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WEEK OF NOVEMBER 25, 2019

It's hard to believe the end of the semester is here already! It's been a whirlwind of learning for me, with concepts I'd never even heard of at the beginning of the semester becoming commonplace to my daily life. The entire subject of pedagogy was new to me when I started this program, and though I thought I knew what a good class was as a student, I've definitely made leaps and bounds in my understanding of what a good class is as a teacher. Watching Nick has been incredibly rewarding because he really does care so much about what he's doing in class, and has such a good feel for when class activities are successful or not, or the little things he can do in class to make participation a little bit higher, like making the students partner up with someone they don't usually talk to, or arranging the desks in a circle at the beginning of class. I've really enjoyed getting to work with Nick and know that he's going to be a great resource for me in the coming year as I venture out on my own in the world of teaching.

This class, too, has been exceptionally helpful. While I thought many of the theories seemed like common sense at the beginning of the semester, it's been very helpful to see the comparison of a "traditional" teaching style as compared to the more active learning classroom we're trying to put together and support here. The theories we've read and seen explored in the class we're TAing has been really great for putting my mind in a place where I can then create a supportive, active learning class of my own, and has really helped me understand the aspects of teaching that I find important and necessary to students, especially young writers coming in from high school, usually, like we have in ENC 1101 and 1102.

I didn't really have much of a teaching philosophy when I first started this class. Going into the realm of academia hadn't really been on my radar until my last semester or two of undergrad, and since I just graduated in December of 2018, I didn't really have any real life experiences to build off of like some of the other people in class. At this point in time I'm not even entirely sure if I will go into teaching after this program is over, or if I'll even be any good at it, but I do know that having these skills and these experiences under my belt will help me with no matter what next step I'm going to take in life once my three years at FIU come to an end.

Specifically in terms of what I've learned about myself and my philosophies on teaching, I'm very interested in the idea of "undoing" negative writing experiences students may have had in the past. We've all heard those horror stories from writing classes in high school, where the teacher doesn't really seem to care about your work, doesn't give helpful feedback, or the class was structured in a way where you could throw together an essay the night before it was due and do decently on it with no chance of revision to make it even better than it was. I like the idea of introducing students to the concept that not all writing has to be like that. There is no set structure of a paper, there is nothing that says you even have to write a paper at all! Allowing students to explore writing and the writing process is really important to me, and I want to create a space where that kind of risk and experimentation is not only allowed but encouraged.

Looking forward I'm really excited to work with Professor Wehr next semester, as I know Nick worked with him when he was in the TA program. I know I still have a lot to learn about employing these teaching strategies in class, in front of students, and I'm very excited to be given the opportunity to do so in the next few months. Thank you for all you've taught me, Cindy. It's been a lot, but it's been exceptionally helpful and rewarding, and I hope I'll be able to pay it forward one day.

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WEEK OF NOVEMBER 18, 2019

Honestly, I can't wait to read through all of my reflections here when I'm going through and putting them on my ePortfolio, because I really have learned a lot this semester, more than I would have thought I could, and about more things than I had initially anticipated. When I first started this program I was under the impression that pedagogy was going to be focused on how to present yourself at the front of a classroom and be respected by the students and teach them to material. Now at the end of my first semester, I can really appreciate how much more in-depth this job is, and how much responsible we as instructors need to take upon ourselves in order to give students the education they deserve.

I could definitely see how much I've learned when I was talking with Nick last Wednesday and was able to discuss my Unit Plans project with him, in detail. I struck up a conversation about an exercise he used in class for conclusion examination and revision. I had been searching for an exercise in one of the last few days of my unit plan, and this fit perfectly with how it balanced the idea of writing as revision, always changing, as well as the intense focus on a single part of the essay, but only at the end of the process after the students had gotten out all their main ideas in the previous drafts. Nick had a lot of great suggestions for me, even explaining how I could re-work the exercise to be partially out of class for homework, and then discussed in class so I wouldn't have to use up class time to set up the exercise.

There was a point in the semester when all this unit plan stuff just clicked in my brain, and I wish it had come sooner, but I know it's something that can only come with experience and repeated exposure to the theory and the practice of pedagogy. Whereas in the first few weeks of actively working on my unit plans project I was floundering and confused and really quite frustrated, these last few weeks I've been really motivated and focused. I can see what the end goal is supposed to be, and now I understand how I can use the puzzle pieces I've been given in order to put together a unique classroom experience that allows me to reach that end goal.

Overall, I'm really excited to see what the unit presentations will be like tomorrow. I'm still quite nervous as I finish up mine, especially since Thanksgiving is this weekend and I'll be home with my family and surrounded by distractions, but I have high hopes for my peers and a healthy dose of optimism for my own presentation next week.

Comparing the first set of conferences to the second go around is a little disappointing to me. For some reason the half of the class that I'm in charge of grading this time has a habit of not showing up or participating in class and online. That wasn't an exception for this set of conferences, as out of my 10 students only 6 or so of them showed up to conference with me. It was the same when Nick was in charge of this half of the class, so I know it's not something to do with me specifically scaring them off but just something about why these students feel like the participation part of their grade wasn't a big enough drive to attend the conference. I'm interested in figuring out how to get students to feel like conferences are a necessary part of their grade and participation in class. I think the draw of receiving feedback and guidance isn't quite enough to make students understand why it's advantageous to show up to conferences, but I can't really think of another way to get them to understand that attending only helps their grade and helps their progress on the project at hand. Overall I'm comfortable with the conferencing process. I really enjoy talking to students about their projects and brainstorming ideas with them. Their second project was the personal narrative so conferences were a great way to get to know the students further and help get them more comfortable talking about themselves in writing instead of just writing about academic subjects.

