3 posts tagged “writing center”

I really hate to reduce such an important topic to a few key insights, but that's what I have to offer.  I've been working pretty successfully with ELL high school students for many years, and that success has arisen from accommodating for all kinds of differences as I plan instruction in my classroom.  What's good for any special needs student is usually good for everybody.

However, after my discussion with graduate writing consultants at the U's Center for Writing, I find that becoming more attuned to ELL issues (instead of vaguely aware of them) could lead to more effective diagnosis of obstacles to better writing.

Could the student be classified as "international" or "generation 1.5"?  How and why an individual finds herself in an American classroom can shed a lot of light on her literacy experiences.  For example, an international student may have had several years of classroom English exercises in her home country, but she may never have written an essay.  A refuge or the child of one may have learned English in her new daily American life.  Her verbal skills may make her seem more proficient than she really is.  Though we don't want to make assumptions, generally an international student may need more assistance with global issues like coherence and the generation 1.5 writer may need more help with local issues because she internalized language "rules" based on spoken communication.

I should expand my notion of first language to first language of literacy, and that's complicated because my students could be native readers and writers in English, but not native speakers depending on their educational backgrounds. For example, my Somali students often learn to read and write in English but speak Somali at home.  This insight reminds me to be particular in choosing areas to focus on in conference.  Some local issues just can't be eradicated depending upon the writer's literacies.  At the same time, some will form patterns that can be addressed.  The key is to find the logic behind the writer's choice, which has likely been influenced by her unique combination of text based and spoken literacies.

Just as an example of how complicated determining the writer's language of literacy can be, consider how birth order could complicate language for immigrants and their children.  The third child may grow up in a predominantly English speaking environment and have first language literacy entirely in English, while her older siblings may share their parents' language more fully.

I feel like I want to say, so what?  If I know every student writer has unique needs, I should be able to help each become a better writer.  I'm afraid though that stance is as damaging as colorblindness.  For example, for years I "helped" some African-American student writers "correct" their spelling without ever understanding the logic of their errors--and so not really teaching them anything useful.  Finally, I read Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations and began to understand inflections.  Suddenly, I was able to diagnose and teach in a way that fairly recognizes a student writer's cultural voice.  These writers weren't making mistakes.  They were following rules that I didn't know about.

Understanding the logic of a writer's choices to the extent possible without making assumptions about them as ELL students, and being equipped to read their writing analytically in order to discover the logic of their choices is the difference between handing a student a fish or teaching her how to fish.  Just goes back to the mantra:  better writers, not better papers.

Last Tuesday afternoon, I had a remarkable discussion with several experienced graduate student writing tutors at the U's Center for Writing.  I'm not going to be able to do it justice right now (I was home with sick babies today:), but I do want to get some thoughts down before their complexity diminishes into that vague, pleasant feeling associated with forgotten cool ideas.

The main difference we decided, or really they did, between a face to face session and an online one was the inability to read the writer's affect.  One tutor explained that she tends to be more gentle online because she can't be sure how the writer is taking her commentary.

Given this insight, many students should be encouraged to come in for a face to face session.  The online appointment could be a portal to this advice and some orientation to the writing center.  The group determined that online tutoring may not be the best choice for

• older students or returning students
• those lacking technology skills or those inexperienced with the world of online chat
• non-native speakers
• those seeking assistance with the brainstorming or prewriting stage of their process
• those who can't type efficiently

We reflected on the real versus perceived level of anonymity an online chat confers.  Writers may take shelter in a perceived anonymity in such a way that it becomes difficult for the consultant to actually assist them.  However, as a perfectionist myself, I can see how being able to read and process someone's comments for a while before chatting could help the learning process.  This idea of anonymity may meet up with the truism that we teachers should meet students where they are and pull them ahead.  Many of our students are sitting in front of their laptops, having become acculturated to intricacies of online communication with other screen personas instead of other human faces.

Email has been around long enough for most of us to realize the trap of sarcasm, which doesn't translate even with emoticons.  It seems that any indirect communication--corny humor, attempts to access shared experiences, nonspecific praise--(a tutor's relationship building routines) probably won't always translate through the ambiguity of cyberspace. 

