The end of the semester brings a predictable series of emotions: from excitement about the semester to come, to frustration and exhaustion as I respond to a deluge of late papers, and finally, if all goes well, surprise of satisfaction at the work my students end up collecting in their portfolios. Right now, though, I’m at glum. In chance meetings with the colleagues with whom I dare to be frank, we compare our students’ projected completion rates. I’m realizing this semester how much the issue is not my students’ lack of writing skills but rather something deeper that underlies their ability to get writing projects started and completed.

I’ve been thinking a lot, again, about that WPA/NCTE/NWP document “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” that lists these eight habits of mind as crucial: curiosity, openness, engagement, creativity, persistence, responsibility, flexibility, and metacognition. I’m starting to see this not as a wish list or a series of prerequisites but rather as my agenda: to foster these habits of mind through more explicit discussion, through modeling, and through the design of my assignments.

So I’ve been thinking about organizing my next iteration of first-year comp around these habits of mind, starting with curiosity. I’ve written before Bruce Ballenger’s Myth of the Boring Topic and Larry Weinstein’s list of Fifty-seven difficult questions. I just ran across Chris Anderson’s inaugural video for the new TED Ed site, Questions No One Knows the Answers To, which would be worth a quick viewing as a conversation starter. Another, more concrete way to begin might be asking students to bring in objects for a show-and-ask questions session, to see what sort of questions even very simple objects might elicit (cf. Henry Petrosky on the toothpick, Colin McSwiggen’s recent meditation “Against Chairs”, any of Nicholson Baker’s loving descriptions of staplers or drinking straws or paper towels).

The first few weeks of class could be a time of collecting up questions: expeditions across campus of not fact-finding but question-finding; my own accounts of what’s stimulated my own curiosity (such as my recent walk through the Fens in Boston that sent me to asking questions about the community gardens there, which sent me to looking through their website); clippings and notes of things students see and hear that make them ask their own questions.  We’d collect up these questions in some online space, as a way to storehouse thinking and writing and researching possibilities. (I’m shifting from glum to my predictable stage of romantic idealism, anticipating the fresh new batch of summer-school students who will meet my gaze come the first week of June.)

I’ve collected up some raw materials that I might share and ask students to supplement: quotes about curiosity (its cat-killing powers); curious characters in stories and myth, such as Eve and Pandora, Curious George and Harriet the Spy; models of curiosity, such as three-year olds and scientists and journalists. This could be a low-stakes way to start talking about the research process, as we set out to find deeper information about these curious folks.

For a personal essay assignment, I might ask students to describe an episode of curiosity in their own life and how they satisfied it or what prevented them from satisfying it. (How is curiosity like and unlike hunger, I would ask.) I would tell about a central curiosity from my own life, to try to understand my mother, and how I’ve approached that mystery through thinking and imagining and writing. Once we’ve collected up some of these curiosity-narratives, we would read over each other’s stories to try to classify and generalize, to make some discoveries about the nature of curiosity and how it gets nurtured or deadened.

There’s not time in one semester, of course, to go through the other seven habits of mind, but I’ve settled on two others that I’d also like to consider. To partner with curiosity (the invention stage of writing), I’d add in creativity (the composing process) and persistence (the revision stage), which I’ll tackle in my next two blog posts.

Do these habits of mind play an important role in your teaching? If so, I’d love to hear whether you explicitly discuss them with student and how you integrate them into the classroom and into assignment design.

Lately, in breaks from my piles of grading, I’ve been starting to consider the results of my semester’s experiment in student-selected themes. With the memoir early on, themes seemed helpful for invention, helping students to find writing material in aspects of their life they might not have considered. But when we got to ethnography, many students seemed to feel constricted by their theme and had a, difficult time finding accessible subcultures to observe (though I’d emphasized at the beginning of the class that they needed to think this through before selecting theme). And now that we’ve gotten to argument, when I’d hoped for the big pay-off, that the reading students had done over the course of the semester would lead them to  topics, that genuinely engaged them, I still am getting students stuck on steroids and childhood obesity, graffiti and cell phones while driving.