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WEEK OF NOVEMBER 11, 2019

This week's readings about style and editing was really interesting, because it's something I've been dealing with my entire writing life even if I didn't specifically have a name for it. Style, I think, is something that comes mostly naturally to people. It can be trained out, of course. People who delight in using figurative language or complex, interesting sentences can be taught to assess the moments when those sentences are better left in their writing toolbox in favor of plainer, easier to digest sentences and declarations. But it's a little bit harder to teach style, or to inject it into someone's writing if the bones of it aren't already there.

In the piece Nora Bacon is quoted in The Centrality of Style saying “[y]ou can teach academic writing or you can teach style, but you can’t teach both” and I was really hoping for more of an explanation on that. Teaching uniformity is easy enough if students understand the difference between a "clear" sentence and one that's written to be a little bit more liberal with creative choices. But how do you teach personal style? Learning how to mimic someone else's style is a start, and I've had poetry classes where we've practiced that very concept. How much time do we have in a 50 minute/3 day a week rhetoric class to focus on mimicking style in order for the students to develop their own style?

This obviously comes with time, and lots of writing. It's a topic we touched on last week in Nick's class before the students second draft of their second paper was due over the weekend. This paper is a personal essay about the students' relationships with language. When I conferenced with my half of the class, many of the students were expressing anxiety about having such free reign to write the paper, as Nick and I weren't putting any stylistic or formatting requirements upon them. This very grapple with personal style was the forefront of a lot of conversations I had with students, and the focus of an exercise we did in class.

Nick pulled up a copy of a previous student's essay from this same assignment on the projector and asked everyone to take a few minutes to read the first few paragraphs of it. The introduction was very stylized, almost in a sort of fairy tale or storytelling kind of way, and many of the students picked up on the whimsical opening, contrasted with the development of concepts later in the introduction and first paragraph (childhood into maturation, especially emotionally). The students could easily identify the pieces of the paper that gave it a specific style, and were then tasked with writing a section of their paper in the example paper's style. Once we talked about how that exercise felt, the students were then asked to look through their own drafts and try to pinpoint places in their own work where their personal style is more prominent.

I thought this exercise was a great way to not only try on someone else's style of writing, but to also be more cognizant of their own ways of writing, and maybe how it is or isn't clear, or the ways they can improve their style and adopt pieces of other people's style to create something entirely new and entirely belonging to them. I really enjoyed how that exercise allowed students to develop their own style by looking at other people's styles critically, and then analyzing their personal styles in a way they may not have done before. 

For me, so much of my style has come from taking bits and pieces of authors I've enjoyed. I owe a lot to how much I read as a kid because all of those books and different authors exposed me to so many styles and tricks of writing. I think unique styles and perceptions of writing can help in a teaching and mentoring position like the TA program by giving the instructor and the assistant something to learn from one another, not only about writing, but about giving feedback on writing. There are always going to be things that one person will see in a student's writing that maybe someone else would not have recognized, or the opinions on the writing will be slightly different and will offer a different perspective on what the student is doing well and what they still need to improve on. Writing style also bleeds down into teaching styles, and that's something that needs developing over time, and something in which I'm very nervous and excited to develop as I move forward in this program!

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WEEK OF NOVEMBER 4, 2019

The Bain reading had a lot of great points! It was super helpful to see the intricacies of what successful teachers do that other teachers may think they're doing as well but not exactly executing correctly. The idea of students being more successful when teachers expect more from them, for example, sounds pretty straightforward off the bat, but when professors start piling on more assignments with little regard for the structure of these assignments, or how they fit into the grander goal of the class, it's not surprising that those students don't perform as well.

The idea of looking at students individually and finding their merits on a person-to-person basis is also exceptionally important, and something I've gotten to see and experience firsthand as a TA this semester. I remember as a student I used to sort my classmates into derogatory groups like "geniuses and dullards" as Bain describes, but as an instructor this kind of thinking is especially hurtful because we're supposed to be the students' touchstones and resources, not a source of judgment on their academic prowess. Especially at a multinational and multilingual institute like FIU, judging based on English skills is not an accurate way to determine the worth or aptitude of a student. There were a few students who did poorly on their first round of essays this semester in my class, and while I may have judged them on that before my TA experience this semester, after meeting with them for conferences and knowing them as people in and out of the class, I'm definitely able to approach looking at these grades in a more empathetic and supportive way than just something that represents their entire worth as a student or a person.

We had another round of conferences this week, but by this point in the semester Nick and I have switched the half of the class we'll be conferencing with and grading, so I got to meet with a new round of students. Some of them were very open about how much they enjoyed conferences, because it let them have a direct communication point between them and the instructor, and was a way for them to ask questions without being in front of the whole class and feeling anxious about it, and for them to also feel like our answers were tailored specifically for them and their well-being in the class.

Some of my students did neglect to make conference times with me, and one even skipped his conference time and didn't show up at all. I know at the beginning of the semester Nick was a little more lenient about this and let the students reschedule their conferences for full participation credit, but now that we're further into the semester I'm not sure how to handle this. I'll definitely get in contact with Nick about the students who missed their conference spots and see what he suggests.

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WEEK OF OCTOBER 28, 2019

It was very entertaining and informative to read the Combine and Conquer text especially! The way it's presented to us in the beginning as a short story in which the instructor is the main character whose point of view we're seeing through is a really creative way of exploring the problem of getting students engaged with the texts of their own class, as well as engaged in class discussions. I've been on the student side of this dismal discussion scenario many times before in high school and in undergraduate, and up until this semester I always thought it was the fault of the students not participating or not coming prepared that the discussions were unhelpful and awkwardly silent.

Now that I know much of the responsibility for creating an active and engaging learning environment is on the instructor, maybe more so than the students. Structuring assignments in a way that will give students the incentive to actually do the readings, and then come to class prepared to talk about them is no easy task, as I've definitely seen so far. The instructor in Combine and Conquer seems to fall into a sort of rut of expecting the students to meet them halfway when they're hardly putting in effort as it is, in the scenario we're shown. Of course, the class does go a little bit smoother after the free-writing exercise, but the opening situation rings true in more ways than one.

