Week 12/MWF Days 333, 34, 35; TR Days 23 and 24 – Monday, November 7-Friday, November 11

Remember: Individual A4 conferences can be in week 11 or week 12, depending on your own students’ needs. Shift the week 11 and week 12 lessons around as is appropriate for your class.

Weekly Objectives

  • Student will be able to use a conference experience to better their writing and to help them prepare for this week’s Reading Workshop and Peer Review Workshop. This will be accomplished through:
  • Engaging in a one-on-one conference
  • Continuing developing reading skills through a Reading Workshop
  • Participating in a Peer Review Workshop
  • Digging deep and analyzing an exemplary argument in a student-centered / led format

Connection to Last Week:

  • Last week, students took an intensive look at their claim’s position, essay structure, alternative perspectives, issues of logic, and essay organization as a catalyst for this week’s conferences, where students will be able to use a conference experience to ask salient questions, better their writing, and to help them prepare for the A4 Peer Review Workshop. Additionally, students will use knowledge attained last week and cumulatively to practice looking at and analyzing a successful argument.

Connection to Next Week:

  • Next week, students will use what they have garnered from the conference experience, reading workshop, and peer suggestions from the workshop to aid their revision process and prepare for the final Style and Convention Seminar.

Suggested Activities:

INDIVIDUAL A4 CONFERENCES (Note: this info is in week 11 as well)

The primary goal of individual conferences is to check in with your students’ progress on Assignment 4, ensure they have considered purpose and audience for their argument, and have crafted a debatable claim, strong reasons and evidence, and have considered a counterargument and how they’ll respond to it. There are also some secondary goals of conferences: they allow you to sit individually with each of your students for a few minutes and focus on their work, respond to student questions and concerns about the assignment and the class in general, and ensure that students know the timeline for the rest of the unit.

Consider where you’ll hold conferences and where you and the student will sit. If you don’t want to use your office, you can meet students in the library coffee shop, at a table in the hallway of Eddy on the 3rd floor, or other appropriate CSU location. Since you will be talking about the argument process work, it may help to be able to sit next to the student so you can both look at their ideas and other materials at the same time. This sets up an informal atmosphere that can be conducive to planning and generating ideas. If you and your students want or need more formality, you could set up the conference space so that students sit across from you.

Use the student’s process work/prep work to begin discussion about their paper, supplementing your conversation with whatever questions, concerns, or comments seem natural at the time. You can also use the guiding questions below to get a student talking about his/her argument if you find you need some help.

Something else to consider is that this is the student’s conference, so the student should be doing most of the talking. The student should be attempting to articulate what he/she is going to argue, to whom he/she is directing the argument, how he/she will support the argument, what counterargument he/she will include, etc. Sometimes when meeting with students individually we can feel pressure to fill the awkward silences with our own words, causing us to do more of the talking than is really necessary. Our goal is ultimately to engage in a conversation with the student, but always try to get them to do most of the talking.

If you find yourself talking too much, think about the acronym WAIT (which stands for “Why am I talking?”) Having a sticky note with this on it in a visible location can remind you to redirect the conversation so the student is talking about his/her own goals for the assignment.

Guiding Questions for Conferences

  1. What is your current position on the issue? In other words, what is your claim?
  2. How did your inquiry lead you to this claim?
  3. Who needs to hear your claim? In other words, who is your stakeholder?
  4. Who will disagree with your claim? What might their counterargument be?
  5. Consider your potential audience: will they already agree with your claim? Will they disagree with your claim? Will they be ambivalent or uniformed about your claim?
  6. Are there any gaps in your research you need to fill?

