Teaching Journal #5

This was a week full of grammar, punctuation, peer reviews, and workshopping. I think I’ve gotten the hang of managing class discussion time when it comes to going over the readings, but, as I will illustrate, I could use some polishing of my workshopping skills.

 

Monday we covered Dawkins and Bernhardt. We went over Dawkins’s hierarchy of punctuation as well as his system of raising and lowering. I then adapted the group activity Javen showed us in ENG 5890. Basically I wrote my own paragraph with no punctuation in it, and had the class (split in to four groups) punctuate it and explain their choices according to the raising/lowering system. I think this helped them understand Dawkins’s method of punctuation more than if I had just lectured on the subject. However, the activity took more class time than I would have liked. In the future, I think I will split the paragraph into smaller chunks and have each group punctuate a different section. We talked about Bryson as a class. I passed out the “Responding to Peer Writing” handout and we talked about how to do a peer review.

 

Wednesday we went over questions about the impending draft of project 1, basic MLA format, how to upload their assignments to SafeAssign, and finally spent time workshopping the sample peer review. Answering questions and showing them how to do things they know they will need to do went smoothly, and they were very interested and vocal in that part of the lesson. However, when I switched to the lion’s share of that day’s lesson, the worskshop of the sample peer review, I quickly lost them. It was so hard to get them to participate that unfortunately I spent most of my time trying to wheedle out some conversation rather than showing them my comments and the overall elements of a peer review.

 

Friday we workshopped a student paper. I tried to force them to pay attention by randomly calling on students to read the paper aloud, as John suggested, but I ended up just getting a lot of confused looks as I jarred them out of their daydreaming to read a paragraph on the overhead projector. I think next time I will have them read a paper ahead of class time so we can spend more time in discussion and less time with them dozing off. Maybe I could also try incorporating group work in the future, with each group being responsible to comment on one section of the paper, and then come together as a class to discuss the paper’s effectiveness as a whole. I think this would work especially well in conjunction with having them read the paper the night before. Alternatively, I could schedule my workshop days in a computer classroom and have them each read the paper to themselves on their individual computer screens. This would save them from the boredom of having the paper read aloud to them; it would force them to pay more attention to the paper.

 

Overall I think I most need to work on running an efficient workshop, because I know this is a problem that is not going to just go away. Luckily I will have more time this semester to hone my skills in that department. I feel like a big part of learning how to teach is trial and error. I wonder if my students know they are my guinea pigs? Overall they are pretty good sports about the workload, so if I can just foster more participation in discussion things would be delightful. I use group work often as a springboard in to whole class discussion, and I think my lack of group work as a “warm-up” is part of the reason my workshops are not the most successful class periods. I am trying to get them to participate as a class without the group work as a bridge, but so far I have been unsuccessful. Maybe I should just stick with the group work if it leads to decent whole class discussion, but I feel like we could delve deeper into the text if we didn’t spend as much time doing group work.