everyone knew her as nancy

I attended a Teaching and Learning with Technology Committee Meeting (I’m a co-chair for the Norfolk campus) on Tuesday, July 11. The main topic was the college’s technology plan. The committee had been tasked with drafting the instructional side of the plan. I brought up the topic of SMARTHINKING and the committee members discussed it at length. The committees main concern was the low number of contact hours per student.

Our interim Vice President of Distributed Teaching and Learning Services, Dr. Yanyan Yong, said she would ask faculty to recruit students to print out their sessions for a qualitative analysis of SMARTHINKING. I offered to print out the peer reviews that the tutors had done for my ENG 3 students that summer and Dr. Yong expressed interest in seeing those as well. Committee members also agreed that student feedback isimportant—a technology plan that doesn’t address student support services is inadequate.

In preparation for the next round of peer reviews, I created groups within Bb for each tutor and their students on Monday. I did an analysis of the previous peer review forum and saw that many students did not get any peer reviews at all. Some got only one review (they were supposed to give and get two), and two students got more than seven reviews. Most students did the required two reviews. Some students did more than the requirement. A few didn’t do any reviews at all, which violates Jolemore’s Golden Peer Review Rule: “Give the same number of reviews unto others as ye would have them give unto you.” I made a point of relating this information to my students in my Monday announcements. I hoped that smaller groups would encourage students to give more reviews. They wouldn’t be able to hide their lack of participation in a smaller crowd.

On Wednesday, when I arrived at the writing center, things were pretty busy, so I worked one on one with each tutor. I explained the writing assignment for that week, showed them how the groups feature works, went over the peer reviews guidelines, and gave them the due dates for each phase of the drafting and revision process. I felt comfortable with their understanding of how everything worked in my class, now that they had gone through a full cycle of peer reviews. I was hoping that the following week, we would be able to get several peer reviews done without too much trouble.

During the week, my students had made a mess of the discussion threads. I had set up the peer review forum so that all they had to do to post their drafts was to open their tutors’ intro and hit reply. Instead, they replied to my post, or they created completely new threads, or they replied to their tutors, but changed the subject line so the tutors couldn’t tell where their drafts were. I thought about chewing them out and making them re-do their posts, but I figured they would only get more confused, I would have to answer dozens of questions, and I’d end up more frustrated than before. So I made a mental note to revise the peer review posting instructions (which I did) and I prepared myself to deal with the ensuing chaos.

I had planned to conduct a norming session on formative evaluations with the tutors to discuss ways they could respond to the students’ rough drafts. I wanted to make sure that the comments students received were consistent. I felt students should get the same quality of response no matter which tutor they were assigned to. I also thought a norming session would give us a chance to talk about our methods of responding. I printed out copies of a few sample papers at home, and drove through pounding rain and flooded streets to the downtown Norfolk campus.

My session with the tutors that day reflected some of the chaos I had witnessed among my students’ mangled use of the peer review forum. The situation was out of my control before I even got to the writing center. Only two tutors were there, Ellynne and Lee, and they had already posted their peer reviews, but hadn’t followed the format I outlined the week before. I struggled with my impulses about how to react. Should I try to impose more order and control over the situation—break bad on the tutors—or should I be more flexible and work with the flow? I opted for a gentle nudging toward a more coherent direction and mentally filed the experience under “lessons learned.”

We did talk about the chaos in the peer review forum (they were having trouble figuring out where their students’ drafts were). I told them I could create group areas in Blackboard. Groups have some advantages (less chaos, more control), but the drawbacks are that students can only read and respond to the people in their group. It cuts down on choice and it cuts down on opportunities to read more of their classmates’ drafts. I think students learn much from reading each other’s drafts, especially students who need models for a level of writing that’s just a notch above their own. Managing groups is also more work for me initially, because I would have to post the guidelines in each separate group, but it would probably be less work in the long run, because I wouldn’t have to spend so much time trying to figure out who was responding to whom.

Later, we talked about how to respond to the students’ rough drafts. Lee felt we should challenge them to expand their vocabulary by using words in our reviews that they would have to look up. I was in favor of using simpler words for assignments, instructions, and peer reviews— students should certainly be challenged by the texts they read, but when teachers and tutors communicate with students, I think our primary purpose is to be understood quickly and easily.

