An Activity for a More Student-Centered Classroom and a Story of Constant Revision
by Constantin Schreiber
Before telling the genesis story of this assignment, I want to provide a quick overview (read the full prompt here). The assignment asks students to read up on specific conventions of written English and then, in class, present on these conventions and engage their classmates with an activity about these conventions. It is designed to give students agency in exploring common writing conventions that are part of the learning outcomes of ENG 2100(T) and ENG 2150(T). The process allows students to draw on knowledge they might already have as they enter these classes, but that they should continue to develop throughout (and beyond) them.
In the Fall 2024 iteration, the assignment takes 20-25 minutes of class time and is highly student-centered—usually led by two students, depending on the size of the class and the number of conventions selected for this assignment. This allows the instructor to blend in with the students for that time, allowing students to take more ownership of the classroom. For students, it is an opportunity to enhance their understanding of these conventions and to practice their rhetorical skills using written, spoken, and visual composition. For the instructor, it is also an opportunity to gain a better understanding of what students (don’t) know about the writing conventions in focus, and to fill in gaps in their understanding of them, though this filling in should also rely on students to the extent possible.
Taking a step back: As the son of an English teacher, as someone who learned English as a second language and who learned how to teach ESL in Germany, the United Kingdom, and here in the United States, as someone who studied linguistics, I generally find teaching and learning about grammar “fun.” However, I know that many students don’t, at least not always, share this perspective. As I always discuss with them at the beginning of the semester, I understand that the majority of them mostly want to pass this class and start taking classes in their majors (understandably so). Ideally, in their eyes, they learn a few useful writing skills and gain a bit of knowledge along the way.
So, when I started teaching first-year writing classes at Baruch and looked at the fifth of five learning outcomes for ENG 2100(T)/2150(T), I struggled with how to approach it:
“Use conventions appropriate to audience, genre, and purpose: Adapt writing and composing conventions (including your style, content, organization, document design, word choice, syntax, citation style, sentence structure, and grammar) to your rhetorical context.”
That’s a lot to cover, frankly. Enough to fill a whole semester. There are classes solely devoted to syntax or aspects of the giant umbrella term “grammar” in any linguistics program, and even in our undergraduate English course catalog at Baruch we offer ENG3001: “Crafting Stronger Sentences: Conventions of English Grammar.”
Should I then address grammatical issues as they “popped up,” like how starting a sentence with “Although” didn’t seem to require a second independent clause for many of my students, or should I proactively teach about English syntax, about dependent and independent clauses? I wasn’t really happy with either approach because the range of grammatical and other language/writing conventions that Baruch students face can vary so dramatically (based on languages they speak or hear around them and other demographic variables). That said, in the T sections, which are designed for English language learners, I was able to justify taking the time to focus on proactive teaching because of the longer class periods for these classes. I also talked to my colleagues, with some leaning more on one end of the spectrum, taking the time to teach some of what they saw as the most important conventions and others being on the other end of the spectrum, not teaching grammar in the classroom, all making pedagogical choices that they saw as working for them and their students.
Ultimately, I decided to craft something that, I hope, works for my students and for me, but also for other first-year writing teachers. This crafting is shaped by my linguistics and TESOL training, but also by influences from different graduate programs and teaching positions. And after four semesters of different drafts of the assignment, I have not found “the” way to do it yet. However, I am confident that my Fall 2024 iteration, shaped by my own observations and reflections as well as feedback from my students and colleagues, will be the best version yet.
I started out by giving students freedom to choose how to present on a list of “language and writing conventions” (you can choose different terminology) that I created using the fifth learning outcome as a starting point, with my Baruch teaching experiences contributing additional, more specific conventions. I try to connect the presentations to the major assignments we are working on, such as working on citation styles and intellectual copyright in preparation for an annotated bibliography assignment.
The guidelines for this assignment have been relatively loose over the last years, but there are some clear tasks: The students (usually in pairs) have to give a presentation in which they define and discuss the convention(s) they present on. After the presentation, they have to engage their peers with these conventions through some sort of activity. I usually tell them that for the 20-25 minutes they are given they should be the teachers, that they should be me. The actual prompt, of course, has always been more detailed (an early version with annotations for instructors can be found here), and my basic evaluation criteria have always asked the students:
- Did you address the convention(s) clearly?
- Did you address possible consequences of not following the convention(s)?
- Did you provide one or more activities that allowed your classmates to actively engage with the convention(s)?
- Did you stay within the time limit?
Students generally managed to meet expectations for the first goal. As can be expected, some struggled with time management. The definition of “active engagement” was purposefully vague as I wanted to allow for creativity and see what students would come up with, and that resulted in me getting to see a lot not so well-designed online quizzes on platforms like Kahoot. The design flaws often sparked fruitful discussions, but I have found these quiz platforms to be limiting in their ability to engage students with the conventions (even though engagement levels during the quizzes were usually high), and they also often seemed to make students return to online pandemic-education behaviors and attitudes. That said, the presentations and activities (there were others beyond Kahoot-style quizzes) were overall helpful, opening the students’ and my eyes to what the students knew and didn’t know, what they could and couldn’t do.
From today’s point of view, I think the assignment was designed a bit too radically in its early iterations, not sufficiently structured or scaffolded, though that was part of the original plan: I wanted to see what first-year college students could do with a lot of freedom. Overall, what they have come up with has worked toward developing the skills outlined in the fifth learning outcome. However, for Fall 2024 I want to provide them with a bit more scaffolding: With the prompt, I will share a slideshow with a basic structure for the presentation and I will also provide a bit more structure in other ways, such as by reducing the overall time allotment to 20-25 minutes and splitting the time between presentations and activity more clearly.
Will this work for you and your classroom? You may already know the answer, but I think it depends on how much you are willing to give up control of your classroom, how much you are willing to go along with the flow of where the students take you, and how much you are willing to sit through the presentations that aren’t particularly well-prepared, feature mistakes, don’t cite sources, etc. You can, of course, control the final product to a greater degree, at the cost of your time: You can scaffold the presentations or activities more, you provide more examples or resources for them, you can require a check in with you the week before they present.
For me, making the classroom more student-centered and seeing what my students can and can’t do both as presenters/facilitators and as users of these conventions is worth it. Even if I sometimes have to ask a question about or even correct what is being presented, I prefer that to spending the same 20-25 minutes lecturing about the topic – I can still do that if really needed. I am excited to listen to well-prepared presentations that show a high level of understanding of the conventions and unconventional choices, I enjoy seeing creative, thoughtful activities. However, I learn just as much from those that don’t go too well, or am reminded of what I have learned before it: For example, whether or not I still need to review citation styles more, how daunting it still is for them to present in front of a group of peers and a professor, how limited students understanding of some grammatical concepts (such as dependent or independent clauses) is, how students still put too much text and not enough visuals on their slides, how they struggle to pitch activities to their peers that challenge them enough, but not too much. Our students are still learning how to be college students, and learning and questioning conventions, giving presentations and helping others develop skills, all that is part of what it means to be a college student.