I've seen something of this nature happen in Nick's class, but handled in a much more graceful way. Particularly I remember a discussion where we were trying out an article that he'd never used before in any of his other classes, and the students, who'd done the discussion board homework and should've been ready and raring to go with questions and observations, were mostly lukewarm about the reading. Despite being prepared and despite Nick's good discussion questions, something just wasn't clicking. And instead of dwelling on this incompatibility for too long, or guilting the students into some semblance of a discussion, Nick moved on. He's got contingency plans exactly for moments like this, so he can try out new materials in class, new readings, new ways of doing things, and if it doesn't work out, there's always plan B.

The Nightmares on teaching text was also helpful! These are definitely things I've been worried about when I have to teach on my own--students not doing the work, not taking me seriously as a professor, me accidentally challenging diversity in the classroom-- and the advice in the reading is very sound as well. Particularly just the idea of being open with your students is something that's resonated with me. As a student I've always found classes in which I feel like I'm working with the teacher instead of for the teacher have always been more engaging and easier to participate in. It's a no-brainer as an instructor now to try and create that kind of open environment for students to feel like they're actual people on a quest of self-betterment, and not just our little work horses that are cranking out papers and homework assignments for no good reason.

I purposefully left talking about disruptive students for the end of this post, because I haven't really seen much of it in Nick's class at all, and the little things I did see were handled very quickly and easily. Particularly one of the students seems to be a little bit uncaring about whether he's being polite to his peers in class, often talking during free-writes or even once he was listening to a YouTube video on his phone, without his earbuds, during a class discussion. Nick dealt with these with firmness but understanding. He always gave the option for the student to go out into the hall to take care of anything he needed to, but always made sure to also put the class' learning environment as a priority as well.

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WEEK OF OCTOBER 21, 2019

Last week in class, the students' first major assignment was due in the form of their completed Advertisement Analysis Essay (which I know is a little bit different from other 1101 first unit major projects). Nick, Kristin, and I got together and grade-normed, and I learned that it's much less intimidating to grade an assignment when you've been with the students during the entire process and feel very comfortable and knowledgeable about what you're grading them on. I found during our grade-norming exercise in class it was far more difficult to defend why or why not a student deserved to receive points for this aspect or that, and also much more difficult when the rubric was not represented with points as Nick's was (20 points for main idea, 20 points for summary and analysis, 20 points for personal reflection, etc).  Overall I feel much better about the idea of grading in general, and definitely feel like I've learned strategies since the beginning of the semester to be a fair grader, and (hopefully) one who gives helpful feedback.

Bean Chapter 13 brings up a pretty good point about student engagement in their own writing, or more commonly, their alienation from their writing, and it's something I've noticed in our 1101 class, even if it doesn't necessarily pertain to research. Nick's been talking about how difficult it is to get students to actually look at their feedback on homework and other assignments, and I think it might stem from this same kind of alienation or distancing from their writing. If students don't think they have a personal stake in the writing process, or in the production and grading of their writing, why should they care about it, or want to make it better? Admittedly, it's not something I went through as a high school or undergrad student, but I suppose if we're all here learning how to teach, then we're probably not the most common denominator in terms of the student population.

This cynicism on the students' part about not wanting to take a personal role in their writing process, or "abandoning" their work as soon as its put on the page is something that might also have to do with the writing and research process as Bean points out. Many times, when I was given research papers in undergrad they were laden with guidelines and themes and rules for what I could write about, and how far back the research should go, and I felt it stifled my academic creativity, but I trudged along. This could be a problem for students who find writing a tedious task to begin with, and their inability to even spread themselves creatively might distance them from the project and their own writing even more.

Although our first assignment in 1101 wasn't research-based, Nick did want to make sure the students didn't feel stifled creatively, and made it clear that the students would be writing about a topic entirely of their own choosing: an advertisement that they chose themselves, and found interesting in some ways. Before the time came to actually choose an ad to analyze, we did give them plenty of examples in class, and even worked together to analyze them, so the students would have the basic skills to go out on their own and find an ad that suited them. Maybe this kind of full-class exercise is also necessary for choosing research topics and beginning the research process in 1102. Building necessary skills while in class might help give students the confidence and authority to flex those skills while working on their own, and may make them feel more in charge of their writing project, and hopefully prouder of their own work.

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WEEK OF OCTOBER 14, 2019

Interesting that the focus of this week's reflection is about peer review, as I was just discussing this with Nick earlier this week! I think peer review is invaluable, but perhaps not necessarily because of the feedback students receive from their fellow classmates, but how the process of leaving feedback impacts the writers' own way of thinking about their own piece. It's hard enough to get students to look at the feedback that instructor's have left, so I can imagine it's just as hard to get them to look at the feedback left by their peers, unless reflection or discussion of the feedback is incorporated into the lesson and/or graded. Instead Nick suggested that peer review is an important process because while looking through someone else's paper and seeing things with a critical eye, a writer can then begin to look at their own paper with a similar lens, and recognize patterns of weakness, or sections that can be improved upon that they may not have seen before.

This same strategy is discussed in the article on peer review, highlighted in the section about Strategy 2: Self-Evaluation. I think it can be exceptionally challenging to get students to take feedback seriously, or in other words to build a sort of rapport and trust system that makes the student feel like the person giving the feedback knows what they're talking about, but when the student is evaluating themselves they obviously care about what they think of their own writing, and (hopefully) care about making it better, which is why this self-evaluation strategy comes in handy.

We've also practiced the "Speed Peer Review" method in class before as outlined in the article, in which Nick has asked the students to pair up and show each other their draft of their introduction for the first essay, and give feedback to one another. He's done similar methods of pairing and sharing before, but this method seems to work best when done with partners the students don't usually talk to, or it at least seems to generate the most amount of new discussion during the activity.

