Professional Development Session Friday 6 October 2023, Concerns Coming Up

Today’s session focused on a range of concerns instructors are bringing to the classroom at the start of the semester. In one sense, many start-up concerns feel familiar. But in another, this does feel like a special moment, with a new LMS on the horizon; ChatGPT bringing its impacts; the college emphasizing a greater need for accessibility in our courses; and CLOs for ENG12 that still feel new in some ways.

We started the session with John Raymond’s question about Brightspace entering our arenas, as we’re now hearing about some opportunities for becoming oriented to it and there’s been a central-CUNY committee to help manage the transition. Hope mentioned that our department likewise has a liaison, Neil Kernis, who will be helping to communicate the changes emanating from CUNY. We tried to imagine the reasons for the change, and had only some guesses: it could be that the contract for Blackboard is up and it’s time for a change: Brightspace may be more responsive to some of the stuck-spots in Blackboard; Brightspace may allow for more data views; the possible reasons are many.

ChatGPT occupied a good bit of our attention during the session, as it has been doing more generally. We reviewed some of the points and approaches that were covered in the recent session for English faculty offered by Matthew Gartner and Steve Amarnick. Mostly, we discussed the awkwardness—at this stage—of ChatGPT’s linguistic style. It doesn’t write like our students write and can be detected fairly easily, especially in its uptake of writing “personally” about friends or family members who are often bestowed short, 4-letter names, like Rose or Jake.

We agreed that a key to teaching in an ChatGPT world is to stage assignments in ways that make students’ steady participation in their own process of writing very transparent and interactional; for example, discussion posts, class activities, and class discussions can be incorporated into students’ larger projects, with advanced stages of their work clearly building from these earlier, smaller and unique inputs. This is a way to “close out” ChatGPT as a player in our writing courses. Instructors also spoke about the importance of clear policies on work by ChatGPT submitted as one’s own, and using the occasion as a teachable moment.

Hope posited that the shadow of ChatGPT is also an occasion for affirming when students are truly authentic in their writing. John talked about including more reflection in the course, now to describe their real true involvement and interest. Ashiza conveyed an easy tone about it, having made an “if I suspect” kind of deal with students, where students likely would have another chance to re-do their work.

Recognizing ChatGPT’s potential to inspire better teaching has been a theme across our faculty meetings generally, and at this session too. John spoke about more time for reading personal writing, such as a recent piece of environmental writing by Terry Tempest Williams.  A close analysis of the rhetorical moves of such writing is not only helpful for genre study, but also encourages students toward the kind of writing that AI can only attempt. In a way, we have another reason to be grateful for students’ individual writing styles and our attunement to them. They are the writing of real, learning humans.

Accessibility issues dovetail the impersonality of ChatGPT, we noted, as courses that are tailored to students’ learning styles, interests, and needs may lessen the temptation to reach beyond the course for easy solutions. Accessibility centers students as diverse learners, and we must make that value apparent.

We all noted that the new CLOs also emphasize reflection. Since the new CLOs, reflection feels weighted more heavily in the portfolio evaluation. Hope discussed the “Add Comments” feature of the Submission Pages of BB Assignments for reflection. The box on the submission page with that tag allows for students to describe their process of crafting their submission, and comes up exactly alongside their assignment when their instructor opens that BB page. It could figure into the points awarded for the assignment, in fact, and students can be reminded of these reflections when it’s time to write the reflection for the portfolio.  John discussed having students come up with their own ideas for revision, discussion board posts, and reflection as a key type of writing for the course.

A helpful workshop by which to start the semester!