Lee and Ellynne both had questions about the peer review guidelines. The first three items in the guidelines address the introductory paragraph: Is there enough background info? Is the thesis clear? Does the writer’s purpose come through clearly? Lee and Ellynne suggested that the items about thesis and purpose could be combined because one affects the other. They also felt that background wasn’t relevant to the assignment, which is to write a letter to a child or parent explaining a value that they hold. I agreed that background may not matter for that assignment but the writing situation does. So I decided to revise the peer review guidelines for the next semester.

The tutors had seemed especially interested in learning how to use Blackboard, so I started the second session with a Blackboard tutorial. I showed them how to login, how to navigate within the site, and how to use the discussion board. They posted short intros in the most recent forum, which was the peer review forum my students were working in at the time. I printed out the peer review guidelines so we could move to a worktable and talk more easily (the writing center computers face each other, which makes conversation difficult).  

I asked them about their writing center experiences: What kind of help do students most often come in for? How do they (the tutors) handle peer reviews? What methods, strategies, and techniques do they employ? I asked because I wanted to know what the tutors do when students come in for peer reviews—as well as what other kinds of help students ask for in the writing center. Even though my research project centers on responding to student writing online, I’m also interested in other tasks the tutors do with students and whether those tasks could be done online. I thought it may be possible to have an email Q and A service, but we would need to create a single writing center email account or maybe create an online writing center help form accessible from TCC’s website. 

The tutors told me that many students come in for a quick fix, or for a quiet place to work. Some students ask for help with accessing their email or their Blackboard site. Some need help with using Microsoft Word. Some students want a tutor to look over their draft quickly; some need help getting started or choosing a topic. At the end of the semester, they get many last minute procrastinators. Some students want the tutors to tell them what to do from start to finish. 

As for peer reviews, the tutors all agreed that they need to see the assignment from the teacher. If a student doesn’t bring one or if the teacher didn’t give students a hard copy, then the tutors still help them, but in a more general way. They read a student’s paper while the student sits and waits. Then they give their suggestions. They write their suggestions on a separate piece of paper, being careful not to write on the student’s paper. The tutors said they focus on different writing concerns; higher order content issues for college level writers and more on structure and grammar for developmental writers.  

We talked about the differences between face-to-face tutoring and tutoring online. I showed them some sample reviews done by me and my former instructional assistant, Donald. Ellynne remarked that Donald “talked” nicer to the students than I did. I admitted that my tone sounded more direct and I gave less praise, but I reasoned that it was from doing so many reviews, for such a long time. I won’t lie to students, I told them. I won’t say something is great when it’s not. But I could probably work on improving my tone. 

Before I left, I outlined the project schedule for the rest of the semester. I talked about how the cycle of drafting, peer reviewing, and revising goes for my students and about where we would fit our responses in—the due date for my students to post their first draft was the following Monday (and most students wait until the last day to post, of course). The following Friday, they were supposed to have given peer reviews to two classmates. Over the weekend, they were supposed to revise their drafts based on feedback from peers, tutors, and me. The final draft was due the next Monday.

We started the summer phase of the project with five tutors; Amber, Ellynne, Etta, Glynis, and Lee. Our first meeting was on Wednesday, May 31, about a week into the summer semester. My plan was to keep the training as open-ended as possible. I wanted to get feedback from the tutors themselves because they were the ones who would be on the front lines. I wanted to give them some control over the shape and direction of the project.

I began the first meeting by explaining what we were going to do, what my own perceptions, experiences, and attitudes were about tutoring online, and some of what I hoped to learn from our project. I then asked the tutors to fill out a survey about computer proficiency in a variety of areas so I could get an idea of what skills they had. Glynis, who later was diverted to the main tutoring center, was the most computer proficient, and had done some online tutoring for math via email. Ellynne was the next most proficient. She had been one of my students in English 112, and in that class, she had gained some experience with Blackboard. Lee and Amber’s computing skills were very good. They had also worked with Blackboard. Etta reported the least proficiency and expressed some anxiety about participating in the project.

I collected the surveys, and then I asked the tutors what they thought about the concept of online tutoring. Ellynne thought online tutoring would work well for college level students but not so well for developmental writers. I shared my own experiences with teaching developmental writers online. The tutors were surprised that English 3 students could do well in an online class. This is a common misperception even among English teachers, mainly because they are judging from their experiences with developmental writers in face-to-face classes. Online classes, however, attract many students who can’t take classes on campus. Most of them have adequate computing skills for getting around in a course management system. Students whose skills are not adequate usually drop the class before the drop/add deadline.