In the clarity that comes near end of semester, I’ve relearned the importance of curiosity and invention. I tell my students that ideas don’t float down from the sky, that (if they want to find interesting things to write about, if they want to live rich lives) they have to pay attention to what happens in the world and ask questions about what they see and hear. But—metaphor being my main tool in my logical toolbox—I realize that what I’ve tried to give them is a buffet, and maybe I’d be better off with a series of chef’s samplers, quirky little plates of ingredients they can’t quite recognize, squiggles of bright sauces attracting their attention.

In the other main innovation from this semester—conducting class largely in computer labs—there was too much nonproductive time, too much staring at lousy websites and not enough time writing. I need better strategies for managing the allure of Facebook and getting students to look at me when I’m talking. I’ve concluded that I need to get them doing more directed writing, and to do that I need lots of prompts for a variety of in-class responses that can be selected from for for more formal, out-of-class papers. (I’ve been interested in reading on Mike Edwards’ blog Vitia about his  flipped-classroom pilot.)

Here are some ideas I’ve had (when I’m procrastinating in my grading) about what I might try next semester:

• For some data points to stimulate curiosity, use entries from “Harper’s Index”; there was an interesting article about this in the May 1990 issue of CCC by Brenda Jo Brueggemann titled “Signs and Numbers of the Times: ‘Harper’s Index’ as an Essay Prompt .”

• Of course, I’d use the usual:  short provocative articles or bits of articles, graphs that riase interesting questions, videos from TED talks, audiofiles from NPR.

• Several years ago I asked students to write personal essays the stemmed from a tool. If you haven’t already seen it, check out the linked essays in the latest College Writing by Doug Hesse, Nancy Sommers, and Kathleen Blake Yancey on Evocative Objects (abstract: “By examining in turn a son’s craft project, a family photograph, and an image of tectonic plates, the authors demonstrate how objects can elicit rhetorical invention.”)

• I’ve been thinking of using samples of some different genres with visual appeal such as the ketubah, asking students to consider what questions it provokes, what research it might stimulate, what it reveals about culture from which it sprung.

• I’ve also considered using two related  images and asking students to write about what factors caused the transformation from first to the second

• I’d also like to invite students to play around with Form; I’ve been inspired lately by Bruce Schauble’s alphabetical series on his blog Throughlines and rememebered the fun I had with form in my post on 4 x 4 writing inspirations.

Please feel free to add in the comments suggestions about any sorts of prompts you’ve used, or any more general thoughts about how best to stimulate your students’ powers of invention.

At mid-semester, in the latest incarnation of my freshman comp course, my students start a project to introduce the basics of the research process. It’s a group project in which, following a format from Harper’s Magazine, four or five students work from an image to brainstorm research questions, find sources, construct discrete paragraphs (one per student), and compile a joint bibliography. I’ve used the assignment for several years, but only recently in group-work mode.

Like many teachers and students, I have conflicted feelings about group work. I worry about whether the work will be divided fairly, whether everyone will learn something, and how I can best assess that learning as well as the product produced. Though I tell my students that they need to learn to work in groups because that’s the way most workplaces operate, from my own middle and high school days, I remember group work mostly as a muddled waste of time with the final product some sort of uneven hodgepodge. Oh, there was that one seventh-grade science project where we measured out a 6’ x 6’ plot of land and drew its topography, analyzed its soil, identified its wildlife, recorded its weather, but I’ll save for another post my meditations about what made that group project successful. For now, what I’ve been worrying about is something much simpler: So, how can I best set up these groups?

Grouping students is a particular challenge at a community college, with the tremendous (in both senses of the word) diversity of our students. This semester, I have students from about a dozen countries, from ages eighteen to mid-fifties; some have a hard time putting together a coherent paragraph, and others don’t understand the distinction between paraphrasing and plagiarizing.  In discussing last week how to put students into groups, a colleague of mine said she has started grouping by ability so that the “high” students will not be tempted to carrying the “low” students or resent the situation. She hypothesizes that the “low” students will rise to the occasion, participating more fully than they would have otherwise, and she wonders if, like elementary students placed into Eagles and Turtles, students will recognize the level of their group.

