Interviewer: Here I am today with Jonathan Hunt. I'm going to let him introduce himself but we're going to talk a little bit about how he conducts his classes, especially helping students improve their writing. Jonathan, the first thing I want to ask you is, could you tell us a bit about yourself, and for this context for the Center for Teaching and Excellence, we don't really care about your research, sorry, but what department are you in? What courses do you teach, that kind of thing?
Jonathan Hunt: I'm in the department of Rhetoric and Language. I've been here for two years so I'll be starting my third year at USF. Before that, I was in the Program and Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford, where I was the associate director for a couple of years and taught in the program for about five years before that. The classes I teach here are mainly courses that satisfy the core requirement for writing and public speaking, so I teach both of those. We have a series called Rhetoric 130/131, which is a year-long series which satisfies both the writing and public speaking requirement, which is a great course.
There's also a course which most students would satisfy the requirement with, which is Rhetoric 120, which is preceded by Rhetoric 110. I also teach those. They focus on writing much more intensely, and the students who take that sequence usually take a separate public speaking course to satisfy their core.
Interviewer: One of the reasons I wanted to approach you is that several educators have written books or essays, whatever about the problems undergraduates have with writing. We've all experienced that doesn't matter whether we work with undergraduate or graduate students. Some people have also written about the lack of opportunities that students typically have to systematically develop their writing skills, and what to do with that. Opening up on a big level in a general sense, how do you help your students develop and refine their writing skills?
Jonathan: At USF we're very fortunate in that, the core requirements for writing are robust, which means that in many institutions, students might be able to fill the core with an online class. There are some merits to that but there's also some very serious problems. The completion rate is very low. Many schools also have just a single semester or even a single quarter of required writing, which is very, very difficult to make a lasting impact in any subject matter, just one quarter. We have together with public speaking, many students take three quarters in the Rhetoric and Language programming, and the research and reasoning skills and public speaking in writing overlap a lot. It's pretty robust.
The downside is that we don't have anything that goes really beyond the first year, so many students are fulfilling this in their first or possibly their second year. Many schools who are really committed to having improvement in student writing have realized that there needs to be substantive attention to that throughout the undergraduate career. Some kind of second-year course, a third-year course that's probably focused on writing in their major. Then also many majors here have that, and then also maybe a capstone writing requirement, but that these are all aligned and coordinated in some way. We hope that we can bring that around in the future.
What I do in my class is an enormous list of goals. Freshman composition has a lot of roles. We often need to socialize students into an academic life, which many of the core classes try to do that. The writing classes are genuinely small, so we might have 18 to 20 students typically, 18 to 22. We often have a lot of contact with students that we wind up playing an advising role for them before they've declared their major. The main goal is to prepare them to succeed both in their subsequent coursework as writers and communicators and ultimately in their professional and personal lives as writers and communicators. Which is a very tall order because as Rhetoric teaches us, you really need to have different strategies and different skills in different situations.
The communication skills that you need in a psychology class are very different from the skills you need in an ethics class. Those are very different from the skills you need as a real estate agent, and those are very different from the skills you need as a spouse. My goal is to have students understand that one strategy is not going to work in all situations and develop their ability to analyze situations to determine which strategies might be the most effective and successful. Which is very difficult particularly at the developmental age of 18. Students, they know it's important to be able to write well, but they haven't often experienced contexts where that's real, or it's not just a school situation. When I talked to colleagues across the university and asked them, "When do you feel you really learn to write well? A lot of them will say graduate school.
Interviewer: That makes sense.
Jonathan: It was really then that they realized that their whole livelihood and life's goals were tied up with their ability to communicate an idea, and freshmen is probably a long way for that sometimes. That's what we try to do pretty much everything.
Interviewer: When you're giving them some writing assignment in one of these classes, given there's so much to do, you must put in some- I'm imagining I may be wrong, but there must be some scaffolding where maybe they engage in a big project that's going to be done by the end of the semester. I don't know. Some long paper or something and there's some way that you build up to that. I'm putting that in general terms because I don't actually know what you do. Can you talk a little bit about how you help students take on something that's big and scaffold it so they're making steady progress and getting feedback along the way?
