Professional Development Session – Friday, October 20 – 11am-12:30pm –

“Checking in with Students: Conveying Progress and Concern”

It’s a familiar step to check in with students at the mid-point.  When students are given time and tools to reflect on their progress, it’s not only a reality-check or CLO objective, but also a reminder of our care and concern. It may be something particularly needed now, in the light of the atrocities overseas, that we help them “check in” about the affects that may be impacting their ability to do the work. How can we combine some tools for checking in, such as Starfish, Blackboard grade reviews, and reflections, among others, with humanistic and sensitive approaches to how they might be feeling, generally, and towards the course?

We really did get to the heart of how many of the generative changes around writing in our department are influencing our teaching, and the feeling is positive overall (with some anxiety still mixed in). How students will ultimately represent themselves as writers come the time of the portfolio is still open, but the hope is that they will conclude that ENG12 engaged them in meaningful and literate activities. I think, for us, we will feel pride for having created greater latitude for them to write and to explore what writing is and can be. 

But as noted, recent events overseas (and, as we’re feeling, close to home) have been impacting the spirit and practicalities of our teaching, so our mid-point check-in on student progress encompassed an especially caring approach to how we confer with students on progress.  This shift to a more questioning, “so maybe you tell me how you’re doing,” rather than centering a teacherly stance on student progress, makes sense too in light of how our new CLOs continue to inspire more student-centered and varied inroads into writing.

Among participants of this workshop, it was easy to see that a caring approach to students’ affects around their writing, and an emphasis on enabling students to do more of the kind of writing they might find meaningful, across genres, are going hand in hand. Instructors shared the ways in which they are making this greater latitude possible, whether it be through a wider genre approach (oral histories, podcasts, comic strips, media postings), and/or through directly getting at the heart of writing, with poignant statement-writing, such as “My Life Has Meaning”—an Instagram project by Damele Elliott-Hubbard (in attendance). The first hour of our the discussion highlighted a large existential question around writing, asking what is writing becoming today, via all the options now current across media, which make writing just as much a “writing about writing” (and “writing about creating”) experience as it is an exploration about knowledge in the disciplines. While we couldn’t settle this question of what is writing, we knew and expressed that our courses were creating meaningful—and CLO-specific—experiences around writing, varied as they might be.

There was consensus that instructors were proceeding in the new latitude toward more genre and rhetorical choices without all the answers; however, participants agreed that likely clearer definitions for both ourselves and students would emerge as students gained strong understandings of writing as communication. That communication, for example, could reflect long-held notions of writing as a performative argument, thesis-based, as in well-tried essay-writing, alongside “newer” assignments, such as oral histories, mixed media collage, or even podcasts—all forms relevant to “writing about writing” and self-reflection.  We also agreed that more models for these newer venues for writing were needed, especially as students might wish to describe and represent their work to portfolio readers as having met the criteria of the new CLOs.

As one faculty member in our session pointed out, bringing more openness to writing in these ways is additive, not subtractive or in substitution of one sort of writing for another. Students are building a “rhetorical arsenal” that we may further support through reflective activities, ala the new ENG 12 CLOs, to help them better understand the widened approaches to writing they are exploring.

So while our topic was “progress at the mid-point,” it felt like we needed to first reaffirm for ourselves values and objectives that were guiding us at this still-early point of enacting new CLOs.

Strategies discussed for checking in with students included: conferencing with students one-on-one while the class engaged in a writing activity; notes and emails to students that recognize their work to this point and, for students who are behind, make the request that they create a plan for catching up; Starfish (demonstration) as an institutional “high-touch” point by a friendly adviser; ways to publicize and recommend some of KCC’s most essential academic, financial, and student support resources; and Blackboard functionalities for students to directly keep track of their progress. We also discussed means for making the perennial challenge of access easier, such as students’ use of Google docs, if they prefer; choice in assignments; and a point system for acknowledging completion of student work that does not conflict with the policy of not grading writing projects for portfolio sections.