The following four options seem to be the most common methods for selecting groups:

Self-selection. I almost never have students pick their own groups, probably because of my empathy for students on the social fringes (and my still-keen memories of circling the high school cafeteria each lunchtime looking for a place to sit).
Proximity. For impromptu get-together-and-share classroom activities, I often just split the class into groups based on seating, setting the imaginary dividing lines to separate any too-friendly or too-antagonistic pairs.
Random. With a class that seems relatively evenly matched in ability and with no other compelling reasons to group or separate particular individuals, for a project lasting longer than a single class I may use a random system to form groups; the easiest method is alphabetical.
Teacher-as-matchmaker. Of course, this option has many suboptions, depending on what criteria are used to group students. I primarily use an abilities-based criterion to balance heterogeneous groups but also take into account gender, personality, and work habits. (In more blunt and accurate terms, in the groups I just assigned I tried to balance abilities while sprinkling throughout the groups those students who don’t show up too often and dividing up the pairs who talk while I’m talking.)

However, my discussion with my colleague, and her experiment with homogeneous grouping, has me reconsidering my own use of heterogeneous groups, and trying to clarify for myself what factors make (or don’t make) mixed-ability groups suitable for this particular assignment. The prime factor I’ve come up with is purpose: the purpose of my assignment is for students to learn (in a basic way) about the research process. This can be accomplished most effectively, I think, if experienced students can help teach the inexperienced, which ensures the involvement of all members of the group. (And if I start to feel sorry for the more knowledgeable ones who must bear the burden of teaching the less experienced, I remember that schematic that claims we learn best by teaching—though a bit of Googling indicates the figures may not be accurate.)

Another issue involves assessment, one of the rubbing points with homogeneous grouping. I generally give group work only minor weight in an attempt to forestall students’ worries that their grades may be pulled down by the work of other students in their group. And in some cases I have given both an individual grade and a group grade. In this assignment, the individual grade is fairly easy to assign since each student writes his or her own paragraph, though I’ve also asked students to include an evaluation of the group process and product as a way to assess individual work; the group grade I assign somewhat more reluctantly, but it’s important in order to get students to “buy-in” to collaborative work.

I’m still in the process of figuring out exactly how I’m going to handle all of this. If you use group work in your composition class, please feel free to weigh in with your philosophy and methods. What types of assignments have you found work best in a group setting, how do you form those groups, and how do you assess the work produced?

The past few days my department has been debating via email a definition for the student ready for college-level writing. It’s part of the alphabet-soup of initiatives swirling these days around my campus (and education-circles generally): this one ties in to PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), feared by some community college folks as a possible threat to developmental education or as a way to focus the community college mission on “mere” vocational training.

In the past I haven’t paid much attention to such things. With one hundred students, I’m busy enough teaching composition without worrying about educational policy, and its politics seem beyond my understanding, or interest.  I’ve heard talk that high school teachers are dismayed how many of their students test into our developmental writing classes, yet I’ve seen the persistence of the five-paragraph essay form that I thought had been cast off as simplistic the time writers hit middle school. At the same time, the murmurings go, the real problem is that students spend too much time in developmental classes, and that the goal should be to shuffle them through as quickly as possible. A colleague suggests that part of the problem may be that the high school curriculum generally focuses on literature during junior and senior year, which may be at the expense of more explicit writing instruction.

It’s a complicated set of issues that seems impossible to untangle. So I try to simplify. Can we answer the theoretical question (when is a student “ready” for college-level writing?) with the practical ramification (how do we place students in developmental writing?) At my college this is done via a holistically scored placement test, a 50 minute essay written in response to reading passage and prompt. We have a rubric that gives scores from 1 to 6, with the cut-off between 2 and 3, but in real-world practice the distinctive characteristics that shift an essay from fail to pass are these: sentence-level competence, a “sense” of paragraphing, and a level of maturity and sophistication of thought that we magically intuit.