Jonathan: The most common curriculum and writing classes and this are really common at USF also is some form of scaffolding. You would typically start out with some shorter paper that involves a response of some kind, analytical response, or other response to a single text and it's usually shorter. The text is often assigned. Then the second or intermediate paper would involve an analysis of multiple texts, maybe three texts of different kinds on a specific issue. A lot of people would do something like a Fox News report and then MSNBC. Different perspectives or sometimes some people would do a scientific report, and then the Newsweek story about that scientific report.
Different registers or perspectives and so students have to look at different voices, not just a pro-con kind of thing but we try to show that there's more than two sides by having three different texts. That would be like the first assignment would focus on analysis with some analytical skill, whether it's a common assignment, rhetorical analysis if the person is interested in rhetoric, but there's other kinds, any kind of critical analysis. The second one would be more having to a synthesis which in other words you have to conduct the analysis of each text and then explain only.
Then there'll be some moderate research texts where students would need to find-- So they would be similar to the second assignment with the synthesis of multiple texts, but the students will be locating or identifying those texts and learning to use the library a little bit. Then a final paper would be trying to unify all of these. So, analysis of single texts, being able to put multiple voices together around a single issue, also being able to locate resources that the student has identified and evaluated and insert them into that.
Interviewer: For them that's going to be a really complicated final paper.
Jonathan: Extremely complicated. That's the recipe for the classic standalone research paper. That's come under fire a lot lately. That's still the way we mainly do it here and the way most people do it. But studies have shown that the generic research paper, which is not associated with any particular discipline that often gets taught in freshman writing, that the skills involved are not transferred very well. Students have difficulty transferring. They tend to think that students tend to recognize genres instead of skills. When they go to another class, it looks like if what we see is a similar research assignment to them appears to be a different thing. Typically, students don't apply very well the stuff they've learned in their freshmen. We call that transfer so they don't transfer very well.
Interviewer: Buffy and Breaking Bad are two different universes, even though it may be script writing and telling a story. It's interesting to think from a student's perspective that if you've read Foucault, he's got the great passage about the culturally alien encyclopedia where things aren't classified alphabetically, but by some system of order which isn't comprehensible. That's a little bit what I think it's like sometimes with students because we see two things as belonging to the same group because of our experience, and they see as belonging to different classes of items. They have difficulty transferring that.
What I have moved towards in recent years is, I was having some instincts about this and they were really confirmed by a book that was our summer book club the How Learning Works book. Which pointed out that a lot of implementations of scaffolding undermine student's learning because we give them a different task each time. They don't see the connection. They don't know how to move from one task to the other. Now I do a parallel, I have two assignment tracks. There's one assignment track, which is the exact same thing. It's a critical reading response that involves analysis of the text they've read, but they also have to compare it to some other texts that they themselves have located.
They bring in something from their own existing knowledge that they've encountered and connect it to with the text that we've read. Which is really helpful for international students also, because they can say, for example, "This writer says that they might read something in my class about how to effectively revise your essay." They'll say, "This writer says they'll summarize the claim, they're going to talk about it." They'll say, "Well, in China, we were taught this other system, it's really different" so that's why. They get to reflect on their own experience. They do six of those through the semester and it's the exact same assignment but just with a different plugin content.
What I've been fascinated by is the degree to which their mastery increases in that particular assignment. They have a real chance to succeed there because the feedback is going to apply really clearly for them to the next critical response because they know it's going to be identical assignment. Where there's a greater difficulty if I have my first assignment is a rhetorical analysis, and later I have an annotated bibliography. To me, it's obvious that the annotations consist
of mini rhetorical analysis, but it's extremely difficult for students to master that because even though we do a first version and a second version, or a draft and revision of each essay, most students don't connect no matter how many times we try to explain what's happening.
