake Yancey's Situating Portfolios, for example), but there is a very real danger in destroying everything wonderful about them in the process. I wonder, in fact, if our attempts to kill the assessment bird and the teaching bird with this one stone have been wise, and if portfolios would be better used as the teaching tool they were created to be and assessment were left to other methods.

Anybody gone multi-modal?

Hi all,

After attending a presentation by Cindy Selfe at NCTE in Indianpolis, I've been toying with adding multiple modes to my comp. classes.

I made a first, and pretty weak, attempt to encourage my students to share information they had learned while working on a researched argumenative paper. They could use whatever format they wanted, including singing, dancing, and a variety of wiz-bang computer assisted modes. Half my class (very rural, mix of techinical expertise) developed powerpoint presentations, and several incorporated web connections in their ppt. presentations. Now, I did no direct instruction with these modes, and I'm pretty impressed with what they already knew in other formats for writing. They were sophisticated in their use of images, parrallel format for lists, all sorts of specific language /media use that I didn't help them with one bit.

Clearly, I'm not tapping into knowledge at least half my students bring with them to class. I'm encouraged by their enthusiasm, and I'm also keenly aware that the other half of the class may or may not have some of these same skills.

Anybody playing with similar ideas?