Accommodating Student Learning Styles

I liked this article because it emphasizes the point that students have different learning styles, and even though we cannot accommodate every single learning style, we can try to use as much as we can that is in our “bag of pedagogical tricks”. Teachers cannot simply use one teaching style all the time; for example, lecturing every class would be terrible for other students who learn best by other means like collaborative learning and experiential methods. It is important for teachers to “tailor reading and writing assignments to intelligence types”.  But I wonder if composition/English teachers have any training in such areas. To have knowledge of the different types of learning styles is invaluable to the composition teacher.

Berlin’s Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories

At first I was excited to read this article because I want to know more about composition pedagogical theory. But then I found the article difficult to understand; it is definitely writer based prose. Moreover, I think he assumes prior knowledge; it almost feels like he’s writing in the philosophical tradition.  He says that he is concerned about how these different schools perceive “writer, reality, audience, and language”.  He is also concerned about truth and how these schools define or situate truth. He seems to conclude that most of these schools adhere to the “myth of an objective reality”.  I wonder if he is talking about academic discourse and it’s “rhetoric of assertion” [Olson] since he also criticizes some of these schools for being scientifically based. Again he mentions truth, and says, “Whatever truth is arrived at, moreover, is always the product of individuals calling on the full range of their humanity, with esthetic and moral considerations given at least as much importance as any others” (777). He ends by saying that yes, everyone teaches process, but in different ways; ie, based on their school of thought and beliefs about reality, language, and truth. He believes that whatever process the teacher teaches should have “significance for the student”.

Abstract. Sequential

I took the Myers Briggs: I took it in high school as part of my sensior seminar. It was supposed to teach me about who I was, what I would become and how to select a major in college. It was really interesting. I learned about who people thought I would be in the the 1980s or whenever it was written and that personality quizzes were really obvious in how they categorize people. I also learned that magazine quizzes were just about as accurate as the MB.

Multiple intelligences, on the other hand, was revolutionary to my understanding of how people learn and use data. I am a visual special learner, but I better understand other earners simply by understanding that there are other, equally good, learning styles. Gardner gives plenty of guidancon how to use multiple intelligences in class, how to teach students to adapt to other learner sand how to grow students in the fields where thy struggle. I have a favorite teacher at my current school at uses his and she is amazing. She tests with projects, grades with finesse, and leads her students through incredibly challenging material while challenging them but also nurturing them through their struggles.

Is she alone in this? Why isn't this theory, or at least it's principals being used all over?

The Eclectic Breakdown

As I read through "Accommodating Student Learning Styles" I was struck with two things: how obvious I find the argument, and how I might never be able to figure out the perfect balance of my own teaching style.  If I'm being honest, I feel like the classes I have learned the most from have been "presentational" in essence. I listen to what an older, wiser professor has to say about a subject, digest it, then come up with my own opinion.  It's how I've always learned.  When I started graduate school, however, I noticed a change in many of my courses.  The professor no longer lectured for 40 minutes, asking for student input here and there, they listened.  They listened to me, they listened to the girl next to me.  They generally let their students draw connections and find meaning within a student-led discussion.  While I do like this in many classes, especially the Rhet/Comp classes I have taken, I find that I still crave a lecture here and there.  These people are my teachers for a reason.  They know more about the subject they teach than I potentially ever will.  So why should I spend the entire class listening to other students who know just about as much as I do?

While I do see the benefits of the "individualized" mode, I hardly think there will ever be a classroom consisting of just one student and one teacher.  Great model for tutoring though. 

The "environmental" mode, which the author argues is the most efficient, seems like it would not benefit me as a learner.  Group work has always been a struggle for me.  Not because I don;t like working with my peers, but because I don't necessarily like sharing very private aspects of myself with strangers.  Therefore, having to spend extended hours of revision and editing with others I may not be comfortable with seems extremely daunting.

