Category Archives: Writing

Teaching, Writing

Fostering Authority in Students as Writers

[Header Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash]

Over my 40-year (so far) career as a teacher, I have spent the bulk of that time teaching adolescents and adults to write.

An inordinate amount of that effort focuses on a great deal of unlearning since many writing assignments for students are exclusively student behaviors, not authentic practices or producing authentic artifacts.

This semester I am teaching two first-year writing seminars and an upper-level writing/research course. All of these students are in the midst of submitting cited essays.

This is the time of unlearning the “research paper.”

For the upper-level course, students work through an authentic process of choosing a topic, searching for their primary and secondary sources, submitting an annotated bibliography, and then submitting a cited essay (an analysis of media coverage of an educational topic).

Throughout that process, I note that, for example, the annotated bibliography is for them, a sort of prewriting of the cited essay (not an assignment to submit for a grade). This is an effort to lay the foundation for an authentic process of writing an original analysis grounded in evidence.

Despite my repeated warnings, students in this course still often turn in a first submission that is not a media analysis but a “research paper” on the educational topic. For example, instead of submitting their original analysis of how the media covers dyslexia, they submit a “research paper” on dyslexia.

Concurrent with that assignment, my first-year students are preparing their first formally cited essay (using APA). The essay before this assignment requires them to cite using hyperlinks, again emphasizing an authentic and more common approach to evidence in the world outside of formal schooling.

For both first-year and upper-level students, however, the urge to write a reductive and stilted “research paper” is deeply engrained from their K-12 schooling.

One consequence of that artificial experience and template is extremely cumbersome style that includes students writing about their “sources” instead of using their sources as either the focus of their analysis or evidence for their claims.

For example, these sorts of sentences are common:

  • Extensive scientific research has been conducted to determine if ADHD is the result of genetics or environmental factors. While this research has shown some correlation between certain genes or environmental factors and the onset of ADHD, the results remain inconclusive (Thapar et al., 2012).
  • Various studies and scholarly research conducted surrounding the pipeline expose the oppressive and discriminatory systems and beliefs involving law enforcement and unforgiving disciplinary policies within schools that are continually pushing students, especially students of color out of schools.
  • One article I read pushed for dialogue in their congregational community surrounding the mental health of black parishioners.
  • Journalists for mainstream media sources have argued that standardized testing adds a lot of stress and without many benefits.
  • Published scholarly work has concluded that testing is necessary, and journalists Donnelly (2015) and Silva (2013) back up these views.

This sort of meta-writing—identifying that scholars do research, treating the sources for an assignment as “my sources,” acknowledging that the student has done the research or reading—is a failure of the students to understand both the nature of cited writing and their own obligation as a writer of scholarship.

The upper-level course has a very challenging assignment that requires students to understand different types of sources and to write in different styles within the cited essay.

For these students, they have to gather evidence of media coverage of an education topic (the primary evidence of their analysis) while also having a body of scholarly sources that serve as the foundation of that analysis.

The brief literature reviews forces them to focus on the patterns in those scholarly articles, which provides the lens for analyzing the media coverage.

In the media analysis and evaluation sections, then, students must incorporate textual analysis, which requires a much greater sophistication than the examples above.

Here is the expanded guide I have created for those students to navigate the stylistic shifts and the use of evidence in cited essays:

Media Analysis Guidelines (EDU 250)

For 8-10 pages, a proposed structure:

Opening – about 1 page (2-4 paragraphs); be sure to include essay focus on media

[ ] Open with a specific narrative that focuses reader on your educational topic (and possibly use a media example).

[ ] Prefer shorter paragraphs (throughout essay).

[ ] Thesis must focus on media analysis. Prefer identifying questions you will answer about media portrayal of educational topic. [Do not refer to “the literature” or “research.”]

Literature Review – 2 pages; focus on *patterns* in the sources (write about your topics, not the sources); must be fully cited (prefer synthesis and avoid presenting one source at a time) and address all scholarly sources included in references

[ ] Discuss the patterns found in the scholarly evidence. [Do not refer to “the literature” or “research.”]

[ ] Do not write about your “sources”; write about what the evidence shows concerning your educational topic.

[ ] Primarily focus on a synthesis of your scholarly sources; do not walk through one source at a time.