Is that rigorous enough? And beyond that, is our purpose to characterize what criteria we now use to identify the “poised-for-college” writer, or are we composing a wish list here?

I turn to a few sources. The Common Core State Standards (ELA Standards) claim that high school students should be able to “Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.” The WPA/NCTE/NWP document “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” lists as habits of mind necessary for success in college-level writing, to cite the most problematic, curiosity and engagement, persistence and responsibility. I measure my college-writing students against these standards and find many lacking.

The gap is wide indeed between rhetoric of these lofty goals and the reality I see in my classroom. It’s not just the usage errors, my never-ending frustration over homonym errors and misplaced apostrophes (let alone the seeming inability to fathom the appropriate boundaries for the sentence).  It’s the inability to chunk together a main idea with some supporting details, to string those chunks together to make some sort of sense. And more than that, it’s the distaste or even disdain for reading. How can I respond when someone says, “I hate to walk,” except to say, “Yes, I know it takes effort, but how else are you going to get from one place to another?”

But I sound like one of those old codgers who tell of five mile walks to school in the winter when I tell my students about my graduate school days when I was required to fail essays that contained three or more usage errors. If I still used those guidelines, I say, ninety percent of their essays would fail (and I typically teach regular-track not developmental composition). For days I’ve been swinging back and forth between Grammar Guru self-righteousness and Susan’s much more humane response to the question of setting benchmarks for competence.

So I try this on for size. How about this as a test of college-readiness: Can a student write an accurate one-paragraph summary, with minimal usage errors, of a two- or three-page New York Times article? Feel free to weigh in with your own suggestions about what you believe to be essential for the college writer and how we might assess such competence.

As usual, as my students start writing their first essays of the semester, I’ve been thinking about the essay I would write myself if given my own assignment. I’m in the brainstorming phase, with food my chosen theme and memoir the assignment, and I’ve been thinking about recipes.

I haul out the cookbook from which I learned to cook and page through some recipes I remember following—Swedish rye bread, cream puffs, enchiladas—as my mother sat reading some convoluted mystery novel in the next room at a comfortable distance for any questions I might have. I rescued the book from her kitchen, and its musty smell still makes me a little sad four years after her death.

Nowadays, my nest is emptying with one daughter on her own and the other two in college, so I don’t cook very often. When I do, my sources for recipes have shifted from book to computer:

I think about how convenient technology has made it to find and follow recipes. The Epicurious app installed on my iPad allows me to search by main ingredient or course or dish type or season: I can call up a Mexican dessert with bananas to finish off my summer barbecue. I can read reviews of the dish and helpful suggestions from other cooks who have tried the recipe. I can even double-check the recipe on my cell phone as I walk up and down the grocery store aisles, or consider changing recipes in the middle of my shopping expedition at the sight of some luscious produce or amazing sale I can’t resist. As my mother kept saying in the last few years of her life, when her memory was fading and the trip from the assisted-living facility to my house seemed always new, “It’s a whole new world.”

For a few years I’ve been meaning to get together a file of family recipes for my daughters, and technology has made that easier as well. Apple’s new iBook Author, which I’d like to play around with for getting together some of my teaching materials, also seems to be a wonderful tool for creating personal texts such as family cookbooks, complete (potentially) with not only recipes but also photographs and videos (this is me at 2 a.m. making Christmas cookies; here is the Christmas Eve smorgasbord table with greetings from the family).

But beyond this flashy technology, what I value most are my recipe cards, jammed disorganized into three file boxes (one a present from my sister when I left home and the other two inherited from my mother). Here, for example, in my grandmother’s handwriting is the recipe for the wedding cake baked for her parents, also used at my own wedding and the weddings of my brother and sisters.

Some are generic index cards, others the purchased sort with cutesy cartoons or the backs of my mother’s discarded library catalog cards (another relic made obsolete by technology). They trace my family’s history in the handwriting of my grandmother, mother, sister, my father, cousins, neighbors, my younger self, and in doing so they preserve in some magical sense my memories of these people. They make tangible and poignant the ties between the generations. I think of my several students each semester who complain about the technology I require them to use in my composition classes, and despite my insistence that computers are a necessary and invaluable tool for the writer these days, I wonder about what we are losing in the process.