It's also really interesting to compare undergraduate peer review to graduate peer review, especially within the context of the class I am TA'ing for and the classes I am taking as a student. Whereas in an Advanced Fiction Workshop full-class workshops are not only convenient but vital for the health and longevity of the class, this kind of peer review and feedback session wouldn't serve a first year writing class in the same way. While you may receive substantial feedback from a full-class workshop like the article suggests, it takes time to learn how to offer constructive feedback on your peers' essays, and it would be unfair to assume that all the students in this first year writing class have those necessary skills to leave helpful feedback. Full-class peer reviews are also an incredibly daunting type of workshop and feedback session, especially if you're just coming in from high school and have never done them before, which could leave a lot of students feeling uncertain and perhaps a bit targeted by the style of receiving feedback.

Overall I think peer review is a great chance for students to see what their peers are writing, and also learn how to look at their own writing through a different lens, and perhaps help them see things in their own work they hadn't recognized before. Learning how to leave helpful feedback is also a really great skill to learn, and something that the students will be able to transfer to many different parts of their lives.

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WEEK OF OCTOBER 7, 2019

Since we were talking about running class discussions last week, and some strategies for making them successful, I really zeroed in on that when observing Nick during class last week. It was an interesting time for me to do so, too, because the class was a little  bit atypical. A handful of our students were absent as they were observing Jewish holidays, and Nick was using an article he'd never led a discussion with before, and was not entirely sure how the students would react to it.

The discussion itself was not a failure, per se, but the strange classroom environment of having so many people absent, as well as Nick not being entirely comfortable with the article he was using definitely affected the discussion. Students didn't seem to have much to say, despite doing a discussion post about the article before class, and with some of our chattier students absent you could definitely tell there was a lull in the classroom.

Nick, of course, handled this extremely well. He had a list of probing questions already prepared for when the students got a little bit too quiet and didn't seem to have much to say, as we outlined in our own lecture on discussions, and he got the most out of the discussion that he could, given the circumstances. We even did a free write before the discussion, in addition to the online homework the students had about replying to the article, so it was really just an unfortunate string of events that led to a less than productive discussion for this one class period. Nick was mindful not to drag the discussion on longer than it needed to be, especially when it was evident that the students were not entirely engaged.

After that, however, Nick did something new with the students. He had them do a pairing activity, but instead of the students just turning to someone next to them and talking with the same people they'd seen all semester, he made them stand up and go sit and talk with someone that they'd never worked with during our class this semester. As Nick and I were observing them while they talked about our next activity, a small peer review of their introductions for their first major project, we noticed that the overall volume of the class seemed much louder, which insinuated that this activity was generating more conversation than most of our pairing activities usually do. Having the students talk to someone new about their projects allowed them to get a fresh insight on something they'd been working on for at least two weeks now, and forced the students to describe their ideas in a new way to someone they'd never worked with before.

After the pairing activity we did another class discussion, and this one was definitely a little more active on the students' parts. I also think it was easier for the students to contextualize this within the larger project assignment, because we were specifically talking about their essays and strategies for constructing introductions and conclusions for them in the next stage of the draft.

This also reminded me of the threshold concept discussed in Naming What We Know, mostly because of how much Nick has stressed that everything the students came in understanding about how to write essays (five paragraph format, strict thesis statements, writing an introduction first and a conclusion last) were not the end-all-be-all of writing academic papers. In my student conferences I had a lot of students fretting over how Nick wanted the paper formatted, and almost seemed less reassured at first that Nick wasn't looking for any specific format to the paper, and that he was focused more on content than organization, especially in the earlier drafts. As well as learning about the concept and application of rhetoric, the idea of transferrable knowledge has been very obvious in Nick's class from day one. We've been talking about students' writing experiences, the good and the bad, and having been building on those with solid foundations, and giving alternatives to ones that may not have been as stable for students who were less fortunate in having helpful writing professors in the past.

This idea of transferrable knowledge is also going to be extremely present when I move into the 1102 class next semester, as so many of the concepts we touch on and build on in 1101 are directly acknowledged in 1102, and then expanded on there as well. This chapter was very instructive about how important it is to build on a students' previous knowledge of writing and the writing process, but also of how to shift their thinking in a way that makes it easier for them to incorporate newer and more helpful knowledge in the future.

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WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 30, 2019

Classroom presentation is so incredibly important and it's something Nick and I have actually been talking about the last couple of weeks, specifically in regards to the classroom that we're in, how it's oriented, and the way that students tend to group together naturally, even if it is "uneven," i.e. most of the students grouped on one side of the class and the rest spread out through the middle and the other side. In the past we've formed a circle with the students' desks so we could all face each other during our class discussion, and though I enjoyed this configuration more than the standard rows of desks, the students seemed a little bit more hesitant to embrace it. When our class is at full capacity it's also harder to circle up, just given how many people there are, and surprisingly how much class time it takes to physically put desks in a circle, and then the time it takes to put them back.

The Howard article on holding better class discussions was very instructive about breaking down the social climate of the classroom, and outlining the expectations that students think they have to meet at a minimum, which don't always coincide with the kind of engagement that we as professors want. I especially thought the section talking about social norms was interesting, because I could relate to it as a student and a teacher. The idea of paying "civil attention" in a classroom, or looking as if you're paying attention so you won't be called on or targeted by the teacher is very real. I've done in before in high school and some of my undergrad classes, and I've seen students do it here, as well, albeit in slightly different ways. Since we're a technology-forward kind of classroom, Nick doesn't mind students having their laptops out during class, and trusts the students to use them responsibly to take notes or to follow along with whatever material we're looking at, but I've noticed dozens of occasions where students will be surfing the web, or generally engaged with something else on their phone or laptop, instead of paying actual attention to the class and the discussion at hand.

