discussion Board
This week we need to discuss the following Think Piece:
Hesse_We Know What Works in Teaching Composition – The Chronicle of Higher Education
For our discussion of Hesse, please answer the following questions:
- What purpose does the personal narrative in the beginning serve?
- What is the author’s main point? What side of the conversation is he on?
- What sources does he use to support his side of the conversation? Are they reliable/ believable sources? Why?
Remember that the Think Piece is supposed to be about using sources from experts in the field.
- What do you think about the advice he offers? Is it too general, too specific, just right? Why?
W
Adam Niklewicz for The Chronicle Review
ADVICE
We Know What Works in Teaching
Composition
By Doug Hesse JANUARY 03, 2017
hen I came to the University of
Denver to start a campus writing
program in 2006, I hea
rd
many
faculty members say, “A lot of my students can’t
even write a decent sentence.” So when I read
Joseph Teller making much the same assertion
in an essay last fall, “Are We Teaching
Composition All Wrong?” I recognized
hyperbole when I saw it.
My response to that sort of exaggeration 10 years ago — joined by my 20 new colleagues
in the writing program — was to gather and analyze a corpus of 500,000 words of student
writing from classes across the campus. We found that, in fact, well over 90 percent of the
sentences coded clear and error free.
Faculty members wanted to see better student writing (and I surely acknowledged and
valued that desire), but it was clear that merely fixing sentences wasn’t going to achieve
that end. There were larger issues: Students needed help developing and deploying their
ideas and matching their writing with the expectations of various disciplines. Those
things, we could work on.
Complaints about the state of student writing have a long lineage. In 1878, Adams
Sherman Hill, a professor of rhetoric at Harvard, famously protested: “Everyone who has
had much to do with the graduating classes of our best colleges has known men who
could not write a letter describing their own commencements without making blunders
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which would disgrace a boy twelve years old.” Hill and others devised pedagogies
grounded in their own experiences and in common sense — though one man’s common
sense was another man’s folly.
Teaching grounded in actual research took a scholarly turn in 1950, marked by the
founding of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Its journal is
now the leading one in the field. By 1963, research on what worked in teaching writing —
and what didn’t — had accumulated to a point that a synthesis was published, “Research
in Written Composition.”
Roughly 25 years later, George Hillocks conducted a new analysis (Research on Written
Composition), using studies published in the intervening years. Since then, peer-
reviewed research on the best ways to teach college writing has accumulated in dozens of
books and well-established journals — including College Composition and
Communication, Written Communication, College English, the Journal of Teaching
Writing, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Composition Studies, Writing
Program Administration, and the Journal of Writing Assessment, to name but a few.
A 2005 article, “The Focus on Form vs. Content in Teaching Writing,” analyzed why
formalist approaches — like the back-to-basics kind that Professor Teller advocates —
remained so popular in teaching composition, despite overwhelming empirical evidence
that they were significantly less effective than other methods.
The teaching of writing happens — or should — within a deep field of practice, theory,
and research. It’s also an enterprise marked by a fair amount of what Steve North, in a
1987 book, The Making of Knowledge in Composition, called teaching “lore.” Lore
consists of ideas and assumptions that are grounded in local experience (“what worked
for me”) and then passed along informally, for the most part, from one faculty member to
the next. Lore is sometimes informed by research, and thus transmutable and
generalizable, but more often it is not.
Teller’s essay participates in the tradition of lore. Not having been in his classes or having
read his students’ work, I can’t judge his local experience, but I can judge how well his
approach compares with the most effective national practices.
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For example, his assertion, “Substantial revision doesn’t happen in our courses,” might
speak for his own classroom, but it surely doesn’t speak for mine or those of thousands of
other professors. Consider his claim that students “do not use the basic argumentative
structures they need.” Again, while perhaps true of students in Teller’s own classes, that
broad claim is unsubstantiated by my experience, by research on my campus, or by the
wider literature in the field.
Where Teller departs most from actual scholarship in the discipline is his claim that
“pedagogical orthodoxy” assumes that “composition courses must focus on product, not
process.” He could hardly be more wrong.
The two most dominant pedagogies today in college composition each focus on product
as well as process. Genre approaches have students learn features that readers expect in
specific kinds of writing (lab reports, op-eds, business proposals, magazine feature
articles, movie reviews, and so on). Rhetorical approaches have students analyze the
kinds of evidence, structure, and style that will be effective for particular purposes (for
example, to persuade, inform, or entertain), for particular groups of readers (experts,
novices, or people of particular viewpoints), and in particular situations. Both methods
make significant use of model readings and examples.
One key to both approaches is sustained, guided practice. On that point, Teller and I
surely agree. Students learn to write by writing, by getting advice and feedback on their
writing, and then writing some more. What can be told to college students about writing
can probably be encapsulated in a lecture of two or three hours. It parallels what
meaningfully can be told about playing piano — the music notation, the relationship
between notation and keyboard, the hand and finger placement, the posture, the pedal
functions.
But without sustained practice on systematically more complex pieces (“Chopsticks” is
not a Rachmaninoff concerto), the world’s best lectures will not — cannot — make a
pianist. So, too, with writing.
Here is what this looks like in the best writing courses, informed by decades of research:
Students have ample opportunities to write. Professors expect them to write
frequently and extensively, and we demand and reward serious effort.
Professors carefully sequence writing tasks. The idea is progressively to expand on
students’ existing abilities and experiences.
Professors coach the process. We offer strategies and advice, encouragement and
critique, formative and summative assessments.
Courses provide instruction and practice on all aspects of writing. Attend to the
form and conventions of specific genres? Yes. Talk about creativity, invention (how
to generate ideas), grammar, and style? Certainly, but also discuss things like logic
and accuracy in writing, and how to fit a piece to various audience needs and
expectations.
Courses use readings not only as context and source materials (which is vital in the
academic and civic spheres) but also as models — and not only static models of
form but also as maps to be decoded as to how their writers might have proceeded,
why, and to what effect.
Professors teach key concepts about writing in order to help students consolidate
and transfer skills from one writing occasion to the next. But we recognize that
declarative knowledge is made significant only through practice and performance
(see Bullet No. 1).
Student writing and student writers are the course’s focus. Everything else serves
those ends.
Lore is a form of knowledge in every field. In pointing to the best practices of teaching
writing — indicated by extensive research in composition studies — I don’t ignore the
experience of individual teachers like Teller.
However, I can’t let pass unchallenged general claims about the way “we” are “wrongly”
teaching composition, especially when they so dramatically misrepresent, even ignore,
the field they would aspire to correct.
Doug Hesse is president of the National Council of Teachers of English and a professor
and the executive director of writing at the University of Denver. He previously served as
president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators and chair of the Conference
9 Tools for the Accidental Writing Teacher
By Daveena Tauber
Help for faculty members who aren’t composition instructors yet are still expected to
teach writing.
on College Composition and Communication.
READ MORE
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