After explaining about my experiment with individualized themes for my composition classes this semester, I thought I’d go into a little more detail about how I have been compiling reading lists and asking students to choose from among the ten themes I selected.

I’ve been using the social bookmarking site diigo (here’s my diigo library) to collect articles, tagging each likely candidate with “readingjournal” and the particular theme in question, so here, for example, is the current list for technology articles. This allows me to post a link for students to a page that can be added onto as the semester progresses. (Of course, diigo could also be used to have students help in the aggregation process, selecting articles they found themselves. For this first try at multiple themes, though, I’m doing all of the selecting myself to try to ensure that articles are both authoritative and substantial in length.)

The sources I used to find these articles include the following:

• the usual favorites that I check on a weekly or monthly basis (the New Yorker, the Atlantic,  Harper’s magazine, the New York Times magazine section, the Boston Globe magazine section, Arts  & Letters Daily)
• two web sites that curate nonfiction, Byliner (which I’ve written about earlier) and Longreads, both of which can be searched by subject
• David Brooks’s annual Sydney awards (here’s part I and part II from last month)
• the Best American Essays series (here’s the table of contents from the most recent volume)
• the New York Times feature Room for Debate, which is indexed by discussion topic
• the apps Flipboard and Zite on my iPad

On the theme “reading lists,” I’m also including video sources drawn from these sources:

• the TED talks, which are searchable by theme
• Charlie Rose’s interviews, also searchable by theme
• Several sites I was astonished to find on which one can watch documentary films: Top Documentary Films, Documentary Wire, and Free Documentaries

After writing my last post about this individualized theme approach (and Jack’s comment hypothesizing that students would split between sports and the family), I spent some time considering just how to set-up the selection process. Before I asked students to choose their theme for the semester, I described my own brainstormed list of possible topics for an economics/business theme. Then I asked student groups to brainstorm topics for a pair of assigned themes and posted the collated results on our course blog.  I emphasized that students must be able to envision personal, ethnographic, and argumentative approaches for the theme they selected and that this should be a theme about which they had not only experience but also curiosity.

Only then did I asked students to write a proposal explaining not only their reasons for choosing a particular theme but also some examples of essays they might want to write for each of the genres we’re covering in the class. So that groups would have a “critical mass” (so that there would be enough students in each group to productively share reading notes via linked blogs), I also asked students to select a second and third choice; this also would allow me to have individual conversations with students who seemed to have settled too easily on the “obvious choice” themes of sports and the family, which I had also suspected would be the most popular choices.

The final results are not in yet as to distribution of students among themes, as only about half of the students have turned in proposals. However, I’m delighted to report that it looks as if students have self-selected into roughly equal groups split between the six themes of the arts, education, health, food, and, yes, the family and sports. At least a couple of students selected each of the less popular options (crime, the environment, technology, and business).

As you can see, this is all very much a work in progress, so I’d love to hear any comments or suggestions you might have.

As I was finishing up last semester and planning for this upcoming one, I decided to make some changes to my assignments. In particular, I resolved to abandon the personal essay, what one of my colleagues calls “my favorite cupcake.” Like many writing teachers, and for many reasons, I often use some sort of personal narrative or memoir as a first assignment. I received some wonderful student memoirs this past semester, as I usually do, but despite my pleas, I still read many essays on car accidents and dead grandmothers. In part, I believed these essays resulted from students’ failure to see the richness of their own experiences. There was a lack of perspective, the writer too close to his subject, like the Facebook self-portraits that so many adolescents insist on posting with pouting lips or flexed muscles or imitations of sultry eyes. I wanted to move the writer a bit further away from her subject, so that instead of the tight shot in the mirror the reader would get a whole person, not just face but arms and legs and clothing, a figure caught in the middle of some action, surrounded by some solid and colorful landscape. I would accomplish this, I thought, by switching my first assignment from the memoir to the profile.

