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Articles Conference Reviews |
Session F2Reflective Practices in Writing Instruction: What New Research Tells Us Riki Thompson, “Virtually Thinking Out Loud in the Electronic Classroom: Metacognition and Issues of Audience, Frequency, and Medium for Reflection” Thompson began by recalling the categories for frequent and integrated reflection practices that Kathleen Blake Yancey proposes in her 1998 book Reflection in the Writing Classroom: 1) reflection in action (blogs, journals), 2) constructive reflection (reflective cover letters accompanying essays), and 3) reflection in presentation (end-of-semester portfolio essays). She then suggested that there has been a gap in applied research in this area. Therefore, she and her collaborator Katherine Anderson studied e-reflection in a Web 2.0 environment in an effort to determine how hospitable such technologies are to metacognition, what the effect of a public audience might be, how writers would negotiate public and private audience expectations, and whether training students to reflect would facilitate self-assessment and transfer in learning. For the study, Thompson and Anderson observed two 200-level Intermediate Academic Writing courses with the shared theme of sustainability: one class that met in a traditional classroom and one class that met in a computer-integrated classroom. They then compared the paper-based and electronic portfolio reflections, which included “My Story” (a beginning self reflection); recurring reflections on writing processes, rituals, and habits; reflections on how the essays were meeting the student’s goals; reflections on technology and writing; and final course reflections. Of the 17 portfolios they assessed in the computer-integrated classroom, they found evidence of metacognition in all of them. Some of the common themes they saw were: the costs and benefits of technology, the considerations of private and public information when writing online, and the value of peer review. In general, students found reflective writing to be most beneficial in changing their writing process (increased organization, actually following through with drafting and revising, etc.). Many students claimed to have developed a new awareness of why they write and who they might be writing for, and they took pride in becoming better writers, rather than focusing solely on the grades they received. According to Thompson, the students’ emphasis on learning time management was a surprising finding. Thompson and Anderson would like to do more research to discover whether the drafting process in the writing classroom is successful because it is a process that is imposed upon the students or whether they are able to transfer that time management skill. As a result of this initial study, Thompson and Anderson have concluded that electronic reflection enhanced the students’ views of themselves as writers and validated their research on their own writing. As a result, the students’ dispositions and attitudes toward writing became more positive. The next step Thompson and Anderson would like to take is to try to discover whether these results transfer to other classes beyond the writing class. Megan Swihart Jewell, “When Students Reflect across Courses: What General Education Portfolios Reveal about Writing Knowledge” Jewell studied an institutional program that requires three writing-intensive (WI) seminars (two of which are interdisciplinary) that result in the compilation of a general education portfolio to provide programmatic feedback. The portfolios contain four essays including one 10-12 page research paper and a reflective essay. Jewell stated that the intended purpose of the reflective essay was for the students to explore their gains over the course of the three WI seminars. While one of the intentions of requiring the three WI seminars over the course of a four-year curriculum is to demonstrate that “writing is not an isolated activity,” Jewell remains wary of the dangers of universalizing writing, a warning sounded by Anne Beaufort. Acknowledging that reflective essays are often rushed, ridden with mechanical errors, and lacking in depth because they often fail to go beyond an examination of isolated skills or highly personal achievements and are rarely contextualized engagements with the question of writing and how students see and represent themselves as writers, Jewell sought to discover how the programmatic seminar approach might mediate students’ representations of themselves as writers. Jewell studied two sets of 40 portfolios from the 2007 and 2008 academic years. Each set contained 20 acceptable portfolios and 20 that were determined not to meet the requirements. She found that many of the writers in 2007 whose portfolios did not pass mentioned the distinctly institutional nature of the seminar program, while the samples from 2008 indicated more differentiation between the classes and less emphasis on the program as a monolithic entity. She also noted that in 2007 more writers found ways to avoid talking about their own writing (including writing about the program) while in 2008 there was more focus on each student’s own writing. She conjectures that as the program’s newness wears off, students are becoming less likely to talk about the program and its goals instead of their own writing, but she observed that politics does mediate students’ reflections. She would also like to look more closely at whether the program tends to universalize writing