They have difficulty connecting the rhetorical analysis genre which I think of as a genre and say that they are a free genre. Now, the assignments I do, I try to break them up into smaller pieces often. When I'm reading the earlier paper, I'll try to make remarks, comments on it that explicitly refer to how it can apply to the next paper even though the topic may be different. I've really been trying to figure how to make-- The scaffolding needs to be constructed so it doesn't seem, from that student point of view, that they're getting just a different assignment each time. We see it as a staircase but they just see it as different. Something completely different. Something from scratch.
Reflecting back on my own experience as a student, I was not a great student and not a very assiduous student in college, but I had a very low sense that things would apply from class to class. I never went and picked up my final papers because I knew that the next professor would just want something different. I knew the grade but I didn't pore over the comments because it didn't seem to me that one professor said would apply to what the next professor said. I think it's a common thing even among people who are pretty engaged in their education to not see the connections.
Interviewer: It also sounds like in this whole arc of your story, that was really a pretty fundamental shift for you in terms of how you change these assignments.
Jonathan: Yes. I understand the scaffolding principle and I think it's a very good one, but in the implementation, I was seeing within my class, I wasn't seeing what I wanted to see. I also, in my role as associate director, was reviewing a lot of other people's materials and talking with them about their teaching. We all believed in scaffolding, but there was not very much of a conversation on the pitfalls of implementing it. It really started to click for me when I came here and we read that book, and there was a brief discussion of how the scaffolding can backfire by not being clearly aligned or integrated. I've changed my plans a little bit.
The underlying principles that I think in writing and in my class are essentially that students should get to do tasks over again. They write a first version, not just a rough draft but a full version and then they are able to-- They write a first version that's complete and then they get substantial feedback on that and then they use that feedback. Also, an individual meeting with the professor as part of that feedback because written feedback is actually a fairly inefficient way to communicate. We also have face to face meetings. Then they get a chance to revise that paper based on that feedback.
Interviewer: Now, I'm going to stop you. [crosstalk]
Jonathan: I'm babbling.
Interviewer: No, you're not babbling at all but you brought up a few things that are pretty interesting. They have several papers in the semester. Forgetting about your whole department, just focusing on you even though other people may do a similar thing. For each of these papers, you give them written feedback and an individual meeting.
Jonathan: I do that. I do three individual meetings. There's three major assignments where a revision is required. It's very time-consuming.
Interviewer: This is going to be one of the questions that any faculty member faces is, how do I give good feedback efficiently? The answer from your perspective of what you're doing is maybe it isn't time-efficient, but there's other efficiencies with other rewards. My guess is you wouldn't be taking the time you're taking if there wasn't some payoff for the students that you could see. Otherwise, you're killing yourself.
Jonathan: Yes, there's two payoffs. I have a couple of caveats. This would be advice. This is advice that I think it can be difficult for people to hear. I also work in the writing center, so I see the comments that professors make on students' papers. There are two pitfalls in commenting. Number one is another term I learned from our summer book club, this time from the Claude Steele book which is the idea of over-efforting. Many professors over-effort in their comments which leads to a sense of frustration and feeling aggrieved if the students don't seem to be matching the effort, or don't seem to be successfully improving.
I've seen this. A student came in with a 10-page paper that was very heavily commented. This was an international student so there were some typical minor errors. It was a lucid and very smart essay, I thought. In fact, it was, it hasn't been announced yet but it won an honorable mention in the Writing for a Real World. We submitted it for that. High achievement but there were a few errors that were fairly surface errors and the professor had assiduously marked every single one of them. Almost every sentence had something. Some errors were recurring but the professor was evidently becoming more and more annoyed as the 10-page paper progressed.
It was a polite comment at the beginning but by the end, a clear sense of a negative emotional tone was coming through about the semi-colon or whatever it was. That's an example of over-efforting, which is undermining the professor's morale and the trust of the student in the professor's sense of empathy and concern for their well-being. That's one thing. Over-efforting. The second thing is to clearly establish hierarchy of value and concern in your comments. Which is to say research has shown that if you mark the semi-colons and then you also mark the lack of code in argumentation and the misuse of sources, those three things are seen as equivalent if there's equivalent number of comments.