I do think the Howard article gives a good way to combat this "civil attention" social norm, and it's something that Nick has done countless times: breaking up the class into smaller groups, where the students have to engage directly with one another before we discuss the matter as a class. This breaks the student out of this social norm of pretending to pay attention, and urges them to actually interact with the people sitting around them, who will notice if the student is trying to dominate the time by sitting on their computer or phone the whole time. I think in this regard, think/pair/share and small group exercises demonstrate that students have somewhat of an academic responsibility for the rest of their class as well as to themselves, that their participation is just as important to the group and the class' collective learning as it is to the student's individual learning.

In terms of presentation strategies, I think Nick takes a lot of really good steps in order to get students to participate more in discussions. Obviously he'll assign homework, which we then come to class with the intentions to discuss, but the homework isn't always readings. Nick does his best to engage the students even outside of the classroom just by giving them materials that are easier to interact with, especially in our age of technology and social media. Videos and TED Talks haven't completely replaced articles in terms of how our students get their information, but the variation is nice to break up the monotony of texts that these students must have, especially if it's their first semester as freshmen and they're new to the college experience. Students seem more likely to engage in discussions after watching videos in class as well, and it's something Nick's done multiple times, which can also be valuable because we are getting the students' first impressions of these videos, and in the discussion we're hearing their initial thoughts, not what they've crafted us to see and posted on the discussion board online.

It is difficult, sometimes, getting students to participate, especially since this isn't a traditional classroom setting, and we only meet once a week for an hour and fifteen minutes. Nick's talked to me a little bit about the struggle of how to connect with the students when there isn't as much in class time to do so, and it's something I've been keeping in mind all semester. It's why when I had conferences for the first time last week, I opened them up by asking the students how their day was going, how they were doing, and basically tried to get them to open up to me as a person, first, instead of strictly as a student. Most of my students responded pretty well to this tactic, and it seemed to relax them a little more as we delved into the rest of the conference and talked about their first major project, and their rough draft that was due over the weekend.

Overall classroom engagement is something that's impacted by what happens outside of the classroom, especially in a hybrid course such as this one. By trying to foster a rich online community on the discussion boards and with feedback, Nick and I are trying to give the students the confidence they need in their opinions to be able to share them in person when we meet once a week. There will always be challenges to classroom discussions, but I think we've got a lot of the tools already to lessen those challenges and help both students and instructors have a more enjoyable and educational classroom experience.

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WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 23, 2019

This week in 1101 Nick introduced the first project of the semester, an advertising analysis paper in which the students are to pick an ad targeted toward themselves (in any one of the many demographic groups they're a part of) and analyze its rhetorical strategies and explain how it makes them feel. We've been doing a lot of exercises in class to hone these rhetorical analysis skills, so it's been really nice to see how many of the students are able to apply those while we watch ads as a class and discuss them with each other.

As a class we also discussed the assignment sheet for the first major project, and Nick did a really thorough job walking them through what was expected of them, and answered any questions they had about the staggered due dates for drafts as well as the expectations for the final paper. He made it exceptionally clear that they'll be scaffolding this paper with the different due dates for the levels of drafts, and reminded the students once again that even the final paper was able to be revised should anyone want to.

I've been trying to think about how to relate the multilingual aspects of the class, and how to recognize them day-to-day both in 1101 and in my own classes, and it's definitely more challenging than I expected. The Matsuda paper last week about the myth of linguistic homogeneity in U.S. writing classes was incredibly instructive about how important the acknowledgment that a classroom is an inherently multilingual space is. My high school and undergraduate writing classes seemed to be, at face value at least, exceptionally monolingual, with little emphasis put on the cultural, stylistic, or formatting differences in papers from non-native or multilingual speakers, but now that I'm actively looking for those differences, and actively trying to embrace them, in this rhetoric class, I'm beginning to see them a little more clearly.

Perhaps the easiest place to see these multilingual differences are when I'm grading students' work through Canvas, as one of the tips from the Matsuda paper and the Writing Across Borders videos we watched, was that offering feedback or grading on grammar is really only fair to the student if they were aware they were being graded on grammar, or requested that type of critique. There are multiple students of Eastern European and Russian descent in my class section, and though their discussion board responses can sometimes be a little gramatically strained, I am always able to understand the main concepts they are trying to explain, and the points that they are trying to get across. Even before our lecture and discussion on multilingualism in the classroom last week, Nick made sure to let me know that content, above grammar or style or anything else, is what's most important in student work, and that leaving supportive comments and feedback on smaller assignments is the best way to build students' confidence in expressing their thoughts and ideas in the future.

Another aspect of the multilingual discussion from last week that's really stuck with me is the fact that at some point, we will all fail at including people, whether it be on the basis of language or some other part of their life or identity, and that beating ourselves up over it is not going to help. Learning from that failure, and making a better effort in the future, is what's really important, which is why I'm so thankful to have this experience as a teaching assistant, because it allows me to make mistakes in somewhat of a lower risk environment, and I'll still be able to carry the lessons I learned from them with me into my own classrooms in the future.

[giglioreflection-blog]

WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

From day one, Nick has been great about acknowledging differences in cultural and linguistic backgrounds and doing his best to celebrate them, both in our casual writing exercises and in thinking about our larger assignments, even sharing with the class that at home he and his wife are speaking to their infant twins in Spanish, not English, in order to foster a healthy, multilingual environment. There have been multiple occasions where when doing free writes for five minutes or so, Nick will encourage the students to write in another language if it's more comfortable for them, or if it comes easier to them. We've also discussed the idea of language differences within the class, what strengths it can bring to a discussion-based course in an American institution, and what challenges it might also pose for international and ESL students.