[ ] All scholarly sources must be included, and you must fully cite using APA.

Media Analysis – 2 pages; focus on *patterns* in the media and include several examples; directly identify media outlets and journalists

[ ] Discuss the patterns found in media coverage of your educational topic.

[ ] Identify journalists and media sources specifically; choose some key quotes to show readers evidence of media coverage patterns.

[ ] Must cite fully in APA.

Media Evaluation (identify if media claims are valid or not) – 2 pages; this is the most important goal of the essay so evaluate the media coverage by implementing your knowledge of the scholarship (do not refer to “research” or “sources”); must be fully cited

[ ] This is the key section where you show whether or not the media coverage is valid (supported by research) or not. You must connect media patterns with the scholarly research.

[ ] Do not refer to “my sources,” the “research,” or the “literature.” Use your scholarly sources to evaluate media coverage.

[ ] Must fully cite throughout in APA.

Closing/Conclusion – about 1 page (2-4 paragraphs); must emphasize essay focus, media analysis

[ ] Return to a concrete or specific example from media.

[ ] Maintain focus on media analysis and give your reader something to do with your analysis/evaluation.

This assignment seeks to offer students an experience with what is common in academic and scholarly writing (graduate-level work and published scholarship). The assignment guidelines are too much of a template for my liking, but I am aware that many real-world scholarly works conform to such template or narrow guidelines (see this work of mine written to a strict template).

For both my first-year and my upper-level students, however, what I am seeking is how to foster in them greater autonomy and authority as writers and scholars.

My students’ cited essays are never called “research papers,” students always have choice about topics for their essays and must generate their own thesis/focus for the assignment, and my feedback supports these students incorporating evidence (sources) as ways to build their authority as writer and scholars.

For example, we work on fairly simple stylistic shifts that create authority and move cited essays beyond the research paper:

From this:

Research has shown that standardized testing interferes with both teaching and learning, increases student frustration, and leads to a classroom mindset focused more on grades than on actual learning of material (Wilson, 2022).

To this:

Standardized testing interferes with both teaching and learning, increases student frustration, and leads to a classroom mindset focused more on grades than on actual learning of material (Wilson, 2022).

Students have far too many experiences at the K-12 level that use inauthentic writing assignments (such as the “research paper”) as a mechanism for assessing if students have acquired skills—finding and analyzing sources, implementing academic citation, etc.

Those approaches have the goals reversed.

Students as developing writers and scholars need to acquire those skills in the service of their writing and expression; the cited essay is the thing we are seeking, and their authority as writers/scholars is the most important aspect of our feedback and (if necessary) assessment.

Can a student organize and focus an examination of a topic or idea in ways that are compelling and grounded in valid claims?

To do that well, academic and scholarly writing demands citation that serves to support the authority of the writer.

Ultimately, the urge in students to write about their sources is a reflection of their not yet understanding their autonomy as humans, writers, or scholars.

Students as writers must be allowed the full experiences of being a writer and thinker, guided of course by teachers of writing. But we as teachers of writing often do far too much for the student and ask far too little of those students.

Few students will move on from formal schooling and be academic or scholarly writers. What we must provide them with, then, is writing experiences that support their coming to embrace their autonomy and authority as thinkers along with the ability to express themselves in ways that are credible and compelling.

Thomas, P.L. (2019). Teaching writing as journey, not destination: Essays exploring what “teaching writing” means. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Education, Teaching, Testing, Writing

Teaching Writing: Reconsidering Genre (Again)

[Header Photo by David Pupăză on Unsplash]

My midterm exam for first-year writing invites students to interview a professor in a discipline they are considering as a major. The discussion is designed to explore those professors as researchers and writers.

On exam day, we have small and whole-class discussions designed to discover the wide variety of activities that count as research in various disciplines, and more importantly, what writing as a scholar looks like across disciplines.

The outcomes of this activity are powerful since students learn that research and writing are context-based and far more complicated that they learned in K-12 schooling.

Two points that I often emphasize are, first, that many (if not most) of the professors confess that they do not like to write, and second, I help them see that a profoundly important distinction between their K-12 teachers and professors is that professors practice the fields they teach.

This brings me to two posts on Twitter (X):

First, Luther is confronting a foundational failure of K-12 writing instruction—students being taught the “4 Types/Genres of Writing” (narration, description, exposition, persuasion).

