Teaching Strategies

   I work with seven primary strategies in teaching:

§   presenting—and structuring the course around—primary concepts and techniques of rhetoric and composing processes,

§   distinguishing between and teaching techniques of both exploratory and transactional writing

§   teaching techniques of analysis,

§   requiring practice work with concepts and techniques, through a games approach,

§   establishing a sense of community within the class to foster social construction (in the larger context of meaningful, respectful social relationships),

§   establishing “real-world” contexts for performance of the concepts and techniques studied,

§   creating opportunities for   feedback,

§   setting high performance standards and giving students opportunities to revise weak performances for higher grades.

   Though the emphasis and level of sophistication changes with upper level courses, all my writing courses work to distinguish rhetorical/transactional writing from exploratory writing—because I consistently find that students have not been taught to think rhetorically, and they haven’t learned to use writing as a private tool of thinking.  And thus, most of their writing is an awkward mix of the two:  neither well adapted to an audience nor streamlined to meet the needs of thinking.  Making distinctions, thinking rhetorically are, of course, fundamentally acts of analysis, and so teaching students the fundamental, generic techniques of analysis is something I spend a great deal of time on, with the students conducting some kind of analysis in nearly every class meeting.  And to teach students how to conduct the more disciplined and extended analysis of a subject (which much transactional writing is grounded in), I teach them to create concept maps, which I regard as a primary tool of analysis (an essential exploratory writing technique).

    I teach composing processes simply by leading them—over and over again—through varied but thorough processes. 

    To make the (often) arduous work of writing and developing as a writer palatable (even intriguing), I am developing (with my colleague, Bryan Kopp) a games approach to writing.  That is, we are conceiving of transactional writing as a series of interrelated games that writers play with language, ideas, and social relationships.  The primary games are (in my terminology—Bryan’s is somewhat different, though we agree on the number and nature of the games):

§   Focusing

§   Developing

§   Structuring

§   Styling

§   Formatting

Fundamental to the games approach is the idea that a player develops skill and depth of understanding by playing the games in isolation (or in simple combinations) for low stakes, as preparation for playing fully integrated, high-stakes games—in other words, practicing and developing in the way that craft workers, musicians, and athletes do.  And, as with musicians and athletes, the work must be done within a disciplined and social context.

    If a student is taking the work seriously, s/he can get considerable feedback from her own performance in practice situations (that sense of dissonance between performance and desired outcome).  But external feedback is also valuable, and so I set up time for students to interact in small groups, at nearly every class meeting, to compare their performances on practice games.  I also give feedback by displaying my own performance on assigned games and by focusing on a few student performances to illustrate how to deal with common problems or weaknesses.  (One mechanism for that approach is to ask students to post an exercise/game on D2L, where it becomes a digital text that I can project and demonstrate, during class, ways to revise and develop it.)

    I also give feedback to students in at least six other ways:

§   through conversations in class,

§   through individual conferences on drafts of transactional writings,

§   through marginal comments and summary comments and through a rubric on “finished” transactional works (works they are able to revise for a second evaluation),

§   through a written response to mid-term progress reports (on how well they are understanding and accomplishing the course goals),

§   through evaluation of and response to D2L postings of short transactional pieces (the written responses go only to weak performances, explaining the weaknesses and inviting the student to revise it for a higher evaluation),

§   through e-mail exchanges (usually initiated by the student).

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