READING WORKSHOP: THESIS, REASONS, AND EVIDENCE

  • Helping students continue to develop their reading skills is just as important as helping them continue to improve their writing skills. In that spirit, design a reading workshop for the Researched Argument that helps students make reading-writing connections.
  • One activity that could be useful is helping students see others’ arguments as combinations of claims, reasons, and evidence. Students often have difficulty distinguishing between reasons and evidence, so a reading workshop whose aims are helping students see the building blocks of arguments in terms of reasons and evidence supporting a claim could be helpful.
  • Assign “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (or another argument of your choice) and have students fill out the “Reading Workshop: Thesis/Reasons/Evidence” (in the Appendix) for that text.

ANALYSIS OF AN EXEMPLARY ARGUMENT

  • The preparation for this activity is best given as homework during preview week.
  • Consider using an exemplary argument or a student sample (samples found in the Appendix.
  • Please refer to the FISHBOWL suggestions included in Week 11 and in the Appendix.
  • Other options for analyzing an exemplary argument are as follows:
  • A Socratic Seminar
  • Application of the same peer workshop process to the exemplary text
  • A pair and share analysis of the text

PEER WORKSHOP

At this point, you probably have a very good feel for your class dynamic and their workshop preferences. Design a workshop according to what you know your class needs. Below are a few suggestions to liven things up or create a new type of revision challenge:

  • The Descriptive Outlinefrom Professor Sue Doe and Writing@CSU Activities Bank

Goal: To provide students with a tool for analyzing their own drafts and the drafts of peers. This outlining activity is similar to the backwards outline but the name makes more sense!

Using either their own, a peer’s, or a published essay, students first number the paragraphs of the essay in the margin.

Students now use a piece of notebook paper and draw a line down the middle of the sheet of paper.

They count the number of paragraphs and draw enough horizontal lines to create a row for each paragraph. They write the number of the paragraph to the left of the appropriate row.

In the first box of the row, students DESCRIBE the substance of the paragraph in question—for instance that the paragraph provides support for the second reason given in support of the claim.

In the second box of the row, students EXPLAIN HOW the substance of the paragraph is accomplished or achieved—for instance, the first paragraph that provides support for the second reason does so through an illustration using personal evidence.

The same analysis and description is followed for the length of the essay.

Then students use a highlighter to draw lines between major sections of the essay. They then find descriptive words to apply to naming this section of the essay.

Having thoroughly analyzed the essay, now students are ready to provide constructive feedback to themselves or their partners. They can plainly see what they’ve got so far in a paper and can often more clearly also see what is missing.

A One-Paragraph Example

Para 5 / Here the writer provides support for her second reason in support of her claim that schooling does more harm than good, saying it robs people of simple joys. She talks about the loss of her innocent love of storytelling. / The support is in the form of an illustration. Using a personal experience from the writer’s life, she describes her love of family stories before she learned to call such stories “anthropology.” Now she finds she can’t hear a family story without thinking about what the story reflects about her culture.
  • The Devil’s Advocate Peer Review ActivityContributed by Mike Palmquist and Writing@CSU Activities Bank

Goals: To help students conduct a peer review that challenges the writer’s argument, key points, and supporting evidence.

Be sure, however, to appoint a recorder for each exchange if you are doing this activity in a face-to-face setting, since inexperienced writers tend to (1) forget criticisms of their essays, particularly those they disagree with, and (2) think that by explaining the problem to a reviewer they’ve solved it (even if they haven’t done anything to change their document).

Today, you will present your original line of argument to a partner and get feedback from him or her. However, the feedback you get (and give) will be a bit out of the ordinary. You and your partner will take turns playing devil's advocate, that is, you'll try to think up reasonable alternatives to your partner's line of argument.

To complete the exercise, you will need to find a partner. Read the instructions below and then begin the session. Half-way through the period, we will switch roles and comment on the "devil's" line of argument. At the end of class, you will save the log of your conversation and turn it in...