Then, as part of the final exam, I asked four sections of my English 101 class for some advice about assignments: which should I keep, revise, and discard. By my rough estimate, 80 percent said to be sure to keep the memoir, for it was the piece of writing they cared about the most. So, after reading remarkably similar sentiments over and over again, I’m not yet willing to kill off the one assignment that gave some students their only sense of personal investment.

Instead, what I’ve decided to try follows up on my last post about having students choose their own themes for reading. I’ve selected ten broad areas for students to choose from, each with an associated reading list (I’ll write more about this process later): education, the environment, technology, medicine, sports, the arts, business and economics, food, crime and justice, and the family. Once students have selected a theme and done some initial reading, I’ll assign as a first full essay a memoir that draws on some aspect of their personal experience that connects to this theme.

I’m hoping that by narrowing down the parameters of what they can write about, I can enrich their powers of invention; it’s my oft-repeated hand motion of focusing in so that you can expand out. (Again hypothesis in visual terms: the person who has just toured a castle may only be able to report a lot of paintings and a bunch of furniture, whereas the one who has been kept waiting for an hour in a cramped room should be able to describe the weave of the couch fabric and the dated magazines on the coffee table and the whirr, maybe, of the drill from the other room.)

Brainstorming for my own theme. Business would not likely be my first choice of a theme, but I’ll take that for an example. In my business memoir, I could write about any one of several jobs I’ve held: working in the dish room in college and what it taught me about the satisfactions of manual labor, or the challenges of strategy in what may seem like mindless work; working at the salad factory one summer, when I sometimes spent eight hours boiling and peeling eggs and learning the social conventions of the break room; later in my adulthood working as an at-home freelance editor and the difficulties of balancing work and motherhood. Or I could write about family finances, contrasting my mother’s penciled monthly budgets with my own more “amorphous” accounting methods, or how the allowance question was handled when I was a child vs. now that I’m a parent. Or, as a third alternative, I could write about myself as a shopper; since books are my most important purchase, I could explore how my book-buying experience has changed through the decades.

In addition to opening up students’ access to parts of their own experience they might not have considered to be fodder for writing, I also hope this scaffolding through the use of a common (though individualized) theme will help students connect the personal to the public as the course takes them from memoir to ethnography to more conventional, research-based assignments.

So, as always, I’d welcome any feedback. Is the personal essay a frothy confection to be cut out of the diet, or is it sound nutrition?

It’s that time of the semester, with my grades not yet in but the end in sight, when as always I’m buzzing with ideas about what I’m going to do differently next term.  I’m thinking in particular about what I ask my students to read and how that fits or doesn’t fit with what I ask them to write.

There are several things I’d like class readings to accomplish:

• With the end-of-semester “Research Paper” on my mind, I’d like the reading students do over the course of the semester help them to find topics to research and write about (beyond the staple of school uniforms, cell phones, teen pregnancy, and the others I don’t need to mention), to arouse their curiosity, to broaden and deepen their knowledge about something that’s going on in the world. (I agree with Nancy Sommers’s suggestion in a recent blog post that theme-based courses are a good strategy to help here.)
• I’d like to talk more explicitly about Reading as a Writer, modeling for students an attentiveness to the choices other writers make and how they can adapt some of these tactics for their own purposes in their own writing.
• Having decided next semester to again teach without a text, I’d like this to be not only a cost-savings move but also a way to increase flexibility and student choice in readings.

While considering how to do all of this, I remembered the site Byliner, which I discovered and wrote about earlier this year. A curated collection of nonfiction essays and articles available online, the site is organized by the broad themes of  arts, science, politics, business, technology, travel, sports, and crime. It contains as well some 160 or so (at present) Byliner Spotlights, collections of about half a dozen articles apiece on more narrowly defined sub-themes, such as Nature’s Inferno, Artificial Intelligensia, and Is College Worth It?