That framing is deeply misleading and overly simplistic, but that framing is grounded in two realities: most K-12 teachers who teach writing are not writers, and the so-called “4 Types/Genres of Writing” are rooted in the rise of state-level accountability testing of writing (not any authentic or research-based approach to teaching composition).

Second, so I don’t appear to be beating up unfairly on K-12 teachers (I was one for 18 years and love K-12 teachers), Dowell is then confronting the often careless and reductive ways in which “academic writing” is both taught and even practiced (academic norms of published writing ask very little of scholars as writers and even impose reductive templates that cause lifeless and garbled writing).

The 1980s and 1990s saw a rise in state accountability testing that asked very little of students. The “4 Types/Genres of Writing” quickly supplanted the gains made with authentic writing instruction grounded in writer’s workshop and the influence of the National Writing Project in the 1970s and 1980s.

Those writing tests prompted students to write narrative or expository essays (for example) that were only a few paragraphs long (likely the 5-paragraph essay). These were scored based on state-developed rubrics that teachers taught to throughout the year.

In other words, as Gerald Bracey warned, writing instruction became almost exclusively teaching to the test. And since K-12 teachers of writers were primarily not writers themselves, this reductive and mechanical way to teach and assess writing was rarely challenged.

Let’s be blunt. K-12 teachers not resisting this dynamic is a logical response to an impossible learning and teaching environment that is dominated by accountability and high-stakes testing.

My criticism is that teachers and students were (and are) put in this situation; I am not criticizing teachers and students, who are the victims of the accountability era of education reform.

Further, while students who move from K-12 to higher ed discover that their K-12 preparation in writing is inadequate and often deeply misleading for how they are expected to write in academia, this new situation is not some idealistic wonderland of authentic writing (as Dowell confronts).

The K-12 to higher ed transition makes students feel unfairly jerked around (many are exasperated when they find out they didn’t need to “memorize” MLA and may never use it again), but navigating academic expectations for writing is equally frustrating (one first-year student this spring noted that my first-year writing seminar is unique, they said, because I teach writing while other professors simply assign and grade writing).

Students deserve better at both the K-12 and higher ed levels so here I want to offer a few thoughts on how to move past the traps I have noted above about teaching writing.

I highly recommend Genre awareness for the novice academic student:
An ongoing quest by Ann Johns.

Johns argues for fostering “genre awareness” (addressing in complex and authentic ways Dowell’s concern) and not “genre acquisition” (for example, the reductive “4 Types/Genres of Writing” approach):

The first is GENRE ACQUISITION, a goal that focuses upon the students’ ability to reproduce a text type, often from a template, that is organized, or ‘staged’ in a predictable way. The Five Paragraph Essay pedagogies, so common in North America, present a highly structured version of this genre acquisition approach.

A quite different goal is GENRE AWARENESS, which is realized in a course designed to assist students in developing the rhetorical flexibility necessary for adapting their socio-cognitive genre knowledge to ever-evolving contexts. …After my many years of teaching novice tertiary students who follow familiar text templates, usually the Five Paragraph Essay, and who then fail when they confronted different types of reading and writing challenges in their college and university classrooms, I have concluded that raising genre awareness and encouraging the abilities to research and negotiate texts in academic classrooms should be the principal goals for a novice literacy curriculum (Johns 1997).

Genre awareness for the novice academic student:
An ongoing quest

Here I think is an outstanding graphic (Johns draws from Bhatia) of moving past confusing modes of writing (narration, description, exposition, persuasion) with genres of writing (OpEd, memoir, meta-analysis, literature review, etc.):

At both the K-12 and higher ed levels, then, teaching writing has been reduced to serving something other than students—either the mandates of high-stakes testing or the nebulous and shifting expectations of “academic writing,” which include very dangerous traps such as a maze of citation expectations among disciplines.

My first-year writing students and I are at midterm this spring, and we just held our conferences for Essay 2 with a scholarly cited essay looming once we return from spring break.

In those conferences, we have been discussing the huge learning curve they are facing since I ask them to choose their essay topic and thus develop their own thesis within a genre of writing.

They are making all the decisions writers do in authentic contexts.

Before my class, they have had most of their writing prompted, most of their thesis sentences assigned to them, and most of their genre experiences entirely reduced or erased.