The Role of Devil's Advocate

A person playing devil's advocate can quickly become a nuisance by constantly disagreeing with what you say. While you wouldn't want to put up with this type of person for any extended period of time, responding to such an antagonist while discussing an argument you have written can often produce new and different insights for you. In addition to opening your eyes to new ideas and viewpoints, carrying on a discussion with a devil's advocate forces you to do your best at explaining and defending your position. In reviewing the log produced by the chat room after such a discussion, you may find that you have stated your position much better while discussing it than you had in what you had actually written.

Playing the role of devil's advocate can be a lot of fun, and is really quite easy. In general, you want to challenge the assertions made by the writer. The writer will then have to elaborate the point, by presenting arguments and evidence to support the stated view. When the writer begins to present solutions to the problem, you would want to propose alternate solutions (possibly far-fetched ones) so that the writer will have to argue why the proposed solution is better than the ones you offer. You may also propose a solution that the writer had not considered before, and which may be quite helpful to the goals of the paper. One important point to remember: When the writer has done a good job of stating a point, concede the argument and move on to another topic. Arguing a point to a stalemate will not be helpful to the writer. Below are some sample exchanges between a writer and a devil's advocate.

Writer: In my paper, I say that the administration needs to do something about the quality of students’ lives on campus.

Devil: I don't think it's the job of the administration to make improvements in the quality of life for the students on campus. What makes you think that the administration can do anything about it? [State an opposing viewpoint, i.e., it's up to the students, not the administration.]

Writer: Well, I think that part of the reason the quality is so bad in the first place is because the administration places so much emphasis on academics, and not enough on the other aspects of a student's life. I think the administration can help balance these things out, by emphasizing the other aspects as well.

Devil: The students come here for academic training--that's what the school is here for. If they want to develop other interests, I would say it is up to the individual students to do this for themselves. [Propose alternate solutions: i.e., The solution is not to have the administration de-emphasize its role, but instead, the students should take charge of their lives and develop other areas on their own.]

Writer: Well that might be true. But if the students are forced to spend so much time and energy on their studies, they don’t have any spare time in which to pursue their other interests.

Devil: OK, I’ll give you that small point! (Concede to writer) Tell me what you think would improve the quality of life on campus. (Move on)

Writer: Well, first I say that one problem students have is lack of spare time. As a way of addressing this smaller problem, I suggest that the Administration provide more activities on campus, so that it will be easy and quick for students to get to an event. This will also address a problem often cited by students--they can't "get" anywhere to do anything because they don't have transportation.

Devil: Oh come on. I don't think that is a valid complaint for students to make. After all, there are buses or they could catch a ride with someone who does have a car. (Challenge assertions)

Writer: That may work for some of them, some of the time, but what about the others? I contend that if you consider the lack of time problem for some students along with the transportation problem for some students, you will see that the end product is still a problem. And this problem can be eased, if not solved, by the administration offering more events of interest to the students on campus.

Devil: OK, you win. I'll admit that more events on campus would contribute to an overall improvement in the quality of life on campus. (Concede to writer) But that seems like a rather small effort on the part of the (Move on)

There are, of course, many other roles you may wish to try. For example, you might take the role of a Doubting Thomas--someone who has trouble believing anything the writer has to say. Such a person would constantly demand more proof, more evidence, more examples and more explanations of the main points, before ever being persuaded by what the writer has to say. Or you could take on the role of a child, or some average Joe off the street. When playing this role, you would act as though you just simply could not understand what the writer is saying, repeatedly asking for clarifications and further explanations. Think of a child who constantly asks "Why?", "How?” etc.

  • Below are three models from John C. Bean in his book Engaging Ideas The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom (297-298).

Suggested Homework Assignments:

  • Applicable readings from the JTCR for this week:
  • Chapter 4: “Work Together toRefine Your Argument”
  • Prepare for your conference
  • Prepare for whatever sort of sample analysis of an exemplary text you select
  • Prepare for the reading workshop
  • Polish and revise A3

Things to Keep in Mind:

  • Don’t hesitate to ask any of the Comp Administrators for ideas if you’re stumped about a lecture or lesson.