What I’m considering, then, is using this site to let students design their own set of readings. I’d like the readings to have some sense of unity (within one of those broad themes), but students may choose how narrowly to focus their attention. In preparation for their reading, I’d ask them all to read Mike Bunn’s article “How to Read Like a Writer” from the wonderful Writing Spaces, which describes itself as a “peer-reviewed collections of essays about writing—all composed by teachers for students—with each book available for download for free under a Creative Commons license.”

I’m still working out the logistics of all of this. After a semester’s experience with a publisher-provided space for uploading and reviewing student writing (a topic for another post!), I’m back to blogs for next semester, so students will be recording notes on their reading via blog posts tagged as “reading journal.” In each journal entry, they will provide a hyperlink to the article they read, a short summary, and at least a couple of bullet-points of “what they got from the article” (either in terms of questions provoked or writing strategies noticed or particular sentences admired). I’m debating how many of these posts to require; maybe a contract with a certain number of posts earning a certain grade is the best approach.

Does my proposal sound workable? I’d love to hear feedback from anyone who’ has tried an individualized reading approach: how you guided students’ selections, how you assessed their reading, how well the whole thing worked.

And I hope you all have a lovely, restful, rejuvenating semester break and, oh yes, Happy Holidays!

As the daughter of a professor, I learned from my father about not only department politics and student complaints, but about the ritual of the faculty coffee hour, when colleagues left the isolation of their offices to gather in a room to drink a cup of coffee and chat. As a graduate student, I loved the conversations with fellow teaching assistants, encouraged by our shared office space, about the students we were teaching, the classes we were taking, or why fiction is to poetry as walking to the grocery store is to dancing. When I started teaching at a community college, I was dismayed by how infrequently those sorts of conversations take place.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the conversations I’ve had this semester with colleagues—how they best happen and how to make them happen more often. My concern is largely selfish: I deeply value how much the conversations energize my teaching. It’s a lot trickier, though, to think about how this sort of communication fits into the interplay between the intellectual freedom properly (in my view) granted to individual instructors and the desirability (maybe) of some level of consistency and standards department-wide. This is an especially crucial question in a department like mine, where about 80 percent of my colleagues are disenfranchised and largely invisible adjuncts. As someone who has recently jumped the fence from long-term adjunct to full-time faculty member, I understand how delicately one must approach the issue, but it does need to be approached.

In trying to figure out how, I’ve listed here the occasions I’ve had this semester to chat with colleagues:

Last month I attended my first national conference, the NCTE annual meeting in Chicago. I had been expecting, actually, to get a blog post out of the experience, but found it less inspiring than I had hoped: one wonderful session out of the eight I attended; a huge marketplace aimed mostly at the pre-college crowd (which soon overwhelmed me); and (though this reflects more on my own lack of social skills) little opportunity to talk with others.

On a local level, English Department meetings give faculty a time to talk to each other; at my college this is one hour per month, often taken up with administrative issues. Over the past few semesters, we have (at great length) tweaked course descriptions, given department feedback about proposed new courses, and brainstormed ways to increase student enrollment in upper-level English courses: all worthy goals but not directly applicable to my work in the classroom.

In terms of the sort of conversation I’m looking for, a more useful local group is our department’s Portfolio Assessment Committee, which I have written about previously. Though our three monthly policy meetings also deal with administrative issues, our norming session and the portfolio reading have been a rich source of information about how we all design assignments and assess student writing.

The Reflective Practice workshop is another department-wide group I’ve found very useful. We’ve discussed issues such as methods of stimulating discussion in literature courses, ways to handle the paper load, strategies to convince students that spark Notes is not an acceptable substitute for reading the literature assigned. This is a voluntary group, which has been meeting late in the afternoon, with at best only five or six participants; there’s a stipend associated with attending, but most of us who attend would do so without compensation, and it does not seem to effectively encourage wider participation. (This pay-them-and-they-will-come assumption seems problematic at best.)

In addition, I’ve had several individual meetings this semester with an adjunct who is using the same text that I am. These conversations have given both of us ideas about using the text (which is new to both of us) and its assignments, and is helping both of us feel more connected. Perhaps this sort of individually arranged conversation happens more often than I realize. I do think that my department could do more to encourage it, though.