After we talked about our perceptions of the project, I gave the tutors some suggestions about how we could approach tutoring online. I told them about an experience from two semesters back, in which Donald, one of our former tutors, had been assigned to my on campus English 3 class as an instructional assistant. Donald had worked with my students in the computer lab (he has good skills) and in small group, classroom peer reviews until he got a good understanding of how my classes worked. The next semester, he worked with my online students, giving them peer reviews in the Blackboard discussion board. I told the tutors that the work I did with Donald had given me the idea to work on this project.

I said I thought that we could take turns doing revision peer reviews in the Discussion Board—one tutor per week. Ellynne felt that it would be best for the tutors to work throughout the semester with the same students so they could develop relationships with them. I agreed, and we decided to group the students in clusters and assign one tutor per cluster. Before I left, I showed the tutors around my Blackboard site, enrolled them all in the site as teaching assistants, and told them they could go in anytime to look around and get a feel for the Blackboard environment. I also printed out one of the forums so the tutors could see how students were responding to each other.

I haven’t posted anything to this blog in ages. My enthusiasm for reading blogs hasn’t transformed me into the prolific blogger I had hoped to become. However, the fact that I don’t write here doesn’t mean that I don’t write at all. I keep a journal for expressing my personal thoughts and I carry with me at all times another journal to write down my teaching experiences and impressions. Some of the material from my teaching journal has made its way into an article I’ve been working on for Inquiry, a Virginia Community College System publication for teachers in the VCCS. What follows today and for several days hereafter, are excerpts from my article in progress. 

Prologue: This is a story that chronicles the development of an idea for an online tutoring program. The final stage of development was a research project, “Online Tutoring for Online English,” conducted as part of a VCCS Professional Development Grant project during the spring and summer of 2006. 

In the summer of 2001, when I was still a part-time instructor at TCC, my dean asked if I were able and willing to teach a section of ENG 3 online. I hesitated at first—not because I wasn’t somewhat proficient with online technologies; I had been publishing course web sites since 1998 and using Blackboard for my on-campus classes since 2000. The truth was I didn’t believe ENG 3 students had the necessary skills to be successful in an online class. I based my belief on experience with my on-campus ENG 3 students in the classroom computer lab, where I would spend much time showing students basic computing tasks. I assumed that students in an online version of ENG 3 would be similarly challenged, but the chance to teach a course and receive a significant stipend convinced me to give it a try. Since it would be my only class that summer, I would have plenty of time to create additional course materials and work one on one with students.  

What I discovered that summer partly supported and partly disproved my assumptions. Students displayed a wide range of computing proficiency. Some students were skillful computer users while others struggled with the most basic computing tasks. I struggled along with my students to find ways to explain how to login to Blackboard, post to the discussion forums, send email, or check their grades. Students’ writing skills varied as well. Some students’ writing showed they were almost ready for ENG 111, while others grappled with serious grammar, spelling, and sentence structure problems. And I grappled for words to unlock their understanding of Standard English. 

After that first experience, I continued offering ENG 3 online. I took on another section, on top of the on-campus classes I was assigned, which meant that I wasn’t able to give my online students as much one-on-one help as I had that first semester. Teaching online involves almost twice as much work as on campus teaching, which of course, puts a greater burden on online teachers, which means they have less time and energy to give students individual assistance. I soon realized the need for some kind of tutoring service for my online students. In my on-campus classes, when I see students who need more help, I refer them to the tutoring center on campus, but many of my online students report that they can’t come to campus at all or can’t fit campus visits into their schedule. Many online students are active duty military, some of who take classes while overseas or on cruises. Some students are stay at home parents with no family or friends to watch their children while they’re at school. Some have full time day jobs. Some don’t live in the Hampton Roads area. Some students have told me about physical or psychological disabilities that make coming to campus difficult.  

Online courses also have a lower retention and success rate than traditional face-to-face classes. Students give various reasons for dropping or withdrawing from an online course. The reasons cited most frequently in an Online Student Survey conducted by Distributed Teaching and Learning Services in Spring 2006 were “changes in work schedule” (12.5%), “family obligations” (11.1%), and “more work than expected” (11.5%). What was missing from the survey was a question about tutoring support services. The survey asked about student satisfaction with Blackboard services, the Student Information System, student webmail services, and online learning resources and library materials, but not about tutoring. And not one of TCC’s four campuses offers tutoring services online. In the same Online Student Survey, 17.5% of students responding said that the most important reason they were taking online classes was that they could not attend class on campus.  

