Author: Dr. Lauren Salisbury

Teaching Artifact Letter

In my teaching artifact, I chose to revise my participatory writing activity: the Writer’s Journal. This semester, students wrote one post per week based on a prompt I shared. Typically these prompts asked students to share a piece of their writing process or reflect on that process. At the end of the semester students use these posts as data to write their Autoethnography, a reflective project where they research their own writing process and growth during the semester. These posts receive “Complete” grades, meaning they are not graded for content, style, or against any rubric.

Though I enjoy the way students writing in this format is reflective and semi-private. Though I have access to these journals and other students can also peruse them, students don’t currently have to engage with one another’s’ posts. I do notice however that my current students seem unsure what to do with these posts and they aren’t quite as engaged in doing the activity consistently as I would like.

In my revised version then, I have created multiple points of engagement throughout the week for students to participate in. Having students return to these posts and engage with them multiple ways—including emphasizing them during our synchronous sessions—will raise student buy-in and reinforce their function in the larger course content.

Right now, I’m not sure how these prompts will look or where they will live in my Blogs@Baruch site. I have a pretty clear site structure already for my asynchronous course, but I think this needs to change to accommodate the unique needs of the synchronous sessions and move students through the content in a different way. I’ve seen a few good examples of module format in this workshop as well as elsewhere, but I’m not sure what it looks like for my course just yet. I’d love feedback on the format or what this might look like.

Writer’s Journal

WRITING TASK

Throughout the semester you will record and reflect on your writing process and experiences in this course. You will respond to prompts on our Blogs@Baruch site before, during, and after our weekly class sessions. You will use this text as primary source material later in the course when you write the Autoethnography. In that project, you will have the opportunity to summarize, quote, code, and otherwise analyze your posts to reflect and demonstrate how you achieved the course learning goals.

APPROACH

The Writer’s Journal will take the form of a series of posts on Blogs@Baruch throughout the semester. Though the posts will be saved in our Blogs@Baruch site, I always recommend drafting in a Word/Google doc first and saving it to your files in case you lose Wi-Fi or the post doesn’t save.

To fully complete the weekly posts, you will need to develop and maintain a system for recording notes on your writing. This could be a Google doc, a Word doc, a notebook, or notepad entry on your phone. Any time you sit down to write or conduct primary/secondary research for projects in this course, you should take a few moments to record some brief notes you can review at the start of your next writing or research session. You’ll have a lot of notes—and a lot of data—by the end of the semester.

LEARNING GOALS

Course Learning Goals

This writing task reflects the following course learning goals:

• Write your own texts critically
• Compose as a process

Through recording, analyzing, and reflecting on writing, you will better understand not only your process but the components that comprise strong academic writing.

Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing

This writing task asks you to engage with and apply the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” habits of mind essential for success in college writing:

• Curiosity – the desire to know more about the world.
• Openness – the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world.
• Engagement – a sense of investment and involvement in learning.
• Creativity – the ability to use novel approaches for generating, investigating, and representing ideas.
• Persistence – the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects.
• Responsibility – the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others.
• Flexibility – the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands.
• Metacognition – the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge.

REQUIREMENTS

Each week, you will complete three posts:

Invention (before class)

This response is due before our first class session for the week. These prompts will be brief and do not require you to have read or completed all the work for the week. Often they will ask you to give your initial thoughts on a subject, reflect on past writing experiences, or develop questions you have for the class session.

Discussion (during class)

This response is due during our first class session for the week. This prompt will be shared during our class session and you will add your response to the Blogs@Baruch site at that time. Often, these prompts will ask you to reflect on something we discussed in class or otherwise contribute to our shared knowledge as a class.

Writing Log (after class)

This response is due after class by Sunday at 11:59PM. This response should include the following details every week.

1. Describe the writing you did this week(your first entry won’t include this)
   Examples:
   1. Wrote the introduction for the Incident Analysis
   1. Read two sources for the Researched Project
   1. Conducted an interview with a research subject
2. What worked or went well this week
3. What was hard or didn’t work this week
4. To-Do list for next week
5. Where you left off/the last thing you did
6. How you feel or felt about the week, your project, and/or your writing

To complete this post, you will likely need to maintain a separate system for recording notes on your writing. As mentioned in the Approach, any time you sit down to write or conduct primary/secondary research for projects in this course, you should take a few moments to record some brief notes you can review at the start of your next writing or research session. At the beginning of your next work session, I recommend you open your journal and review the last entry. Doing so will help you know what tasks you have to complete and remind you of what you accomplished the last time you wrote. You can also make a quick note about what plans you have for the current session, even if it’s just to copy your To-Do list. You could also make a comment or note in your document.