I’ve had other informal chances to talk with colleagues because of two additional responsibilities I have: as a tutor in the Writing Center and as a scorer of placement tests. In the Writing Center there are often opportunities to chat with fellow instructors about teaching-related or writing-related issues, and in the Testing Center we work in pairs to score essays, which gives a chance to calibrate expectations about developmental vs. college-level writing.

For years now, I have hoped that technology could come to the rescue, with some sort of electronic forum for discussion and the sharing of ideas that will be flexible enough to enable active adjunct participation. Some of us tried an English department Blackboard space years ago, but few participated and that dwindled away. That’s one of the reasons I started blogging but I quickly realized that few of my colleagues had the time or inclination to read what I wrote. Some colleagues use blogs in their class, but none that I’m aware of write a blog to reflect on teaching issues. Five or six of us this semester did set up a group blog to about our experiences teaching in a computer lab, but with everyone’s busy schedules participation has been slight.

My question is obvious: what can and should be done to provide time and space for colleagues to chat? What has your college done? Does money matter? What structures can be put into place to encourage a collegial interchange of ideas? I’d love to hear any solutions your college has implemented—or any dreams about what’s possible.

After nearly ten years of teaching composition, it’s depressing to find myself struggling with the many of the same issues semester after semester. Right now the issue is how best to handle argument. I’m not sure whether it’s my temperamental aversion to conflict or my creative writing background, but I chafe against the contention that all academic writing is (or should be) argumentative; at the same time, I do feel an obligation to “teach argument,” whatever I mean by that. I (sort of) know what I want out of student arguments, but there seems to be a yawning gap between what I’d like to see and what students are able to produce.

Here’s what I’d like students to do:

• Engage with a topic about which they do not already hold a committed position.
• Take on a fresh topic or offer a fresh perspective on a familiar topic.
• Consider (in an open-minded, believing-and-doubting way) opposing viewpoints.
• Recognize the limits of their own authority and the necessity for various sorts of evidence.
• Understand something of the context and implications of their chosen issue.

As I pause to look over these goals, I notice that they involve not the actual drafting process and structure of the argument, but rather the thinking processes that occur before and during research. I remind myself that students’ development as writers and thinkers (if one can separate the two roles) is ongoing. I fully recognize the limitations my students face (as do we all) in terms of time and curiosity and investment in a course that for many is merely a requirement they must reluctantly hurdle. So are my goals foolishly ambitious? Should I settle for introducing students “merely” to the form that academic argument takes, with its thesis statement neatly shoe-horned into the end of the first paragraph, the skeleton of its reasoning laid out in clear topic sentences, its in-text citations conforming to some officially sanctioned format?

I suppose I’m trying to figure out what I want my students to gain from the arguments I ask them to write, what my purpose is in making such assignments at all. It’s a question that involves negotiation and setting priorities.  I guess this is where I’m stuck now, the same place I get stuck every semester, trying to figure out which of those bullet points above are most important, most possible, most teachable—and realizing yet again, with a start, that these are three different questions. That’s where my thoughts stagnate. But what and how I chose to teach argument depends on both those questions and their answers.

Still, come August and January there are syllabi to write, and even if the Big Questions remain unanswered, I still need something to try, some combination of reading and thinking and writing activities to keep my students productively engaged. So I’ve been thinking over the options:

• A theme-based class that will help provide the context students need (but that runs the risk of being a theme they don’t care about)
• A nonfiction book to serve as the centerpiece, which will provide context as well as practice in reading and responding, and, maybe, stimulate some curiosity
• A case-study approach (groups of three or four related articles), which would allow more flexibility and variety
• An emphasis on brainstorming activities
• A bombardment of what I call arguments against convention to try to inspire a fresh approach

Care to weigh in on questions large or small? What do you see as the role of argument in first year composition? Is summary-response-synthesis of secondary sources the key sequence, or is there some other skill sequence you hope to teach? Does it matter that I teach at a community college? How do you balance the teaching of form with my more amorphous goals of habit of mind?