So I explain this to them, assuring them that their struggles are reasonable and not a product of them failing or being inadequate.

These are new and complex expectations of young writers.

But is the only fair thing to offer them, this experience of becoming a writer as an act of them as humans and not as a performance for a test or to fill in a template.

Recommended

Investigating Zombi(e)s to Foster Genre Awareness

Thomas, P.L. (2019). Teaching writing as journey, not destination: Essays exploring what “teaching writing” means. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

RECOMMENDED: John Warner’s “Why They Can’t Write”

RECOMMENDED: John Warner’s “The Writer’s Practice”

2023, Education, education reform, Educational Research, existentialism, reading, Science of Reading, Writing

A Decade of Blogging: 2023 Overview

Spring 1980.

I am sitting in my dorm room of a local junior college looking out the window from the third floor of an ornate but old rock building. On that day, I wrote my first real poem, inspired by e.e. cummings’s “[In just-]” that I had recently read in my speech course with Steve Brannon.

I began playing with letter and word placement while watching students throwing a Frisbee on the dorm lawn, weaving the word “Frisbee” to reveal “free,” “is,” and “be”:

Winter 2023.

This has been my journey across five decades to be a writer. I could have never envisioned as a college student that I would in fact become a writer and that my writer life would primarily be grounded in a WordPress blog.

I start blogging reluctantly at my own blog in 2013, a decade ago. Oddly, 2014 was a peak year until nearly being matched in 2023, which saw almost 219,000 views and about 138,000 visitors.

Over my 22 years in higher education, I have gradually decreased my traditional scholarly work after authoring, co-authoring, editing, or co-editing almost 30 books and dozens of journal articles. Traditional work feels perfomative and hollow, to be honest.

Instead, I prefer public work, activism that has an open-access audience and may better impact how the world of education works.

My social media audience is over 10,000 and my social media traffic is consistent with hundreds of views per day resulting in 10,000-20,000 views per month.

In 2023, for example, my open-access work on grade retention contributed to removing grade retention in Ohio. My primary work on the “science of reading” has maintained an audience with much less satisfying outcomes.

It means a great deal to me to have this space to be a writer, and I appreciate even more my audience of smart, kind, and dedicated folk who often share with me the need to speak up as one avenue of activism.

The top 10 posts of 2023 include the following with links below:

  1. Podcast: What You Can Do: How ‘Sold a Story’ sold us a story ft Dr. Paul Thomas
  2. Which Is Valid, SOR Story or Scholarly Criticism?: Checking for the “Science” in the “Science of Reading”
  3. Open Letter: To Curriculum Coordinators in South Carolina School Districts, Diane Stephens
  4. Does the “Science of Reading” Fulfill Social Justice, Equity Goals in Education? (pt. 1)
  5. The Myth of the Bad Teacher: 2023
  6. Reading Programs Always Fail Students and Teachers
  7. Simplistic View of Reading Fails Children, Reading, and Science
  8. Open Letter to the Biden Administration, USDOE, and Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona
  9. Fact Checking SCDOE Science of Reading Infographic
  10. How Media Misinformation Became “Holy Text”: The Anatomy of the SOR Movement

While I remain primarily committed to my public work here on this blog, 2023 (and 2022) was a fruitful time for producing traditional scholarship that is open-access; let me share those again here:

Writing is a solitary venture with an urge to speak to a community beyond the Self. Often it is a lonely act, and too often, it feels pointless (we writers are also an anxious bunch prone to depression and such).

And it is now cool to relentless trash all social media.

However, the virtual community I have built over the past decade through the blog and social media is incredible and important.

My existential leanings allow me not just to survive, but thrive.

Remember, the struggle itself to the heights is enough to fill a person’s heart. In this struggle, yes, I am happy.

The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus

Education, Grades, Testing, Writing

The Heightened Negative Consequences of Reductive Behaviorism on Student Learning

One of the most significant failures of media, public, political, and educational responses to the Covid/post-Covid era of traditional schooling is claiming that the Covid disruption created the problems being addressed about student mental health and student achievement.

The Covid/post-Covid era has heightened those problems in many ways, but the core issues were always the worst features of traditional schooling, notably the reductive behaviorism that drives testing/grading and classroom/school discipline.