I think the "natural" mode seems to be the best fit for teaching all around.  It consists of a healthy balance between student initiated thought and peer and teacher response.  However, I wonder if students look more to their peer's feedback for revision or their teachers.  For me, I would go to the teacher first.  Find out if they feel like I'm missing the mark in any way.  Maybe then I would feel more comfortable opening up my thoughts to the group.  If I was asked to show my classmates work prior to having it (even slightly) seen by the teacher, I'm sure my nerves would get the bet of me.

So I guess I'm going to try and build my teaching philosophy from both the natural and environmental mode.  Actually, a bit of all four. I think finding the breakdown is what will get to the most of us.  I realize that just because I learn a certain way doesn't mean everybody learns the same way.  But as teachers how do we decipher how many of each type of student we have in our class.  Should our philosophy change for each individual course?  Should we try to make it equal on all fronts, so as not to disclude anybody? 

Shari - Accommodating Student Learning Styles

The piece, "Accommodating Student Learning Styles," was very interesting.  It was a very honest piece.  I agree that free-writing on any topic that appeals to the student is a great way to get him/her to write and get engaged in the writing.  I also agree one-on-one meetings are great.  Like the piece says it can show the student that the teacher cares as well as being able to intervene at each stage. 

Many students don't like group work.  According to Gregorc, that is the Concrete Sequential Learner.  The Abstract Sequential Learner doesn't benefit from group work since they are supposed to be natural born writers (whatever that means).  As a teacher, how do we know what our students are in Gregorc's classification? 

Gardner and Myers-Briggs have their own classifications of people.  In the classroom, the teacher barely has the time to do what he/she wants to accomplish, let alone try to cater to each student's needs.  I'm sure teachers know the strengths and weaknesses of their students even if it doesn't fall into a specific Gregorc, Gardner or Myer-Briggs category. 

The challenge comes in teaching a heterogeneous class in a heterogeneous and homogeneous way when it is one class.  The classroom is not a place that necessarily facilitates individual instruction, nor should it.  This is why the one-on-one student/teacher meetings are so important.  However, there never seems to be enough time to spend with each student.

Teaching the Sentence and Being Up-front with Students

“And so how can we be prescriptive when we know that professional writers create paragraphs that ignore these models...We can because despite the limits of these models, they do give students a structure with which to create coherent paragraphs”(247) 

Our task is to teach mechanics who may someday be artists. Once the limiting rules are mastered, they can be transcended, but only those who know the law can afford to live without it. If you are honest with your students about the limitations of the rules you set, you need never apologize for being prescriptive”(247)

A few years ago, I was tutoring a high school senior and we were working on paragraph structure, topic sentences and supporting detail. Admittedly, I was using a “fill in the box” type hand out that was on the tutoring company’s website-I felt as if I was being condescending to her, but the company wanted to make sure we were using their selected material. I decided I would use their material, but not this specific handout.   But for the short time I was using this hand out, I wanted to be careful about what went inside the boxes; I felt that when I turned them in, they would not only prove that I was in fact using the company’s material but that I was complying to traditional ideas of composition. I wanted to be careful, so I had the student transcribe her finished paragraph on notebook paper before we filled in the boxes.

   One day, we were filling in the boxes and she asked: “Can you start a sentence with ‘but’?” I said yes, you can; but then I qualified that statement , saying that professional writers can do that because they know the rules-they know what they’re doing. It felt like such a cop out.  Even though her sentence made sense by beginning with “but,” I didn’t want that go inside the box: the administrator who checked the handouts was not likely an English professional, but beginning a sentence with a conjunction would seem like such a glaring and obvious mistake , regardless if it made sense within the paragraph. 

I don’t want to cop out or confuse students; but do they need to grasp mechanics before artistry, one before the other, or simultaneously?

Shari - Lindemann Ch. 5

Lindemann talks about the role of linguistics in teaching students.  I like how she questions what do students need to know about the English language and how it can effect their writing and a teacher's judgment of student's writing. 

She states, "By what standards should we judge student writing?  Is it an English teacher's primary responsibility to teach standard English?  What right have we to force a particular language or dialect on speakers of other languages and dialects?" 