Students often have difficulty determining which of these is the most important one to address. You can economize a lot on written comments if you have a policy with your students that you're going to mark errors, for example, grammatical errors only on the first page, and they need to seek help at the writing center for the subsequent pages.
Interviewer: Got you. That's a nice strategy.
Jonathan: That's a common strategy to stop that. That way you don't get more and more irritated. You could just set that aside and focus on the [crosstalk]-
Interviewer: Usually, these things are predictable, repeatable and once they get it, they can sort it out.
Jonathan: I regret to say that research has shown also that no matter how many times you circle it, that's not the way students are going to learn to fix it. Especially, if it's a language issue, it's going to be very difficult. Some things are very resistant to that kind of correction. You have to be mindful of that, I think. Your own morale and the student's. There are efficiency strategies. As I said, not over-efforting and establishing a hierarchy of concerns. In an end note, I always say the number one priority for your future work is this issue. The number two priority is this issue. We'll discuss this when we have a chance to meet.
Interviewer: That's fantastic.
Jonathan: Yes. That comes with the research of Nancy Summers. You can look her up. She directed the writing program at Harvard for a very long time. Her main area of focus was responding to student writing.
Interviewer: I'm going to get to this other part but when I give feedback now, I do give written feedback. My handwriting isn't legible anyway. If it's a week later, I can't even understand it. I can't pull off what you do with personal meetings because my students don't live here. They come here every other week but I give them audio feedback. I think I fairly naturally, at the end of it, it's like I've come to the end. When you're writing it's a little different but when it's audio, it's like, "It's time for a summary."
So, I do, do a summary but I'm not sure, even in that case, if I've done it, I've just been lucky but I certainly haven't consciously said, "The number one priority next time and the number two priority." But that's a really nice way of organizing it because even though it may be obvious to me, even though I would think after this feedback, it would be obvious to them, it's not necessarily obvious. Using that approach is really nice.
Jonathan: One thing that I think is helpful for faculty members is to look at the last set of referee or reviewer comments you had on your manuscript, and remember how hard it was to sort out what decisions you should make. Often that's because referees conflict in their opinion. Students don't have that situation. Although we all conflict with each other. Basically, any one class is different than the other one, but I think, in my experience, determining what the course of action should be given a referee or a reviewer's remarks can sometimes be opaque. Thinking about your own experience as a writer can sometimes be helpful for thinking about how to respond to students.
Interviewer: You have this interesting term you use. Hierarchy of values and concerns. Going a little further, when you set up these personal individual meetings with students, they've already gotten the written comments. I understand you say they either may not pay attention to them or not know how to pay full attention. What's the purpose of the individual meetings and how do you approach it? I'm inferring, perhaps wrongly, that it somehow plays into this hierarchy of values and concerns but I may be wrong.
Jonathan: The individual meetings are an important place. There's some other mechanisms that I use for this, but it's an important place for the student to set the agenda. I have them fill out a sheet which is a goal sheet so that they thought ahead about what they're going to say when we have our meeting together. This helps me because what I want most for them is to have a clear idea of their own rhetorical purpose on what they're trying to achieve and to match strategies to that purpose. Again, I can think of my own experience with referees commenting on my work which is to say that often they miss the point, and they give me recommendations that are hijacking the purpose.
They seem to want me to write the article that they would have written and you realize that the response isn't to do what they said but to reiterate more strongly what your own goals are so that readers can understand it more clearly. Students are sometimes in that similar situation. We're reading a lot of papers. We might not see their argument very clearly sometimes, and we might perceive that to be a fault in their argument. But in fact, it could be just that we missed something. We don't read student papers with the same way that we read [unintelligible 00:19:36] or something like that.
We assume that we're going to understand it all in the first read. I have them fill out a goal sheet and then they come in and I ask them about what their goals are, what their sense of strength and weaknesses are. Also, in the conversation, I ask them to tell me what they thought of my comments. A mistake with the individual meeting is to think of it as a reiteration of what you've already written but now, you're saying it to them.