Although I taught in K-12 education 18 years, I have been in higher education now for 22 years, working often with first-year students in my writing seminar (and this semester, in our advising program).

My first-year writing seminar students this fall are both very predictably similar to those I have taught for a couple decades and significantly exaggerated versions of those students.

We are at midterm, and students have just submitted Essay 2, a public essay in on-line format designed to help students ease into a formal cited essay (Essay 3). Essay 2 requires students to use hyperlinking for citation (and thus practice evaluating on-line sources, etc.) and incorporate images.

My first-year writing course is grounded in both writing workshop and minimum requirements instead of grades. This minimum requirements include the following:

  • Submit all essays in MULTIPLE DRAFTS per schedule before the last day of the course; initial drafts and subsequent drafts should be submitted with great care, as if each is the final submission, but students are expected to participate in process writing throughout the entire semester as a minimum requirement of this course—including a minimum of ONE conference per major essay.
  • Each essay rewrite (required) must be submitted after the required conference and BEFORE the next original essay is due (for example, E1RW must be submitted before E2 submission can be accepted).
  • Demonstrate adequate understanding of proper documentation and citation of sources through at least a single well-cited essay or several well-cited essays. A cited essay MUST be included in your final portfolio.

I recognize that I must not only teach students how to write at the college level, but also how to fully engage in a process writing course.

That last point is where students have always struggled, but Covid/post-Covid students are struggling mightily.

I provide students a wealth of support material and models for assignment, such as the following for general support:

And these specifically for Essay 2/hyperlink cited essay:

For context, I should note that I do not grade assignments throughout the semester (I must submit a course grade, which is based on a final portfolio as the final exam), and I do not take off for late work because I require that all work must be completed.

Historically, despite no grades or late penalty, my students have submitted work fully and on time at about a 90+% rate. Students typically receive As and Bs in the course with a sporadic student or two who do not meet the minimum requirements and thus fail (which is a consequence of simply not being able to fully engage in process writing).

A couple weeks ago, my first-year students submitted Essay 2; only 4 out of 12 did so on time.

So, yes, Covid/post-Covid education is different, but the issues are not new, just heightened.

What I am noticing is that students struggle to follow guidelines (see above), and I spend a great deal of time prompting students on their essay submission to review the sample and checklist provided.

One recent example struck me because a student submitted their Essay 2 rewrite, which was not significantly different than the initial submission—although I provided comments, directed them to the sample/checklist, and conferenced with the student (conferences end with revision plans and students choosing their rewrite due date).

I did not respond to the rewrite, but returned it with the original submission, noted my concern about almost no real revision, re-prompted the student to review the sample/checklist, and recommended another conference to insure the student and I are using our time well with another resubmission.

Two aspects of the essay were not addressed at all; the essay failed to mention the focus/thesis throughout the body of the essay (three subhead sections), and despite the checklist explicitly requiring students use journalistic paragraphing structure (noting restricting paragraphs to 1-3 sentences), the resubmission included (as in the original submission) opening and closing paragraphs of 5-6 sentences.

The student’s response is notable because they explained how hard they worked on the rewrite, including working with our writing lab, and then apologized.

I want to emphasize that I have over 40 years of teaching writing had to help students let go of the fear of mistakes and the urge to produce “perfect” writing in one submission. Most students simply can’t engage in process writing because the dominant culture of their schooling has been reductive behaviorism that hyper-focuses on student mistakes, fosters a reward/punishment culture, and shifts student concern from authentic artifacts and learning to securing grades.

As I have examined before, students are apt to view all feedback as negative even as I carefully and consistently urge them to see feedback as necessary for growing as writers.

One strategy I incorporate is showing students the real-world process of submitting and publishing academic writing; for example, my own experience publishing a policy brief:

This context, I think, helps some with the anxiety students feel about feedback and their tendency to view that feedback as negative (even though I am not grading them and they are performing in a low-stakes environment).

None the less, students at the college level have been so powerfully trained into the reductive behaviorism of success/failure, tests/grades, and avoiding mistakes that authentic process writing and writing outcomes (students write on topics by choice) are too foreign for them to fully engage.

What concerns me beyond why and how my students are struggling (in justifiable ways) is that I also see teachers and professors complaining about “students today” on social media.

Those complaints are quintessentially American responses—blaming the individuals while ignoring the systemic influences.