I am a teacher of the English language, so my take on this may be skewed.  Obviously, teaching native English speakers, my responses perhaps would be different, but not necessarily. Lindemann's use of the word "force" is a bit harsh.  I can't never say that I force anything on my students.  They come to my class to learn to speak, listen to, read and write the English language, and that is what I do.  However, part of that equation includes learning the discourse of American English.  My students are not looking to be judged as if being negatively criticized.  They are looking for a teacher to help them use the language in correct way for correct situations.  If they make a mistake, which I encourage the making of mistakes as that implies the student tried to learn more than their set of phrases, I applaud the attempt and help them to discover the mistake for themselves. 

Ch 14 Responding to writing

Responding to Student writing

I feel like I’ve been teaching writing wrong all these years. My students almost always never do a first draft, and at the end I’m so pressed for time I just make them turn it in and move on because we have this pacing plan to follow. When I do give feedback, it is usually on the final draft, something they never look at because all they see is the grade. I spend all that time commenting for nothing. Over the past year, I have focused only on giving limited feedback, maybe 3 per paper. Something vague, like “deeper analysis”, “connect analysis back to topic sentence,”  or “use specific examples”. What the hell do these kids know about deeper analysis? I don’t even know how to teach “deeper analysis”! How do I get them to analyze, and how to I respond to student writing so that it’s practical and it’s something they can DO. One idea that I really like is when Lindemann talks about holistic scoring and she says that we can teach students to score one another’s work, and that the scoring is dependent upon the effectiveness of the essay as a whole, not on its different parts (245). I feel like when we grade essays, don’t we always use holistic scoring. Sure, we look at each paragraph and see if the analysis is “deep” or connects back to the topic sentence, but in the end, the overall meaning of the essay is what we grade students on. I would love to see my students grade their own and each other’s essays, and see how they would respond to each other’s writing. That would be perhaps a beneficial activity for me to see what kind and how I can give feedback. We have previously created rubrics in our class, but students have never used them to grade each other. It could be a worthwhile activity to try with out next class.

Why no speaking vs writing Wolfy?

“Written Communication” is the title of this article and it aims to take a closer look at the level of participation student’s offer in a classroom. K, cool. But what strikes me as fascinating is that Wolfe does her study by comparing face-face and Computer mediated communication, but does not call attention to the fact that one medium is purely textual and the other is a lived experience. Not really at leas Did I miss it? Some of the students mention this and she talks about them noticing this difference, but I almost feel that this difference should be researched, probably has or is researched, and that her work, without taking this into consideration or at least allowing a section to talk about it and discuss it a bit more, is … lacking? Inaccurate? IDK- those aren't the appropriate words to use to convey my meaning but I thought about them and on some level I feel they are kinda correct to what I am trying to say.  I mean, in a face to face interaction, you are speaking and interacting, not writing and interacting. This is like the biggest fucking issue ever- that speaking doesn't translate to writing and vice versa when limited to a purely academic mode of communicating.  But maybe since it is only about participation, this emphasis on standard academic English is not so strict.  But I wonder, even if this is the case, how ingrained is this need to speak and write in SAE for students that even if you don’t mention it, they are subconsciously being shaped by this feeling of having to communicate in a certain genre.  I believe this is key a difference and point of analysis that is ignored by her research and in my mind – it explains a lot of the findings and “surprises” of her research. 

While reading this I thought of how a student’s nonstandard English could not only be appropriate, but understood in a face to face interaction because of the physical gestures, hand motions, register and tone of the speaker.  The visual itself of seeing a person speak adds context literally as the words come out of their mouth.  Think of someone who is dressed in pajamas and starts to recite Aristotle.  That moment of conflicting biases? (pajama= wtf or bum, Aristotle= educated, legitimate *stereotypes, I know, that is the point) creates confusion and ultimately effects how one interprets the speaker and their interaction with the material, the class, another student, the instructor, etc.  That may have been a shitty example, but it’s all I got at the moment.