Then you say any questions at the end, and of course they say no and leave. Instead, you try to get the student to take ownership of that process and it's surprising.
First of all, there are two aspects of this that I think are worth noting. One is the pedagogical one, which is that students often report that this was one of the most valuable parts of the experience. They really feel this one-on-one attention helps them grow individually as a writer.
Interviewer: I can easily imagine that.
Jonathan: When you think about the amount of data that can be communicated, even a short face-to-face meeting compared to writing it out long hand, it's very efficient even though it's time consuming. That's one thing to think about as a pedagogical value and there's another value related to students' experiences of the class. In our end of the semester evaluations, we asked students if the instructor was a good teacher. Some research on student ratings of teaching has shown that a major component of their answer, is their sense of how much this person cared about them.
It's partly empathy, but it's also partly concerned for their learning and well-being. It doesn't mean you were nice necessarily. It doesn't mean they got a good grade, but it means that they feel the professor has their best interests at heart. The face-to-face meeting is a place where the tone of comments can be clarified. The purpose of the exchange can be clarified, especially for students who are coming from a high school situation where they're more a subject of discipline than a budding intellectual in some ways. They tend to think of the teacher in a way of disciplinarian in a way that we're not.
I think the conferences had this great effect where they cannot, I think they have a positive effect on the student ratings at the end of the semester, but also just the student's experience of the class. They feel that they've been attended to as an individual. The last thing I would say is that these do not have to be long. It can be 15 minutes long. It's not to be a very long conference. If a student comes to you for a required 15-minute conference, they might drop by your office hours sometime later too because they've reached the threshold. I know that still if they're distant, it's difficult or there's other reasons. There's 100 students, it's difficult.
Interviewer: This gives people ideas. This is really wonderful. As an aside, and I may cut this out of the audio, would you be willing to share how you structure your goal sheet for students?
Jonathan: Each one is different depending on the traditional concepts that have been interviewed, but if people saw them, I think they could adapt them for their own needs.
Interviewer: It's a great idea.
Jonathan: Yes. It's quite brief and it's something that actually the common pedagogical strategy, which is that metacognition about self-efficacy actually increases your learning. They have to think about what do they think is the strongest part? They typically will start out mining what they think, I think as this comes apart. In the course of a semester, if you establish a certain amount of trust, then they can grow into that space of owning their own work.
Interviewer: That's the value of having the multiple meetings. If it was just a one off it would have some value, but I have to imagine there's a cumulative value that's more than three ones because of what happens.
Jonathan: Here at USF, the one-year sequence that we have with the 130/131 which is only about 10 because of the logistical concerns and other concerns, only about 10% of the students are in that class. I'm with those students for the whole year, so I meet with them-
Interviewer: At the end of year again, that's having a huge impact.
Jonathan: Yes, by the end of the term, I've really had a lot of opportunity to build on their writing throughout the whole year. It's really, it's fantastic, it's a treasure. It's a jewel, faculty jewel from a writing teacher's perspective.
Interviewer: I can both imagine it. I can't imagine that would be just such a fantastic situation.
Jonathan: Especially in a public, this is an aside, but in a public speaking class, there's an opportunity for students to do the same thing repeatedly, get up, stand up and give talks about their work and progress, and their final research reports and to have a chance to revise that and do it again. It's like there's almost a theater class component to it. Not only do you get to know the students much better because you've spent so much time in their audience, but the students all know each other really well. They know each other as intellectuals and they know each other's research projects and it's a true treasure.
Interviewer: Fantastic. I want to ask you some very specific questions. One of the things that people use a lot of rubrics, do you choose to use a rubric in your class and why or why not? What's the value for you?