Our students are struggling in heightened ways because of the disruptions of Covid/post-Covid formal schooling. But traditional and uncritical commitments to reductive behaviorism are also at the core of their struggling as well.

Many if not most of the traditional approaches to schooling in the US are antagonistic not only to learning but also to the basic humanity of students and teachers.

Learning to write is a journey, a process, but so is all learning.

Students are the canaries in the coal mine warning us that education is too often dehumanizing and reductive. When students choose not to fully engage with that education, they may be making the most reasonable decision by choosing themselves.

grammar, Lou LaBrant, Writing

Writing Is Learned by Writing: 2023

The odd nostalgia for sentence diagramming popped up again so a thread that builds on an older post of mine—Diagramming Sentences and the Art of Misguided Nostalgia:

Links from Thread

Writing Is Learned by Writing (1953)

Writing topics by LaBrant

Writing Is More than Structure (1957)

grammar Nazis (post-apostrophe literature)

Thomas, P.L. (2019). Teaching writing as journey, not destination: Essays exploring what “teaching writing” means. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Education, Teaching, Writing

Teaching and Learning in Writing-Intensive Courses

The fall of 2023, I will be walking into my year 40 as a teacher. I started my career journey as a high school English teacher in the high school where I graduated and even the same English classroom I had sat in as a student during my sophomore and junior years.

The somewhat early years teaching high school English at Woodruff High (Woodruff, SC).

Many of the teachers had been my teachers when I was a student, and I was then (seemingly suddenly) a colleague with veteran and well-loved members of the school and my small hometown.

One of those English teachers assigned their seniors only one essay, due at the end of the academic year and never returned or commented on by that teacher. Many of those seniors were destined for college and had essentially no writing instruction their entire senior year—filled instead with weekly vocabulary tests, grammar tests, and textbook tests on British literature.

Just down the hall, I was embarking on 18 years of responding to about 4000 essays per year by my students; I was committed to teaching students to write well by having them write often and in workshop experiences.

I just completed my spring 2023 semester, which had two writing-intensive courses. This spring followed my only sabbatical experience in the fall of 2022, although I had been in higher education for 20 years.

I returned to teaching with a renewed commitment to decreasing stress and high-stakes for my students while trying to foster greater engagement by those students.

For about three-quarters of my teaching career, lowering stress and high-stakes has included de-grading and de-testing my courses, although the de-grading applied to assignments since I still had/have to assign course grades (see here about delaying grades).

However, once again, a number of students offered feedback on student evaluations that deflate significantly my enthusiasm for many of my efforts to support autonomous students.

In courses with required conferencing, some students noted that conferences should be required; this disconnect is linked to students being responsible for requesting and scheduling those conferences.

In a semester where I responded to about 200 essays over three courses and 24 total students, some students complained that I did not provide enough feedback for their work and/or that my feedback was too negative or not specific enough (see here about negative feedback).

At the core of these tensions and disconnects, I feel, is the essential paradox of who is responsible for learning.

For over twenty years now, I am teaching adults, yes, young adults, but college students are adults. My career before higher education was high school, and again, I worked with teens and young adults.

Yet, most students have experiences in formal schooling that teaches them they are passive agents in the teaching/learning dynamic. My students, particularly those who struggle in my course, think the responsibility for their learning is me, the teacher.

My teaching is grounded in critical pedagogy, and I practice an awareness that the role of the teacher is to teach with the role of the student, to learn. More nuanced is Freire’s argument that the teacher is always a teacher/student and the student is always a student/teacher.

Critical pedagogy views teaching and learning as liberatory—to learn is to become fully human, which is a state that requires autonomy.

Broadly, my role as a teacher (and mentor) is to provide the ideal context for students to learn; however, I cannot make someone learn.

As painful as this is to admit, teaching does not guarantee learning, and ultimately, learning is the role of the student (acknowledging that far too many students are in life situations that inhibit that autonomy).

My students are mostly in ideal contexts to learn, yet they often struggle even as I create courses with low stakes (no grades, no tests, no lateness penalties, etc.) and encourage high engagement; that struggle is grounded in the stress that students feel by having the responsibility for learning shifted from me to them.

Traditional and enduring practices around assigning and teaching writing prove to be barriers for student autonomy—essay prompts, rubrics, comprehensive marking of student writing, etc.