within an institutional context. Anne Beaufort, “All Talk, No Action? Or, Does Transfer Really Happen after Reflective Practice?” Beaufort began by asking the question, “Does reflective practice aid transfer of learning?” The issue of transfer is so important to first-year composition (FYC), Beaufort explained, because we know we can’t produce highly trained, highly literate writers in FYC. Beaufort identified three approaches for promoting transfer: 1) helping students clearly understand writing strategies, 2) giving students practice applying those strategies, and 3) fostering mindfulness or metacognition about learning through reflection. Of these strategies, she identified reflective writing as one of the best. Beaufort acknowledged that reflection per se doesn’t guarantee transfer of learning. First of all, teachers of reflective writing must be aware of the “schmooze factor” of students who write what they think their professor wants to hear. In addition, teachers must be aware that students must be prompted to think about transfer, so as teachers of writing we must think about how to strengthen the connection between reflection and transfer of learning. For her study, Beaufort compared her prompts for reflective letters from 3 years ago and from 1 year ago as well as student responses to those prompts. The prompt from 3 years ago contained instructions such as “you may want to look at the syllabus, course goals, etc.” and “you may write in any genre.” Beaufort chastised herself in retrospect for using the word “may” in the prompt, which resulted in many reflective letters with either grandiose or vague claims. This prompt also encouraged students to publish their letters to the Internet; as a result, Beaufort found that students had a hard time imagining an audience for the letter. Her new prompt asks students to aim for three things: 1) to produce a lively, clear piece of writing, 2) to write in order to think and remember ways of writing that they may want to apply to future writing tasks, and 3) to write for an interested audience who wants to learn something from their letters about the complex business of teaching writing. According to Beaufort, the revised prompt yielded student writing samples that showed more evidence of the vocabulary of the class and the class objectives (e.g., rhetoric, writing process). From her comparison of samples, Beaufort concluded that genre and rhetorical context affect the likelihood (or not) of transfer occurring. Beaufort suggested that two of the primary considerations that must be taken into account when assigning reflective writing are how specific the prompt is and whether or not transfer is explicitly invoked. On a sliding scale, these considerations might be depicted as such: Open Closed Non-specific <----------------------------------------------> Specific Non-directed Directive On the left end of the scale, problems such as the ones Beaufort identified above can arise (grandiose or vague claims, lack of understanding of audience). On the right end of the scale, problems can also arise from telling students exactly what skills or outcomes to write about. For instance, the students may not value those outcomes, or, since they are being told what to write about, they may not have to think about what they actually learned. Therefore, Beaufort recommends writing a prompt that falls in the midrange of the scale, one that invokes transfer but provides students with room for a range of responses. While such reflections may only name the students’ intention for future transfer, Beaufort suggests that some specific intentions are better than vague or grandiose claims. Kathleen Blake Yancey: Respondent Yancey began by remarking that she got 70 “hits” on reflection when searching the CCCC’s program and suggested that perhaps there is a resurgence of interest on reflection in the discipline. In response to Thompson, Yancey stated there are two issues to consider when seeing a disconnect between the transfer of learning talked about in class and whether or not that language of transfer appears in the reflections: context and time. While we know we are constrained by our classrooms, we have to consider how we build context and time into our frameworks for reflection. In response to Jewell, Yancey noted a distinction between the strong and weak writers: the strong writers had a sophisticated notion of writing and rhetorical practices, while the weak writers tended to perceive writing as a mechanical enterprise. Part of the solution, Yancey suggested, may be to expand the theory and model of writing being presented to the students as more than process. In response to Beaufort, Yancey concurred that writing instructors need to ask real questions in real contexts, to focus less on what the students have learned and how they learned it than on what writing is. She offered one possible model of writing that she feels effectively intertwines reflective practices and transfer. At the University of Edinburgh, the medical school asks students to provide a record of their generic professional skills and to keep logbooks that reflect on their learning. When something goes wrong, they are asked to do a critical incident analysis—to focus on the incident and their own performance during the incident. They then submit a learning portfolio in which they examine their knowledge of key topics based upon their experiences with specific patients. Such attention to genre development might be a model for our own practices, according to Yancey. |