Based on my experience as a high school classroom teacher, I worry that I wouldn't be able to achieve the level of diagnostic insight that I can through face to face communication.  For instance, we analyzed a sample chat in which it seemed that the writer was trying to elicit "answers" from the consultant for his essay.  Reading between the lines, though, it seemed to me that it was equally possible that the student was inexperienced with close reading and may in fact not be trained in critical thinking.  I could make those determinations more reliably face to face and therefore be able to assist the writer more effectively.  At the very least, my classroom experience makes me cautious about asynchronous communication.  Even if a session is online, it should include a "live" component.

All this said, online writing conferences are likely the waves of the present and future.  Most students probably will benefit from this trend as long as the technology can be made to fit the mission:  better writers, not better papers.

I’ve just finished reading a chapter from a tutoring guide  and Muriel Harris’ rationale for why writers need writing centers.

I was a writing center tutor in college and a writing assistant for several professors.  Maybe that’s why I entered the classroom prepared to conduct writing conferences in a way that calms student writers and maintains their sense of control and ownership of their work.  Jen Budenski, draft whisperer.  Really from all that I’ve observed at Hopkins High School, I think most writing teachers are dedicated to using a conference and workshop model to improve student writing.

As usual, as I read, I realized that I don’t know everything there is to know about teaching writing.  What the articles did make me wonder about is the potential incompatibility of all the roles I (we) have to take on in these conferences.  No matter how skillful I think I am at presenting myself as a consultant or reader, will my students always perceive me as an evaluator?  What’s the connotative difference between “teacher,” “tutor,” and “reader”?  A teacher imparts knowledge, makes assignments, and assesses products.  Above all, a teacher “gives” grades.  A tutor knows something you don’t—and in fact need help with—about a subject area or concept.  A reader interacts intelligently with and responds to, even finds a way to appreciate, a text.  While these distinctions may not be true in denotation, I’m fairly certain they are in student perception.

Writing “consultants” in writing centers can freely inhabit a variety of roles, but teachers ultimately have to assign grades.  Students know that, and perhaps too often what they take away from a classroom conference would be something like a to-do list from their teachers in order to get the A they think they so desperately need.  Despite the teacher’s best intentions, students probably leave their classroom conferences armed with the tools they need to make a better paper (a fish, as it were), but the ethos of a writing center is to make better writers (or fisherpersons).  Relieved of the power imbalance inherent to the teacher-student relationship—not having to assign grades—the writing consultant can work with students as more informed readers than their friends, relatives, or even checklist-bearing peers, in both practical and affective domains.

Here’s why I’m thinking about this.  In working with my special population of loveable underachievers, I’ve found that the writing conference works to motivate them to produce and revise.  And that’s great in many ways, but it can be paralyzing for me when it comes time to assign a grade.  I want to build upon the relationship we’ve begun in the conference and reward students for their revision, so I tend to assign points based on particular skills and strategies that arose in conference and were addressed in revision.  Students are motivated by these successes to keep writing and experimenting with revision.  However, as critical as this kind of motivation is, I worry that I’m harming students by building a false impression of their actual abilities.  As their teacher, the one who is accountable for their literacy instruction, I need the freedom to step back and say, “This paper isn’t good enough. You haven’t learned how to write, yet.”  I try to communicate this necessary criticism through a 6 traits rubric score, but it doesn’t speak to them with the same force as a letter grade does.  Grades need to motivate, but they also need to be actual measures of ability.

That’s where I think a writing center filled with competent, ethical consultants can offer classroom teachers a sort of healthy triangulation.  Or given all the roles of writing teachers...healthy septagulation?

It’s a mad, mad rush to find time to support 19-26 student writers in understanding an assignment, brainstorming ideas, drafting, revising, and editing—let alone teaching them how your expectations for written discourse are discipline specific, that the way Ms. Lucking teaches how to write a DBQ is great, but doesn’t quite work for rhetorical analysis or Ms. Kleinman’s template for research writing works well in the sciences but doesn’t cut it with the MLA.  Not all the time, or sometimes, but a disquieting number of times in a nine week quarter, I’m herding students through these process steps without time for reflection, much less true metacognition.

Personally, the idea of sacrificing even one stage of the writing process to an outsider, some consultant, makes me feel crabby.  Honestly, I don’t want to share.  I love this part of my job.  Love it irrationally, paradoxically, passionately.  But at the same time, it might be best for my students to stop being a miserly control freak and learn to be willing to outsource some stages of composition.  Or else, maybe I should leave the classroom and teach in the writing center...