Why, I wondered, in my first year teaching online, didn’t we have the same academic support services for online students that we had for on-campus students? Over the next four years, my desire for an online tutoring service led me to investigate ways to adapt on-campus tutoring to an online environment. In fall 2002, I volunteered to be on a Tutoring Center Task Force and shared my thoughts with the other task force members. I searched for technologies to use. I went office to office making informal inquiries. I exchanged emails with faculty who expressed interest in online tutoring.  

Finally, in spring 2005, I had an opportunity to put some of my ideas into practice. I was assigned a supplemental instructional assistant for my on-campus ENG 3 class. Donald worked with my students in the computer lab and in small group, classroom peer reviews until he got a good understanding of how my classes worked. My students liked him and he was very helpful in the lab. The next semester, he wanted to cut back on his hours on campus, so I asked him if he would work with my online students, giving them peer reviews in the Blackboard discussion board. Donald did so well in my online class that I decided to work on a VCCS Professional Development proposal for a research project on online tutoring. That fall, I wrote a proposal for a VCCS Professional Development grant to collaborate with the Writing Center director, Faith Hutchinson, on developing an online tutoring program. 

Our original plan was to identify technology that would facilitate online tutoring for students in online writing classes, to evaluate technologies to determine which technology would work best, to determine the best formative assessment practices, to develop training procedures for tutors and to implement online tutoring at the Norfolk campus, and if successful, take it to TCC’s other three campuses. We were advised to extend the research over two semesters, spring and summer 2006. We decided to focus on technology and best practices research for the spring and planned to do tutor training in the summer. For the first half of the spring semester, Faith and I met often to compare notes on our project. About halfway through the spring semester, the college announced that TCC would be using SMARTHINKING in the fall. SMARTHINKING was supposed to be an alternative to our on-campus tutoring services for online students in the 2006-07 academic year. At the time the announcement was made, I thought our research project had suddenly become obsolete.  

 I talked to Faith about whether we should even continue working on our project. Why search for technology to allow students to receive tutoring help online from our college’s tutors when SMARTHINKING could do the job as well or better? At the end of our discussion, we decided to refocus and continue. We could still use the same methodology but apply it differently. Our new angle would be to have the tutors work with my English 03 class in the Blackboard site. The tutors would be more like in-class supplemental instructional assistants than like drop-in tutors. They would work with the same groups of students all semester and hopefully, develop a rapport with their students that would influence students’ to work on and improve their writing. So for the rest of the spring semester, we continued to research and evaluate technologies and best practices for online writing tutoring and we designed a training program for the tutors. During the summer 2006 semester, we trained the tutors and supervised their online interaction with students. Tomorrow, I’ll post a narrative account of the first training session.

Tim Burke at Easily Distracted writes about student evaluations of faculty and about teaching styles. He talks about one particular teacher he had for his senior year AP English class.

Some people can be shambolically Socratic, slyly pushing students to think, with every class completely different from the next, a description that fits the best teacher I’ve ever had, my senior year AP English teacher in high school, Mr. Wilton. The students from the two junior year honors English classes had to write an essay for him, which he used to winnow the class to about 20 students. The first day of class, he announced that everyone in the course would receive an “A” no matter what, and that if a student wanted to twiddle their thumbs in the back of the room or not read what he assigned, it was no skin off his nose. He only had time for the students who were going to love literature, have some passion for what he offered. That was the pedagogical equivalent of the Allied liberation of Paris from Nazi rule as far as I was concerned.  

In the spring of 1978, I had an art teacher kind of like that. The class was titled “Documenting the Process of Artistic Creativity,” and the teacher’s name was Gael Bennet. I had missed the first day of class, wherein he told everyone they were going to get an A no matter what they turned in. I busted my butt all semester to produce something brilliant. Everything I did fritzed out. Finally, a few days before my project was due, I came up with a lame idea; I would get a friend to videotape me doing tai chi with another friend. I don’t know much about tai chi anymore, but I do remember the name of the exercise we did was Cloud Hands and it was fun.

When I met with Gael to show my tape, he sat through all 20 minutes of it without a word. At the end, he told me it was nice. I fell apart, apologized for the crappiness of my work, and spilled the whole story about how everything I had tried had turned to poop. He looked puzzled and asked me if I had been in class the first day. I said no. He laughed and told me his grading policy. Somehow, that didn’t make me feel any better. But I wanted very much to take another class from him. Alas, he was a visiting lecturer that semester and his time was up.

Teachers procrastinate as much as students do; no surprise, since all teachers were students once, and if anything, have become more efficient procrastinators. A look around the web at teachers’ end-of-semester weblogs indicates that many teachers distract themselves from grading by turning their thoughts to reflections on teaching: what worked this semester, what didn’t work, what they plan to change, and how those changes will lead to a real improvement in their students’ learning.