Like in the video, we heard a lot from the students about how teacher feedback is incredibly important for learning the writing process in the United States and navigating the cultural differences in organization, formatting, rhetorical strategies, and tone in papers. The point made in the video about how it's less helpful for students to receive a paper marked up with all their smaller grammar, spelling, and punctuation issues is something that's been reflected in my class as well, with many students talking about how their first essays in English were usually done in high school and the learning curve was exceptionally difficult to overcome. Receiving a paper bleeding with red ink and focusing on minor issues does nothing to prepare students for the critical thinking environment of American colleges, and only discourages them from taking more risks in their writing.

Even native students to the United States talked about how unhelpful feedback was detrimental to their enjoyment of writing and their ability to learn and grow in the class it was given in, which shows just how important support from the professors is, regardless of linguistic or cultural backgrounds. I think Nick is making great strides to create an environment in which students feel comfortable making mistakes and coming to him or me with any questions that they may have. We've discussed a lot about what positive associations our students have had with writing in the past, keeping all the notes on the classroom Google Doc for easy reference, and are doing our best to keep the conversation open for students if they have any recommendations on how to foster a more comfortable environment to grow in.

Last class Nick introduced the students to our first major project, talking to them about what it will entail and how the assessment for it will be structured. The assignment comes with multiple due dates for drafts throughout the project, scaffolded so as to let students build on top of their initial ideas and improve on them through the use of multiple drafts and conceptual feedback from Nick and I. Part of their homework this week was to look at the assignment sheet and rubric so they would know what is expected of them.

Earlier in one of our discussions, some students expressed that they've had negative experiences with rubrics in past writing classes, describing how professors had given a rubric and not followed it when grading and leaving feedback on their papers, which made the student feel like time was wasted trying to adhere to the guidelines set out for the assignment in the rubric if the teacher wasn't going to stick to it when grading. Nick's rubric for this assignment follows the non-grid, text-specific format, which looks much more inviting to students than a grid-based, generalized rubric, and talks specifically about the goals of the assignment on a conceptual basis instead of just focusing on the quality of writing or inherent textbook understanding of rhetorical devices and strategies.

We will hold conferences next week, and I anticipate discussing the big ideas of the first assignment with my half of the class. We'll be focusing on looking at their choices for topics and what media they're analyzing, as well as initial ideas about what arguments they'll be able to make about the rhetorical strategies used in those pieces of media, including their target, purpose, and genre.

[giglioreflection-blog]

WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 9, 2019

Unsurprisingly, Nick’s class on Wednesday was very informative. We started class off by getting the students to sit in a circle of desks instead of the normal grid arrangement, because the class was smaller than usual. Only fifteen of our twenty-one students showed up, and only a couple of them offered an explanation as to their absence. Nick actually copied me in one an email one student sent him about being sick and missing the class, and I thought it was a really nice, easy way for me to see how to handle student absences with tact while also coming at it from a more compassionate side in terms of showing the student that they would be missed during our class discussion today and that he hoped they felt better. I think this little inclusion of humanity in something as small as a quick email is such a great way of letting the students know that we care, and that they aren’t just another person in a seat that we give grades to.

The discussion that followed was about homework that was due the previous Saturday evening, the idea of what stereotype threat is and how we see it in our daily lives, and it might have been because students weren’t comfortable with being in a circle, or that they weren’t as refreshed on what they responded to the homework the week before, but the discussion was a little bit quiet and slow for the first half. Nick did give the students a chance to access their responses on Canvas to look them over and remind themselves what they’d said, but I think maybe the combination of them being unused to the circle arrangement, as well as them having to talk about an assignment due four days prior made them a little more skittish during the discussion.

I personally preferred the circle to the traditional lecture style of desks, but basically for all of my creative writing classes in my last two years of undergrad we sat in a circle, so I’ve become rather accustomed to it, and know how especially helpful it can be for workshop classes. This may have been some of these students’ first times sitting in a circle in class, and instead of making them feel engaged they may have felt intimidated. I hope we continue to sit in a circle for the duration of the semester because I think it will open up the students to sharing more in discussion by virtue of being able to see all of their classmates, knowing what points they’re responding to, and who the person is that said them. They might be used to the grid style of desks, but I think for an active learning classroom based heavily on discussion, having them set up in a circle is far superior to get the most of out of classroom discussions.

Nick also had the students do a five minute free write exercise, and made it very clear up front that it didn’t have to be on a specific topic, or didn’t have to be a specific length, and that they didn’t have to turn it in to anyone. The only rule was that they keep writing for the entirety of the five minutes, whether it be writing with a pen or typing on their laptops, tablets, or cell phones. Afterwards Nick asked them how they felt about the exercise and a lot of the students admitted it took a lot of pressure off of writing when they knew no one would have to see it because it wouldn’t need to be turned in. Some even admitted it was therapeutic to write just for themselves, and that it was something they wouldn’t have done otherwise because they might’ve thought it was a waste of time since the exercise seemingly had “no purpose.”

The purpose of the exercise was actually pretty clever, though. Not only did it give students a chance to discover a new way of working through stress via expelling whatever things are on your mind, it was also a great segue into our class discussion about rhetoric, and in this case, the rhetoric of writing for yourself, aka writing for an audience that you know better than anyone else. After this exercise Nick asked the students to research rhetoric online and find a definition of it that made sense for them. After the research time was over, he had them turn to the people next to them, and share what they found, essentially teaching their peers what rhetoric meant to them. I thought this was a great way of establishing peer relations in the class, and a great way of ensuring that students understand a topic by having to essentially become a master of it so they can teach their peers. This style of sharing also kept any unneeded anxiety out of the equation because the students didn’t have to feel as if they needed to come up with the most perfect definition of rhetoric in the world, because they weren’t sharing it with the professor, and they weren’t immediately being graded on this exercise. I could tell a lot of thought went into this activity, and I think it paid off when we got into the discussion about rhetoric.