Now in the CMC interaction, although you may see a name, and possibly be able to put a face to that name, that context is gone.  The audio-visual experience that assists the speaker in communicating meaning is gone.  Now the speaker is completely reliant on the words he or she uses.  At this point, I wonder how many of the students studied suffer from second language issues or things along those lines because if I know that I struggle to speak and write standard academic English, then my CMC is going to be limited because unlike in the classroom where you see me and I can talk and perform my way towards communication, on the computer, with pure text, that is not so easy.  And even if I feel or am told I can speak colloquially, there is still this underlying need to be clear and coherent by academic English standards.   You can’t help but think…fuck, these guys are going to judge me if I say that, or they are going to think I can’t talk or read or write or I’m stupid because the way my dialect or vernacular or slang or broken English translates into text.  Get me?

Interesting read.  I also wonder how this data would change now that colleges are filled with more females than males.  Data taken in 2000 seems obsolete at the rate information and technology is going. 

Following Social Change

Teenagers have got to be the most challenging group to teach writing. They have just enough knowledge at their fingertips that they feel they know it all, and now they have all the technology they need to back their play. Lindemann claims that "language change follows social change, not the other way around" (66).  So this is basically empowering those little idiots to use text speak and tweets and regurgitate them in the classroom. (Are they the idiots or am I for not embracing them?--Little column A, little column B.) 

I am all for incorporating modern technology and intelligent new media into the classroom, but how do you tell a 15 year old that she is misusing/abusing lol and rofl and brb in her academics. I don't want to teach another generation of kids how to write academically they way I was taught, to write "up," but I also don't want to hire another assistant that uses the @ and & signs in formal letters to my clients. I also don't want another lazy or entitled kid showing up late, working four hours and claiming they are overworked and underpaid...and I am not that old. I am not 50 and crotchity. I am still in my 20s and already feeling like I am in the last generation of well spoken, hard-working, literate people...but maybe every generation has felt that way.

So how do you, teachers in my class, how do you teach a teenager that cares more about her number of twitter followers than her own education or literacy. Where's the balance?

Not talking about idioms or regional dialect here. In general, what do you do with tech savvy, socially literate illiterates? 

Lindemann: Chapter 12, Teaching Rewriting

Lindemann says, “Planned carefully, writing workshops realize the primary objective of a writing course: students and teachers writing, reading, discussing, and improving one another’s work” (208).  I had not participated in a writer’s workshop in a long time, although I’ve had my high school students take part in such workshops regularly. I forgot how helpful, enjoyable, and constructive they are to me as a writer. I think writers workshops are very crucial in order to get students out of the habit of viewing “rewriting as more than editing, polishing, or proofreading, as more than correcting flaws in papers we’ve already graded” (210). Writer’s workshops are invaluable in getting the kind of feedback that will immensely improve one’s work, if one is open to such critique and group work dynamic, because ultimately one gets a different perspective and lens on what has been written.

Tobin: “Reading Students, Reading Ourselves”

I like Tobin’s honesty in addressing the biases and assumptions that writing teachers have toward their students. I also found fascinating Tobin’s comparison of the teacher-student relationship to that of psychotherapy. Tobin says, “By attempting to edit feelings, unconscious associations, and personal problems out of a writing course, we are fooling ourselves and shortchanging our students”.  Moreover, he says that “The teaching of writing is about solving problems, personal and public, and I don’t think we can have it both ways: we cannot create intensity and deny tension, celebrate the personal and deny the significance of personalities involved”.  A distinction can be made here, however. When I taught high school English, I found that professionalism and propriety was the pinnacle in which I arranged the discussion and execution of writing. However, in college there is a lot more freedom. Like Tobin’s student Nicki, college students may write about abusive relationships. But I think the essence of his argument is that the student relationship is not “decontextualized”.  I agree that our own personalities and egos create a dynamic of transference, and that this needs to be acknowledged and negotiated in order to achieve effectiveness. Tobin’s discussion is important because writing teachers are human too, and so are our students. Hence, tensions are not exempt in the writing classroom.