Two people have recently posted entries that seem related to me. At Collin vs. Blog, I came across a reference to John Udell’s suggestion that first year composition courses incorporate methods used in MFA programs, and via Mike at Vitia, I discovered John Lovas’s request of teachers to contribute lists of “the five most important issues or concerns you face when planning a writing course.”

I happen to have an MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in fiction, though I did take two poetry workshops, a craft of poetry class, and a form and theory of poetry class. I also hold an MA in the teaching of writing, which is fancy title for a rhet/comp degree, so I’ve been able to look at the writing thing from at least two perspectives.

In the creative writing workshops I took, the focus was on critiquing classmates’ stories and poems. Our teachers assumed we had already taken the appropriate intro and craft courses, and didn’t need to learn how to write a story or poem. What we needed was time to write and time to have our writing ruthlessly de- and re-constructed. And we needed to learn how to de-and re-construct the work of others. That’s about all I did for two years as an undergrad and two as a graduate student. What I learned from that was how to read very, very carefully, and how to talk about what I read in constructively critical ways. I got real good at explaining (nicely) what went wrong in a classmate’s text and how flaws could be dealt with. As a result of some of the criticism I received, my writing did improve somewhat. As a result of some other criticism I took, I developed calluses against hurtful and stupid remarks. And I vowed to never inflict similar cruelty or ignorance on any of my future students.

In my rhetoric classes, our teachers also assumed we were already competent writers and spent no time in class examining the characteristics of “good” writing in our own work. We seldom got to see each other’s writing, and when we did, it was in discussion forums and at end-of-semester presentations that featured very little criticism. The aim was not so much to improve our own writing as it was to consider, discuss, and write about theories of writing and the teaching of writing. We surveyed moments from the history of rhetoric, conducted keen eyed analyses of other people’s rhetoric, explored the effects of affect in the classroom, looked at the ways that our students’ (and our own) diverse experiences contributed to construction of identity and voice in writing, and examined the elements and conventions of particular genres. Some of what I learned in those courses helped me to become a good teacher, in terms of being able to help students help themselves to discover what they wanted to say and how to say it well. I also learned how to be a better listener, to resist the impulse to speak with all-knowing authority and to sit back and ask open-ended questions designed to elicit more information.

So what does this have to do with first year comp courses, or with important issues in planning said courses? Well, I partially agree with Udell’s remarks about teaching writing the way it’s done in creative writing workshops. Students do need to learn how to see their own writing and the writing of others as plastic, impermanent, and imperfect. I know too many teachers who spend zero class time looking at the revision process, much less practicing revision in class. The usual excuses (it takes too much time, students don’t know how to give good peer reviews, all they do is correct mistakes) point more to the teachers’ lack of know-how than the students’ ignorance. Students need to be shown how to critique each other’s work and they need practice critiquing and revising their own work. They need models of common writing problems to analyze, and they need help generating constructive suggestions.

When I introduce the first revision workshop for each semester, I spend some time before the workshop talking about what real revision entails. I pass around an essay from a previous semester, one that has problem areas common to most students. As a class, we deconstruct the essay paragraph by paragraph, and sentence by sentence, identifying and articulating where the writer went off course or where meaning became muddled. Then I go over my workshop rules, assign students to small groups, and go around the room, group to group, sitting in briefly to make sure everyone’s on track.

I do this for every essay they write and I let students know that I expect significant revision. If I don’t see it, I say so in my summative end comments. My students don’t just turn in a finished essay. They turn in a portfolio that documents the process of idea generation, drafting, revision, and editing. They include their peer reviews so I can see what kind of advice they received and I remark on the quality of peer response in class when I give back the graded portfolios. So I guess what I’m saying is that on my list of five most important issues in planning a writing course, number one would have to be the teaching of revision.

As for the other four, those change from semester to semester. I often feel a mixture of elation and despair this time of year, vacillating between beating myself up for my failures as evidenced by my students’ muddled prose and/or congratulating myself for pulling off some assignments that seemed to help students produce a little good thinking and writing. This semester, my thinking revolves around: 2) program objectives due to an upcoming SACS review; 3) learning outcomes due to my own struggle with the gap between the developmental and college level courses I teach; 4) my ongoing conflict over whether to emphasize the craft of writing or critical thinking (why can’t I have it both ways?); and 5) of course, as always, my eternal quest to make my grading strategies work better as a teaching tool.

I’m done procrastinating now. Back to grading.