The students seemed much more engaged during our second class discussion about rhetoric. Perhaps since it was close to the end of class and they’d gotten used to the circle it was easier to share their opinions, and also perhaps the exercise they’d just done researching and teaching the concept to each other, made them feel like they had a bit more authority on the subject and made them feel more comfortable speaking about it in front of each other. Their discussion was just as rich and in-depth as our discussion rhetoric on Tuesday, talking about what rhetoric is used for, what aspects there are of it, and how rhetoric is used by us and on us every day. This exercise and discussion on rhetoric was actually a sort of warm-up for the students’ homework due this Saturday, considering they had to write up a definition in their own words about what rhetoric is, so I thought it was really great of Nick to start the discussion on this topic in class, especially if people had any major misconceptions or confusions about it, and then let the students continue it on their own later. I think starting this homework in class will allow the students to feel more confident about their answers to the homework, and therefore feel more confident when discussing it in class next week.

Nick also handled student disruptions in the class in a great way. During one of our discussions a student was listening to something on his phone, and Nick very quickly but respectfully told the student that if he had anything he needed to take care of, or listen to on his phone, to please do it outside in the hall. I thought it was a great way of not trying to embarrass the student for the disruption by immediately shaming them, by showing compassion in case the student really did have something they needed to take care of that was important and/or crucial to them, but also showed the rest of the class that Nick valued their time as well and that interruptions weren’t going to be allowed. It was a small moment but Nick was able to keep any real tension out of it and resolved it within thirty seconds.

Nick’s pattern of discussions are obviously textbook active learning methods, but the way he’s setting up assignments in class that start the scaffolding and comprehension for assignments out of class is also a great example of work that builds on top of each other. He also did a great job of showing how the free write session at the beginning of the period was not busy work, considering we had a discussion afterwards about what the students got out of the exercise and how it made them feel. Assigning authority to the students by allowing them to “teach each other” was also a great tool to get them to take responsibility for their own learning, as well as the learning of one of their peers. I can’t wait to see more active learning techniques in action from Nick throughout the rest of this semester.

Tying back to the text, I’d also like to talk about how I see Nick reflecting specific ideas, theories, and activities that we’ve looked at in the Bean text as well as the other supplemental materials from pdfs and class discussions. The most notable theory so far is the idea of using facilitative feedback for responses instead of direct feedback. Obviously by facilitative we mean comments that are structured to inspire the students into thinking more critically about their own work and their ideas, as opposed to direct feedback which can come off as prescriptive and unhelpful in framing the students’ thought processes when starting major and minor assignments.

For the last three weeks Nick and I have been reading and giving feedback to the students on the Canvas discussion pages for the hybrid portion of the ENC 1101 course in which the “second day” of the class is an online discussion. Nick will grade a student or two as an example for me so I can see the kind of feedback he’s looking for and then I take the reins with my own students. I’ve noticed that I’m paying much more attention to tying the comment back to the larger goal of the assignment, asking questions about how the students’ ideas relate to the goal, and if they do an excellent job of communicating that I make sure to comment on that as well. I avoid making comments about the relevance of information included, or outright stating whether something is stated clearly. Asking questions will get the students to think about how they’re being interpreted, and if their point isn’t quite coming across then hopefully in the next assignment they’ll be able to remedy that.

Since last week in class we talked about conferences, I thought it would be proper to mention a type of “mini-conference” held in our ENC 1101 last week in which the students were told to look back on their homework assignment from the previous Saturday and talk about it with the people they were sitting next to. Since I happened to be sitting in the circle with everyone else, I got to discuss one of the students’ posts and was able to use some of the conference techniques we talked about during the discussion, including talking about the parts of the post I had questions about which led the student to explain more completely what their point was and how they were trying to achieve that, and where a reader may be getting a little sidetracked while going through it.

While the exchange was technically a mini-conference when held with me, the activity also served as a way of peer-reviewing the post with other classmates, looking at the very same kind of big idea and organizational questions we were talking about previously. While this assignment will not be available to do revisions on, which is a large portion of why conferences and peer-reviewing sessions are so important, the activity itself still plays a large part in the student being able to communicate their ideas out loud and to see how what they’re saying differs from what they’ve written on the page, and allowing them to interpret and experiment with other rhetorical devices and techniques in order to be more fully understood.

As a smaller note, the free writing exercise I mentioned in my first half of this post sets up the foundation for the “scaffolding” term we’ve been talking about for the better part of a month. The free writing exercise Nick had the students do may have focused on simply writing non-stop for five minutes, but our discussion of the benefits of this exercise afterwards, using it as a stress reliever, or even creating a story out of it, demonstrated that no writing is useless writing. This is the same kind of idea we want students to have when they approach the drafting process. When I was in high school especially I can remember people blowing off first or second drafts and turning in something half-done as a final product because they didn’t want to waste time writing everything else up. What this exercise shows is that writing does not have to have a point to have a purpose, and that every single word we scrawl or type down is a word that brings us closer to better explaining ourselves and our ideas and being able to build on top of a strong foundation and develop the scaffolding of our next project.

[giglioreflection-blog]

WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 2, 2019

Thankfully our second week of class wasn’t wiped out by a holiday or a phantom hurricane, and I was able to meet with my group of ENC 1101 students and my instructor Nick Vagnoni. The set-up for this class was very similar to the first class, in which Nick solicited class-wide discussions by asking questions, and then broke up the class into smaller groups so they could have more discussions there. Unlike last week, however, the students had done two online writing assignments, one on Mindset and one on Mindfulness, which they were able to discuss in the small groups with questions guided by Nick.

One thing I thought was very smart about this is how it opens up the students, especially those who may feel put on the spot or unsure of their answers, to already having come up with answers in advance to the discussions, and therefore feel more comfortable asking them. It’s also an excellent exercise, because basically none of the students read each other’s discussion board posts, so they don’t have any idea what their peers are talking about, or what their opinions might be. By getting into small groups not only are they sharing their own ideas, but they’re also listening to other people’s ideas, seeing where they align and differ in terms of the media and readings assigned.

