Teaching Writing in Large Classes
Guided-Journal Tasks Keyed to Your Lectures
For this approach the instructor creates guided-journal tasks that encourage students to use information from the lectures. For example, these tasks can ask students to tie lecture material to their own experiences, to reapply information gained from the lecture to new contexts, to consider the pros and cons of certain propositions in the lectures, or to design new questions based on the lecture. The important component here is to create tasks that can only be completed if the student paid close attention to the lecture.
A second approach for the use of guided-journal tasks (or in-class freewrites) is “to engage students with a problem that the day’s lecture will address or to activate prior learning and personal experience that will facilitate learning of new material.” For example, if your lecture for the day is going to address a new mathematical equation, you can begin by asking students to discuss ways in which they would apply that mathematical equation in their personal lives. By allowing students the opportunity to relate in-class information with real life, it becomes easier for them to apply that information to other concepts and/or other disciplines. (Source: John C. Bean. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.)
See Chapter Six, pages 107-108 of Engaging Ideas, for an explanation of guided-journals; see Chapter Seven for suggestions on the design for tasks.
Feedback Lectures
In a feedback lecture, the instructor allows time for the students to comment on what needs clarification or to address a thought problem provided in the midst of the lecture. During an appropriate time in the lecture, the instructor pauses to provide space for the students to write for several minutes. Once the students have finished writing, the instructor can ask one or two students to read what they have written or collect them to read a random sampling of the responses after class. These freewrites create a dialogue between the students and the teacher, while offering insight into the students’ thinking process as well. Aside from providing valuable feedback for the instructor, the freewrites also serve as a transitional period for the students. The break from the lecture to write will help students refocus their attention and can help increase their listening for the remainder of the class. (Source: John C. Bean. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1996.)
Lecture Summaries
Required lecture summaries promote better listening by encouraging your students to be accountable for what they hear during the lecture. At the end of a lecture, either in class or for homework, the instructor asks the students to write a one-page summary of the lecture. At the start of the next class, collect the lecture summaries from the previous day; later, read a random selection as a way of checking student understanding. (Source: John C. Bean. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.)
Through this process students become active listeners, because they know they will need to report what they heard in the lecture, but students also become active learners. When students take notes from a lecture, they often write down exactly what the instructor said, but do not really hear what is being said. By taking the
notes they wrote during the lecture and having them then compose a summary based on those notes, the students engage with the lecture and attempt to understand it in their own terms.
Instructors also benefit from this process, for they can gauge whether or not their students understood the lecture. As you randomly read the summaries given by your students, you can see if they comprehended the content of the lecture, and if not, you can make adjustments in your lecture based on the problem areas seen in the summaries. (For further discussion of summaries, see Chapter Seven, pages 128-129, and Chapter Eight, pages 145-146 of Engaging Ideas.)