Jonathan: I resisted that for a very long time. I found the answer for my resistance in the work of a guy, a psychologist named Robert Boyce. I encountered him in a professional development workshop 6 or 10 years ago. It was a while back and he observed that in the humanities, which is my background, tacit learning is very highly valued. Which is that the skill of decoding and assignment is considered more important than the actual assignment itself. Many professors, they themselves wouldn't say that explicitly because it's just this incredible tacit economy of knowledge in the humanities, and nothing's valued more than somebody who gets it.
Having to explain it is almost like for a comedian would puncture the value of it. There's this resistance to explicitness and transparency typically. You often hear this was my experience too as a younger humanities professor, was that when a student says, well, ask for some explicit advice, "What do I need to do to get an A?" Or "How many pages should it be?" Or "I don't understand what you mean by analysis?" There's a sense of this is your puzzle to figure out, I'm not going to explain these things to you. A rubric would be something like that. I still do want students to understand that they need to set the agenda as problem solvers.
It's not they're trying to figure out a puzzle, I'm going to make them guess something, but they need to be problem solvers in their work and that's going to serve them in all areas. I give them more information about what I value than what we think we should value as a class. I have moved towards using rubrics and I use rubrics in canvas. In some classes I've had students develop the rubric together through some various kinds of group work, which is effective in a writing class because in a writing class, the content is the writing. Writing is the content. That's all we have to do. You don't have to know anything about Moby Dick or the unconscious or physics or anything, just writing.
That's what we study and if I'm devoting class time to that, it aligns with the course goals here. It would be hard for somebody to do that I think in another class, but it is possible to have a line on the rubric where you could have, for example, how student groups generate competing proposals for what they think should be valued. A common example would be students will, I'll have my list of things to be valued, which are pretty predictable. It would be a clear rhetorical goal or thesis or argument, reasonably organized procedure of laying out the argument, use of evidence, which would include citations and attention to formatting and presentation, those things.
That's in descending order of value. They'll often want to add something like they want to be rewarded for effort. Even if they missed the mark, they might've worked really hard. Then we have a long conversation about, and I'll say, "Well I'll have this on here, but we'll need to figure out how I'm going to be able to tell what your effort is." In a recent class in the course of the discussion, they came up with the idea that they would write a cover letter explaining what efforts and all the tasks they had done so that there would be a material evidence of their, at least the claim of effort so that I would have more information and I would be able.
I allowed that that could be 10% of their grade so that they had some ownership of the rubric by contributing this, that one line to it. We also got to have a conversation about the idea that they need to be putting evidence into their paper so that I can see evidence of their learning. I want to see evidence of their learning. I'm looking for it. We need to just make sure to put it in there. They figured out it's a good learning tool.
Interviewer: Yes, I can imagine so.
Jonathan: I do use rubrics now. They're not super detailed. We tend to flush them out in class discussion. They're basic. I think overly detailed rubrics are overwhelming and students will have a hard time seeing it as making practical use of it. Also, a lot of rubrics consists of the a column will be a description of something that's essentially unattainable, and all the other columns are our deficit language fails to meet the other things. I like to try to avoid that as well. Rubrics like scaffolding can be, I think that they're a very powerful tool, but you can't just throw it down. It has to be carefully implemented. I think that giving students some ownership is a good plan. Kathy Gabor does a lot of the having students develop rubrics in her class, in my department.
Interviewer: That's fantastic. What do you do, then I think that's all related to this is what models do you give students, or do you choose to give models because this is a big thing? I'm working with doctoral students, but typically, especially through first year students, I'll give them some models of great papers, but for another course. It's the focus on the writing, not the content. I choose because there's not that many students in for some other things. Not to give them negative examples, but I'm just wondering how you deal with giving people examples or models or not and why?
Jonathan: That's another thing that I was resistant to for a long time is coming from my humanities literature background, but increasingly in, and also my own temperament as a student, I wasn't interested in models. I don't read owner's manuals. I wouldn't have followed the model that had been given to me. I just didn't see that was my thing. I didn't have a tendency to do that, but I've come to really realize how valuable it can be for students. I really learned this in my administrative work when I had to produce an administrative document of some kind in a genre where I'd never worked.
