Blog 3: Core Seminar 3 Prep – Page 3 – Fostering Student Engagement

To my fellow group members & colleagues,

The teaching artifact I am revising is quite an extensive overhaul of my digital portfolio prompt. What I have decided to focus on, however, is adding a journal component. This will be a reflective assignment in which they respond to a current world issue and share their thoughts on Blogs@Baruch, then share the reflection and some discussion questions with their class colleagues. This will offer an opportunity for the students to engage in low-stakes writing, communicate with their colleagues, and engage with/follow current events.

This will facilitate student engagement by encouraging the students to communicate with one another around current events. Each student will not only write a journal, responding with their own thoughts and reflections about a piece of current news, but they will also be tasked with creating open-ended questions to facilitate discussion among their writing group peers.

The seminar has expanded the scope of my project, and I am continuing to develop this semester-long project to draw in Vocat and to consider how the students can engage with their colleagues during discussions in class and outside of class using technology (Slack, Google Forms, etc.).

One specific aspect I would love feedback on: Is it better for the students to post this in a journal post on their own blog, then share a link within their writers’ group on Slack? Or, is it better for the students to simply share the whole thing in a Slack group and guide discussion within Slack?

Without further ado, my artifact:

Journal Entry Prompt and Guidelines

Throughout the semester, you will be expected to update your personal Blogs@Baruch portfolio site with readings on current events related to the topic you’ve chosen to explore. You’ll keep track of these readings in a blog or journal that will be housed on your site. It’s here that you will share five annotated articles of interest, which will be posted at regular intervals throughout the semester, your own reflection on these current articles, and questions that might guide a constructive discussion on this topic.

Step 1. Read, annotate, and post a PDF of the article, linking to the original. Annotations are, by nature, free-form, but your marks should display your engagement with the text as well as highlight key passages for future readers (specifically your class colleagues who will read your journal posts).

Step 2. Write an original 350-word reflection on the text. The brief is open-ended, so this post can be about whatever interests or shocks or awes or angers you most about this current news. Keep in mind that this assignment encourages conversational language, so spend your time developing your original response to the news article you’re sharing, not formatting the text perfectly.

As mentioned, your response might be a casual reflection of your initial reactions. But, you might consider:

—analyzing the author’s rhetorical situation or the site of publication and the impact that these have on the tone of the piece

—writing a letter to the editor responding to the article

—identifying any “holes” in the piece — e.g. is there anything this article missed or (gasp!) got factually wrong?

—comparing the article you chose with a topically similar piece posted on a different site and for a different audience

Step 3. Once you have written your own response to the article, you will create three questions for your group members to respond to. These questions will follow your own reflection and will, hopefully, open up a conversation about this topic (so, steer clear of language that shuts down any constructive conversations).

Step 4. When you’ve completed Steps 1-3, you’ll post a link to your group (either by email or Slack — however you’ve decided it’s best to communicate). The group members will have 48 hours to read and respond to your post in 100-word (minimum) comments on your site. You will be expected to engage with 5 of your colleagues’ posts throughout the semester.

The journal posts on your site, and your responses to your group members’ posts, are worth 15 points.

5 journal entries worth 2 points each.

5 journal responses worth 1 point each.

In order to earn the full 2 points for each journal, your entry must include:

A scan or PDF of the annotated article you’re responding to along with a link to the original article.
Your 350-word reflection on this article.
Discussion questions for your group members to respond to.

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.

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
What worked or went well this week
What was hard or didn’t work this week
To-Do list for next week
Where you left off/the last thing you did
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

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
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.
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.
To-Do list:
1. Read additional PO documents I’ve downloaded
1. Begin source organization chart to look for themes amongst the documents
Where I left off:
1. Added notes on NYU PO document in Zotero
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?