This writing log might feel tedious at first or like busy work. As you do these log posts, please make them work for you. Find a system that allows you to keep track of your writing and reflect on it quickly and effectively. Remember, I won’t see your notes but your notes and these logs will become the data you use to write your Autoethnography project at the end of the semester. You’re creating the source material for that project every time you write.

EXAMPLE

Writing Log

This is a sample writing log I completed for a project I was working on in fall 2020. I don’t always use this exact format for my individual writing, but I do frequently take notes like the ones I recommend you do for this writing task. Creating notes and comments in my project documents has helped me remain consistent while I write and dive back into my writing quicker. I can often get started writing much faster when I have these kinds of notes than when I have left a project for days or weeks with no idea where to start when I return to it. Notice that your writing log doesn’t need to be lengthy. Feel free to use bullet points, fragments, or any other method that makes sense to you.

Saturday September 19, 2020

Peer Observation (PO) Project

1. What I did:
   1. Read through three examples of peer observation documents
   1. Added multiple sources to Zotero
   1. Downloaded additional PO docs to review
2. What went well:
   1. Zotero organization feels good. I have a separate folder for the project now.
   1. There’s multiple examples available for me to review.
3. What was hard:
   1. Having a hard time concentrating on the project/early stages of getting interested and invested in the work.
   1. Reading these on the screen without ability to annotate is frustrating.
4. To-Do list:
   1. Read additional PO documents I’ve downloaded
   1. Begin source organization chart to look for themes amongst the documents
5. Where I left off:
   1. Added notes on NYU PO document in Zotero
6. Ultimately a bit frustrated by my slow progress. I’d love to have one afternoon or day where I could sit down for two or more hours without distractions (ha!) to work on reading and organization. Maybe, I should set a goal of reading one PO doc per day?

Description

Currently, in my writing courses I have an assignment called the Writer’s Journal. Students maintain a blog where they record their experiences and writing process throughout the semester. They then use that journal as primary source material for their end-of-semester reflective Autoethnography project.

In its current format, students create a Blogs@Baruch site that they host and then share as a link in a Blackboard assignment. Each week, students get a prompt that they respond to. In addition to their response, they compose a Writing Log where they describe the writing they did that week, what worked or what went well, what was hard and didn’t go well, their to-do list for the next week, where they left off/the last thing they did, and how they felt about the week, their project, or writing in general.

Currently the project is low-bandwidth and low-immediacy.

I’ve also attached the current assignment sheet for this project to this post.

Learning Goals

This writing task reflects the following course learning goals:

• Write your own texts critically
• Compose as a process

“Through recording, analyzing, and reflecting on writing, you will better understand not only your process but the components that comprise strong academic writing.”

More informally, I want students to see writing as a social process wherein they pull from multiple places and perspectives, even if that social nature doesn’t happen in real time.

Rationale

I think I do a good job of humanizing my course generally, but this aspect of the course could be stronger. This semester, I noticed that using the blog format did not foster as much engagement as I thought it would. I anticipated students being able to view each other’s blogs and give each other feedback but that didn’t happen to the degree I wanted it to. Instead, the student blogs felt and feel more like individual silos that give students space to write about their writing but not effectively communicate with each other or with me.

To change this ongoing project, I want to keep the prompts in Blogs@Baruch, but instead of asking students to create their own blogs, have them reply to a post/page on our main course blog. I’d create the prompt there and then students can reply via the comment feature.

To also encourage more interactivity, I want to create multiple avenues of participating and interacting with the prompts. Since I’ll have a synchronous session this semester, I want to create three methods for interacting with these posts:

1. Before our synchronous session, students post their initial thoughts. A specific question or piece of the prompt will engage students in this activity. It will be clearly labeled “Before Synchronous Session” or “Initial Thoughts.”
2. During the synchronous session students will read through their colleagues’ posts and we’ll either summarize them as a group or discuss particularly compelling posts and responses.
3. After the synchronous session students will follow up by engaging with a piece of the prompt labeled “After Synchronous Session” or “Dig Deeper.” This will include the prompt for their Writing Log, but also a secondary prompt that asks them to reflect on the session or take their response one step further.