After a few minutes of the small groups, Nick brought the class back for another class-wide discussion, and this one he brought back the Google Docs concept, which I talked about last time. Essentially by writing down the points brought up by the students and making it a part of the active and growing class notes section, Nick is giving them agency and turning their opinions and ideas into texts for the course. These discussions are reachable by any of the students online in case they ever want to look over them, or get a recap about what was discussed in class the week before.

As I mentioned last week, Nick did not do introductions for the first week. At first I thought this was a little bit strange, considering I’d done a number of ice-breaker exercises on the first days of basically all of my undergraduate classes, Nick’s reasoning for doing this was especially sound. Not only did we have a multitude of students late on the first day, which I don’t fault them for at all considering how turned around I was when I first got onto the BBC campus, it also seems a little unfair to put people on the spot and tell them to figure out something interesting about themselves with little time to think or prepare for this.

To alleviate that problem, Nick made the last section of the homework for the first week a space for the students to introduce and tell a little bit about themselves. This way they already had something prepared for when they came to class the next week, and when we went around the class they were able to pull from that assignment if they just wanted a quick and easy introduction, or they were allowed to go off-book and tell us something about themselves that they hadn’t mentioned in their brief online introduction. This attention to student’s comfort was a great idea on Nick’s part and I could really see how it benefitted shyer members of class, as well as students who added the class later on and the second meeting last week was actually their first time there. By doing the introductions in the second week, Nick didn’t alienate those students who joined later and ended up making them feel more welcome because they were a part of the introduction process like everyone else.

We did have a student that stated very openly that he did not enjoy talking in front of people. All he gave as his introduction was his name, and when he explained he didn’t like talking, Nick was very quick to accommodate this and did not give the student a hard time about doing a full introduction like the other students. I was very impressed with how respectfully and quickly Nick handled the situation, and though it could have easily become awkward I think his tactful diffusing of it kept any tension from mounting in the room. I hope the student realizes this as well, and that this is just one of the first steps into creating a comfortable, safe environment for him to share his ideas without becoming anxious about public speaking.

Again, I’m very excited about working with Nick. One of the assignments for homework this week was a ten minute guided meditation, which I thoroughly enjoyed doing and cannot wait to hear what the students thought about it, and if it helped them clear their minds and focus or not.

[giglioreflection-blog]

WEEK OF AUGUST 26, 2019

One of the most surprising, but overall pleasing aspects of my first week of classes and assisting my instructor, was how neatly the lessons of rhetoric and active learning environments lined up with the reality of my first TA class! Obviously I know Nick has been doing this for a fair amount of time, and he’s got an excellent handle on how to engage students in his classroom, but seeing it firsthand was a treat, and helped solidify my understanding of how to incorporate active learning into a lesson.

First, instead of a traditional ice-breaker activity, Nick opened up the class to interact right off the bat, having them participate by raising their hands through a variety of questions, such as “Who has heard of rhetoric before?” and “Who has used rhetoric before?” Soon after, Nick pulled up the Canvas webpage for the class, and opened up a Google Drive Document in which he asked the class to give examples of what they understood rhetoric to be, or where they’d heard the phrase before, and he began entering them into the document.

This level of active participation on the class’ part seemed to me an excellent example of allowing the students to have their own agency in directing the discussion of what rhetoric itself means, while also collaborating with each other, such as when one student would say what they believed rhetoric to be, another would chime in with “Oh, that reminds me of X.” I believe one student specifically brought up analyzing poems in high school as a form of rhetoric, which reminded another student about the term “rhetorical analysis” and we were able to go on from there. In general, the students seemed to have a much better grasp on rhetoric as an idea, or at least how it was employed in real life, than I might have at their age. One student even brought up the term “political rhetoric” which harkens back to the Aristotle reading on rhetoric where he claimed “rhetoric masquerades as political science.”

Another active learning tactic that Nick employed was transferring authority to the students in an activity that involved them to actively add and collaborate on another open Google Drive Document. Through this activity, the students were asked a series of questions including questions about how to better tailor more satisfying class discussions, what the students were expecting from their professors, what the students expected from each other, and what they wanted to get out of the classroom experience. Students were encouraged to log onto their laptops, tablets, and cell phones in order to contribute to the document, and after a period of ten or fifteen minutes they got into small groups and discussed their answers to the questions, and eventually we discussed the answers as a class.

This Google Drive Document cited answers about how to engage the students’ peers in discussions, as well as outlined ways to keep discussion from getting hostile, such a respecting others’ opinions and handling sensitive matters with a delicate hand, and also gave instructions about how the students wanted their instructors to create a welcoming environment in the class, such as ensuring to include everyone in discussions if they noticed people were unable to share their opinion at the moment, or creating groups that were small enough to openly share in without the students feeling overwhelmed. At the end of this exercise, Nick added a link to that document on the Canvas’ syllabus page, giving it just as much, if not more, priority over the guidelines already outlined for the class. By putting a student-collaborated document onto the syllabus, Nick essentially used student work as a text for the class, showing the students that their opinions and boundaries and preferences on how their class is run are just as important, if not more so, than the instructor’s.

The students were also incredibly relieved to hear that there are no midterms or finals in this class, and seemed especially pleased that Nick intended to spend about a month or so on each of the four units presented in class, which he promised to go into greater detail on when the units actually started. The class seemed especially excited about the final unit, which was a mixed media assignment involving either an audio or video recording of the student sending a message to the next group of students that would take ENC 1101 about what they’d learned in the class and what rhetoric means to them.

Overall, I am exceptionally excited to continue working with Nick throughout the semester. In only one class I’ve seen him able to blend a myriad of aspects of active learning in real time, and with great success. Student-led discussions, the transferring of authority, and the use of student work as a text in the class are all excellent foundations for a fruitful semester, and based on their participation and eagerness to be heard and hear one another, I believe my section of ENC 1101 would agree with me as well.