It was really quite common advice from my mentor to use a copy of his and just take that structure and substitute my own content into it. I think they use models more for the structure than for the content and that can be really helpful. I provide a number of different models. In fact, I give them APA and MLA word document templates. It's already set up to have the font.
Interviewer: So, they can focus on communication rather than-
Jonathan: They don't even need to be power users of words. They can just fill in this thing, which is in fact for international students, they're starting from zero with that word processing stuff. I also give them exemplar models, so stuff from writing from a real world, which is the undergraduate journal. I don't give them whole papers. I give them examples of things that we are working on at that moment. A common lesson might be working on an introduction, which should be in our own writing. We give the introduction an awful lot of attention because it's the first impression. I'll have two examples that are really divergent from writing from a real world to talk.
We talk about different examples, and that way they can choose which one.
One might start out very first persony, a dramatic story, the other one might start out more sciency, heavy six or seven citations in the first paragraph but they're both undergraduate papers. They'll start out, but just the first paragraph, and then I often ask them to write their introduction both ways. They write two different, totally different versions and then select or mix and match, and so on based on their own choice. I think it's good to provide-- I think that in different disciplines, disciplines really vary.
As far as I can tell, they really vary in how much variance they accept in writing. In some fields, you're writing something that the genre is extremely constrained, and the methods section is always going to go here. It's always going to look just like this and the tone is the same and so on. Then in other fields, there's a much wider degree of choices that a writer can make. I don't have expertise that I think it will be impossible to train all students in their future major, because you don't know what those majors are going to be, and I don't have the expertise to do that. I try to show them different models and have them select ones that they think would be most effective for the project that they're doing.
That's an exemplar model of a polished, edited student writing. It's not the writing at someone handed in I mean, they handed it in, but then it was revised again and again. Then I also use work from my prior students. Often, I have an essay come in, and I'll say to the student, "Would you grant me permission to show this to future students, because I think you've done something here that I want them to see." It might be I had a student, for example, who had conducted an interview with several peers in a way that looked really good on the page, and was very effective in making his point.
I have students often interview peers about writing tasks or writing issues and I use that as a model. I use it, I didn't update it, it's got its minor errors and other things in it as well but it's just to show the structure of how he went about it. Those are different software templates, exemplary models, past students work. I use a lot of different models, but not the whole paper, just pieces.
Interviewer: Well, one of the reasons I wanted to talk with you is, maybe not every faculty member, but a huge percentage of faculty member are in one way or another working with students and their writing. I think probably almost all of us struggle with that in one way or another either how to give the best feedback, how to structure the assignment, how to find the time, all of that. You've provided some really nice ideas, tips, suggestions, attitudes and approaches to all of this. I'm asking the best questions I know, but I may have left out something important.
I'm wondering if there's any kind of, when you reflect on it, for somebody who's not teaching writing, they're teaching their discipline and they have relatively limited amount of time that they can give to writing, per se, in terms of feedback and support for all of that. Is there anything that we haven't touched upon, that would be really important for people to at least consider as part of their process?
Jonathan: I can tell you a couple of things. In fact, I could probably talk for hours. I will just tell you two. The first one is about a resource that's here on campus, which is the writing center. Our writing center is I think, doing a good job given its level of resources right now, and faculty members who want their students to seek extra help with their writing can do some framing of the Writing Center in order to help students get the best of their experience. The people in the Writing Center can, what you want to avoid and faculty members maybe had this experience is that you might make a comment on a student paper about some rhetorical choice they're making, their use of evidence, that that source might be credible or not credible.
They might have had an overly personal reaction to something. Something that is not appropriate in your field and they may go to the Writing Center and talk to somebody who has a different training. Unless the student can set the agenda of that conference, the person in the Writing Center might wind up giving them some advice that runs counter to the faculty members calls.
Interviewer: It's hard for students to frame it, they're guessing.