Here is another story from my first years of teaching.

A very highly regarded teacher of English moved to the high school when my district reorganized around a middle school concept and shifted ninth grader from our junior high to the high school.

I often taught that teacher’s students, and they explained to me that they would submit their essays, and then the teacher would return the papers with comments before using the overhead to show the students how to rewrite the essays.

Students dutifully followed the essay that teacher rewrote for them and resubmitted essentially identical essays.

My students today often have one of those two experiences—the negligent writing teachers who assign almost no writing or provide no real feedback or the hyper-controlling teacher who uses scripted prompts and rubrics (the enduring five-paragraph essay included) while also commenting exhaustively on submitted essays.

For those students, my classes are disorienting and often difficult to navigate.

While I have worked for decades to reduce high-stakes environments in my courses to reduce stress, students are often stressed when the responsibility for learning is shifted toward them

As I ponder how to revise further my writing-intensive courses, I continue to look for ways to increase student engagement. Currently, here are the structures I use with varying degrees of effectiveness:

  • Reducing how much I copyedit and comment on student drafts and increasing face-to-face conferencing.
  • Providing students with resources that support their learning to revise and edit their own writing.
  • Grounding writing assignments in authentic forms of writing and inviting students to explore examples of published writing to support their own awareness about forms and purposes for writing.
  • Maintaining a culture of low-stakes that includes not grading student work while in process, establishing workshop environments for students as writers, and providing structure for students without using punitive or coercive procedures.
  • Establishing minimum requirements for student engagement that include required drafting of essays as well as options for additional drafts and conferences by choice and request.

A couple years ago, I created guidelines for students to better support their own drafting, revising, and editing—How to Revise Your Essay after Receiving Feedback—and guidelines for how students should navigate my use of highlighting when providing feedback on essays—Revising Drafts with Highlighting as Feedback.

Regretfully, I am not seeing these materials being as effective as I hoped because at the core of the problem is not my structure or guidance, but that students remain committed to seeing my role not as teaching but as making them learn.

For example, I often mark needed revisions on essays and add a comment to check for the issues throughout the essay, yet most students only revise what I have marked.

That is a habit they bring to my classes, and one I find nearly impossible to break.

What I am addressing as a writing teacher, then, is a subset of how to foster learning autonomy in students.

Traditional schooling and the pervasive consequences of the Covid era are working against students’ abilities to recognize and embrace that autonomy.

And having an outlier class like mine that centers student autonomy, despite my commitment to lowering stress and high-stakes, is ironically highly stressful for my students.

And thus, I have much to ponder before walking into my classrooms for year 40 this coming fall.

Education, literacy, Lou LaBrant, reading, Science of Reading, Teaching, Writing

Beyond Reading Skills: Phonics, Vocabulary, and Knowledge

When I entered the classroom as an English teacher in 1984 at the high school where I had graduated just five years earlier, students lugged around two huge textbooks for their English courses, one of which was Warriner’s English grammar text.

Students were conveniently color coded by these texts since the publishers provided different ability and grade levels of the literature and grammar texts. And universally students hated these textbooks, the carrying and their use in the classrooms.

Since I taught different ability levels (we used and A, B, C level system for each grade) and grades, I had about 15 textbooks across my five courses because students in English also were assigned vocabulary books (the publisher we used proudly printed in bright letters that these vocabulary books prepared students for the SAT!).

At least the vocabulary books were small paperbacks.

Two important facts stand out about those first couple years teaching in the traditional expectations for English teachers at that school (mostly the same teachers who taught me as a student): first, Warriner’s regardless of grade or ability level had essentially the exact same chapters for teachers to systematically and comprehensively teach every year, and second, teachers expressed repeatedly that students never learned those grammar lessons, noting that student writing failed to improve in terms of grammar, mechanics, and usage.

Another big picture point to make here is that when I was a student, grammar texts included lessons on “shall” and “will”; that my students had to cover an entire chapter and be tested on “who” and “whom”; and both my students and I had to “learn” about pronoun/antecedent agreement (specifically the use of “they” as plural only).

Today, we must acknowledge that all of these rules and the consequences of students “not learning them” have evaporated since “shall” and “whom” have graciously disappeared and “they” has been (finally) acknowledged as a resourceful pronoun.

