Survived (and thrived)

It has been a busy week for me with my regular courses and the impromptu attendance at the Writing Matters seminar. When I first got the call Monday morning, I was sure that I was going to have to skip out on a lot of the seminar in order to attend classes, but it worked out: most of my classes are evening courses, and the other two professors excused my limited attendance. As it was, I would break away from the seminar at lunch (taking my catered meal with me) and attend class for a hour before heading back to the seminar. Despite the hectic nature of it, and the fact that Kimberly rarely saw me this week, it was worth it.

I really enjoyed meeting with faculty from across the university: nursing, human performance, education, psychology, biology, chemistry, physics, law, languages, and more. They were enthusiastic, humble, and wanted to learn how to make writing an effective part of their students' university experiences.

I will leave in about half an hour to give my ten minutes presentation - as all seminar participants are required. The presentation is an opportunity to share one way that we will integrate writing into our courses this fall. Although writing is already the central topic of the courses I teach (since I teach writing composition), I learned some important principles to make my current writing assignments more successful.

My presentation will discuss the use of journals as a writing-to-learn tool. I have used writing journals in my classes since I first began teaching here more than two years ago, and I have had varying levels of success with them. While attending the seminar this week, I became aware of the underlying practices that influenced the success of journals: direction, accountability, and cumulative worth.

Direction: sometimes I get lazy or just think "students will know what to write" and I fail to give specific writing prompts for their journals. This inevitably leads to worthless or non-existent journal entries. When I give students a specific prompt, they are excited to write and then enjoy reading and sharing with their classmates.

Accountability: I have this misguided expectation that students will write simply because it's good for them. Oh how naive! We all need motivation, and for students that often means grades and reminders. When I assign journal writing as something to do out of class time and I never check it, students don't do it. But when I provide class time for writing and sharing journal entries, it always results in thoughtful and useful entries.

Cumulative worth: I have always viewed journals as being purposeful in the act, not the result. I feel that journal writing builds confidence and helps students to regularly practice writing on a variety of topics. However, I have never considered using the journal as a resource for a more encapsulating project, such as exam notes. Because I don't offer a content exam in my courses, this would not be an applicable option; however, I do find that when I end a course with a metacognitive activity, students better recognize the worth of the writing course they just took. Therefore, I plan to use writing journals as a resource for students when they write a metacognitive essay at the end of the semester: they keep entries all semester long about their writing process, resources, challenges, and successes. Then, at the end of the semester, they write a short paper that gives advice to a future student who plans to write a research paper in their field. They describes what they feel is the best way to begin research, the evaluate sources, to organize their paper, to improve their English, to revise their work, and to do anything else that is relevant to the task. Not only will this make journal writing more motivating (since keeping details and organized entries will be helpful), but it will also ensure that the self-reflective essay is also more thoughtful.

Here's hoping it works out. And here's hoping that I get better at my own writing journal (aka robblog) so that I can personally testify to its worth.