Jonathan: What the faculty member can do that's extremely helpful, this takes no effort whatsoever is to advise the student when they go to the Writing Center take the essay with the faculty members comments on it and the assignment sheet. Then the consultant in the Writing Center can understand what the faculty member's goals for this assignment are. Whereas if a student comes in with a clean copy we don't know what the assignment was. We don't know what the faculty members reactions were or preference, which is no, that's for a psychology class.
Interviewer: Does that happen a lot?
Jonathan: We advise students next time make sure to bring this in but it's very, very helpful because we want to align with what the faculty member wants, and not how you serve that. But in a vacuum, it's very difficult not to impose your own disciplinary tendencies. That's the first things. The Writing Centers there, we're looking forward to continued improvement of the services that we're able to offer. In fact, as an aside, I think if you really want to have your eyes open about writing and what it's like for students working in the Writing Center is the best place. You're sitting down with something they've written for some other faculty member, and that assignment handout all of a sudden it doesn't seem that clear.
We get frustrated when students don't understand our assignments because we've worked very hard to prepare these assignment handouts. But when you're looking at someone else's assignment, it could be quite puzzling sometimes. It's very interesting, but sending students in with more information about take the assignment handout, take your last paper that I marked up. The more information about it. Then the second thing is about the history of writing instruction in the United States and its history is one of frustration, which is that we have very good records of faculty responses to student writing.
Not only in journals but also actually there's huge bodies of archives, which includes student papers going back to the 1880s, themes that were written at Harvard and so on with instructor comments on them. We have a lot of information about the assignments that have been given, about the writing that students have done, and about what faculty have said to one another in journals and other kinds of venues about student writing. Also, of course, there's the occasional article about it in the popular press and so on. Essentially, there's only one constant, and that is that everyone feels that writing is getting worse and they have felt that way since the first writing class.
In fact, it was at Harvard was the first place to split off writing into a separate composition class in 1880s. Universally people feel that students are dumber and less articulate than we were when we were that age, but we have all this evidence of what they were actually doing, and in fact, it's entirely false. The students today are rhetorically much more sophisticated. They're writing much more than their predecessors; they're making way fewer errors in their processors. They're using more sources. They're using them more effectively, by almost every measure, they're doing more and better than we did.
The frustration is constant, but students are actually doing a lot better, and this is quantitative analysis of large corpuses of student work. I would say the impression, and the frustration may not accurately, I wouldn't despair, that may not be an accurate picture of the situation.
Interviewer: That's interesting to know, because I wouldn't have guessed it.
Jonathan: It is a bit surprising but one of the famous studies was a study of student error that was done by Andrea Lunsford and Robert Connors way back in-- I think they did one in the '60s and then one in the '80s, and then one another, that was 2005 or something like that. They ranked all the most common errors and they also counted up how long a typical essay a student was writing, and the kinds of analytical or other task research tasks that were involved. Students are writing way more words today, much longer papers. It was rare in the '60s to have anything that had a bibliography, especially for freshmen.
They weren't doing anything source based in the '80s. They were doing a little bit more of that, but not like they do now. My students write a paper that has 8 to 20 sources, depending on the student. They're not all academic sources obviously, and often the papers are, they can be anywhere from 10 to 20 pages long, which is a substantial achievement for a freshman writer. It's much more than a freshman writer was doing in 1980 and the errors are much less frequent. The most common error now is that it's a correctly spelled word, but it's the wrong word, the kind of error you [crosstalk] or capture.
Interviewer: I do that all the time too, the famous pubic instead of public.
Jonathan: I would say that to take heart that not to despair, and I think that to feel really that frustration again, and to come back to the idea over-efforting, that the frustration can also be we can feel like we're putting a lot of work into it and not seeing the results. I would say that over-efforting is an issue. Also writing, development and writing is a lifelong process, and it's very difficult to see mastery of all the different skills involved in writing in a short term. It's something that we find it hard to measure.
Interviewer: Well, Jonathan, thank you so much. This has been fantastic. You've given me some great ideas, and hopefully, you will inspire and help other faculty also.
[00:38:29] [END OF AUDIO]


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