In this way students aren’t forced to “respond to two of your peers” or “comment on each other’s posts!” but instead meaningfully engage in real time and then return to their own writing. This reinforces the idea that writing is social but that the social nature of that work can be created in many ways. Likewise, it encourages students to “write their texts critically” and engage with other texts critically. They can see their colleagues’ writing develop from initial ideas to further developed drafts and note “compose as a process.”

This revision shifts the workload from pre-semester/Week 1 and individual student labor to a more equally spaced out workload that is dependent on instructor labor. Though the activity is still low-bandwidth, it does add some higher immediacy to the activity by giving us a way to engage with the Writer’s Journal in real time. I think this shift will cut down on some of what was frustrating for students (and me) at the beginning of the semester: trying determine which Baruch/CUNY accounts allow access to which tools; how to create a Blogs@Baruch site; and how to submit their links for their blog. It also reinforces the learning goals more clearly.

The current assignment sheet for the Writer’s Journal can be found here.

1. Hi! Nice meeting you! Could you introduce yourself? What department are you from? What courses are you teaching or have been teaching? What are the classes you teach like, such as format or class size? Is there anything you want to tell us about your teaching, research, or other projects? 
   • Hello everyone! I’m Lauren Salisbury and I’m an adjunct in the English Department at Baruch. I’m currently teaching ENG 2100 and am going to teach ENG 2150 in Spring 2022.
   • I currently teach online asynchronously and have taught in that format most frequently at institutions in the past. In Spring I’ll be teaching online synchronously which is a format I’ve only taught in one other time. I’ve taken many classes that way as a student, but have less experience–and certainly less recent experience–as a teacher.
   • My classes are typically small. Currently I have 15 students per section in my ENG 2100 courses.
   • I love teaching online and am invested in doing it well. I feel comfortable in the asynchronous format but less so in the synchronous format. Though I have taught face-to-face many times it’s been a while so as odd as it is, teaching synchronously feels out of the ordinary to me.
2. Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar? 
   • I’ll be teaching ENG 2150 in the Spring which is a new prep for me. It’s the second first-year writing course at Baruch. Students will work primarily with incorporating source material into their writing and conducting academic research.
3. What are the listed learning goals of your course? They could be ones provided by the department, or ones that you have written for your syllabus? Please list them (pasting is fine!).
   • Critically analyze texts in a variety of genres: Analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres (e.g. essays, news articles, speeches, documentaries, plays, poems, short stories), with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, tropes, genre, audience and purpose.
   • Use a variety of media to compose in multiple rhetorical situations: Apply rhetorical knowledge in your own composing using the means of persuasion appropriate for each rhetorical context (alphabetic text, still and moving images, and sound), including academic writing and composing for a broader, public audience using digital platforms.
   • Identify and engage with credible sources and multiple perspectives in your writing: Identify sources of information and evidence credible to your audience; incorporate multiple perspectives in your writing by summarizing, interpreting, critiquing, and synthesizing the arguments of others; and avoid plagiarism by ethically acknowledging the work of others when used in your own writing, using a citation style appropriate to your audience and purpose.
   • Compose as a process: Experience writing as a creative way of thinking and generating knowledge and as a process involving multiple drafts, review of your work by members of your discourse community (e.g. instructor and peers), revision, and editing, reinforced by reflecting on your writing process in metacognitive ways.
   • 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.
4. What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them?
   • Since this is a new prep, I have many materials to develop. Primarily I want to create some activities for our synchronous class discussions since that will be a big shift away from the asynchronous work I currently do. Ideally, I’d like to create some version of a model I used when I last taught face-to-face. In that course–an Intermediate Writing course–I conducting f2f discussions in class and then created discussion spaces that students could return to asynchronously. Students all had to post at least a summary/review (an exit ticket) of the discussion and what they took away from it. They could also ask questions and add to each others ideas while also retaining the ability to return to those spaces if they wanted to review what we did or to get ideas for writing projects.