Teaching Journal #1

For the first week of class, I wanted my students to grasp the overall objectives of the course, along with my expectations for them and the work they will be expected to do. Furthermore, I wanted them to understand the Greene and Kleine readings, and how to undertake going about their first project.

On the first day I covered the syllabus, the grading contract, and the informal writing assignment expectations. To engage the students initially, I had them individually answer questions about their relationship with writing. I then had them take turns sharing something about what they wrote. Their answers were typical; some just defined what they thought writing was, others acknowledged that they had a strained relationship with writing. I wanted them to share their answers aloud so that I could then transition into the goals of this course. I think this individual writing exercise worked fairly well as a way to get students to think about writing initially.

I talked a lot on the first day. Other than the individual writing exercise mentioned above, I didn’t do a lot of class discussion. I had a good deal of information to get through, so the first day ended up being more of a lecture than a discussion. For the most part I kept them engaged with a few jokes and an animated delivery of necessary information. I lost them a little near the end, but the number of dead stares in the audience was significantly less than I was expecting. I answered their questions about the course expectations and urged them to read the syllabus and grading contract carefully before signing and returning the grading contract.

I think day two was when the real teaching began. We were covering the Greene reading and it was clear from their reading responses that not everyone understood the reading. To combat this, I decided to start out with a whole class discussion on the Burke quote that uses a parlor argument as an extended metaphor for academic conversation. I started out by asking them about the pre-reading assignment that asked them to define an argument. This helped draw the connection between arguments and conversations, which in turn let us dissect the Burke quote. I had some participants in our discussion, but found myself having to play the “silence” game with them once or twice. This culminated in an uncomfortable stand off where no one talked for two or three minutes. It was at this point that I determined that they remained silent not because they were gathering their thoughts, but because they did not want to say something silly in front of their new classmates. I asked them if the silence made them uncomfortable. When one of them confirmed that it did, I told them that an easy was to remedy the situation would be to participate in discussion. I then reaffirmed that no one was there to judge (myself included) and that I would value any contribution anyone had to give. After that I saw a pick up in class participation, and the quality of their answers confirmed my belief that a good deal of them knew more about the reading than they were letting on.

On day three I did a reading response workshop with them over the Kleine reading. I split them into groups and had some groups go over their summaries, while others went over their synthesis. After some discussion within their groups, I had each group share what they thought was the “best” representative summary or synthesis. This exercise ended up working really well, both as a workshop of necessary writing skills as well as a springboard into discussion about the actual text. I was able to get a lot more discussion out of the students, though sometimes it was more directive on my part than I would have liked it to be. I would do this exercise again, especially if the quality of their responses improves as a result.

For my upcoming sessions, I am going to try to utilize what did work during this weak and tweak what didn’t work. I definitely want to use more group work as a tool for encouraging discussion, but I have to work on opening up the discussion to the whole class. What I did on Friday of this week I think really helped some of the students understand both the reading responses as well as the text, but the conversation was very much between a single student and me. I want group work to act as a springboard into whole class discussion, so I will try to engage the rest of the class by asking them questions about what a certain student just said (if they agree or disagree, for a simple example).