As a beginning teacher, I had entered education to teach writing, although, of course, I loved literature also. Yet, the grammar- and skills-centric approach to teaching English, I recognized, was failing students miserably—I mean literally because students were miserable, learning to hate English, writing, and literature.

Of course, my stories here speak to a disturbing reality in education: Lou LaBrant, writing in 1946, noted: “We have some hundreds of studies now which demonstrate that there is little correlation (whatever that may cover) between exercises in punctuation and sentence structure and the tendency to use the principles illustrated in independent writing” (p. 127). And then in 1947: “A brief consideration will indicate reasons for the considerable gap between the research currently available and the utilization of that research in school programs and methods” (p. 87).

Yet, English teachers throughout the decades kept beating their heads against the grammar and skills wall, lamenting “kids today” for not being good writers—regardless of decade, regardless of the grammar programs implemented.

This raises a current issue about “scientific” or “evidence” as the basis for how teachers teach, notably in the current reading war.

Here, I think, is an excellent overview by Jal Mehta (Harvard University) about why calling for “scientific” or “evidence” to mandate teaching literacy is just as misguided as the evidence-free practices I witnessed as a beginning teacher almost 40 years ago:

What may have started out about a decade ago as a sincere plea similar to LaBrant’s—the teaching of reading in practice often failed to be effectively evidence-based (“scientific”)—has turned into the exact sort of one-size-fits-all ideological movement that Jal warns about: scientific as a “weapon.”

The SOR movement has refueled the myth of the bad teacher, continued to perpetuate false narratives of crisis and miracle schools, profited the education marketplace, and driven deeply problematic reading legislation and policy, including inequitable grade retention.

The mistake being made is also perfectly identified by Jal: “In my experience, the best educators and leaders see lots of complexity, consider context, and artfully weave together different approaches to solve particular problems.”

Ironically, this is the exact approach grounding both whole language and balanced literacy as philosophies of teaching reading and writing; however, as we have witnessed, both WL and BL also became convenient labels for practices not following those philosophies or simply slurs ideologues use to criticize.

Instead, the SOR movement has become ideological and weaponized to create simplistic and unfounded crisis rhetoric for politicians and skills-driven reading policy and practice.

For example, no one argues that phonics, vocabulary, and knowledge are not key elements in reading. But the SOR movement demands a linear and sequential skills-first approach; teach phonics, vocabulary, and knowledge systematically before students read.

The skills-first approach is essentially authoritarian (what phonics, vocabulary, and knowledge students “need” is determined and outlined for students and teachers) and necessarily erases diversity of language and experiences by students.

The counter approach, the complex approach to reading, acknowledges the importance of elements such as phonics, vocabulary, and knowledge, but also honors that the relationship between so-called skills and reading is reciprocal, not linear or sequential.

In other words, yes, students need some direct and purposeful instruction in phonics, vocabulary, and knowledge building as they become beginning readers; however, most of a person’s acquisition of phonics, vocabulary, and knowledge comes from reading—not direct or systematic instruction.

The problem with systematic and comprehensive teaching of any literacy skills is that the goal and accountability around teaching and learning become the acquisition of the skills (phonics tests, vocabulary tests, knowledge tests) instead of the authentic goal of fostering eager, independent, and critical students who read.

Ultimately, if we genuinely want evidence-based reading instruction for children in the US, we must recognize that the most important sources of evidence are the children themselves and the most valuable person to understand what children need to read are their teachers.

However, beyond shifting to what evidence counts, we must also recognize that students and teachers cannot be successful unless we address learning and teaching conditions (the one move politicians refuse to make).

Regretfully, as Jal recognizes, students and teachers are again simply pawns in another fruitless war won by the SOR advocates “who are loudest about ‘evidence-based practices,’ [and] ironically tend to be more ideologues who have a few preferred solutions that they think can address every problem.”

Education, Writing

Revisiting the Research Paper Problem for College Students as Writers

About 15 years ago, my university overhauled the curriculum and academic calendar, including dropping the traditional English 101/102 approach to composition for a first-year seminar structure.

That moved the responsibility for teaching composition out of the English Department solely and across the entire university (a problem of writing pedagogy that the university didn’t acknowledge until several years later). Initially students were required to take two first-year seminars, one writing intensive and another that allowed students and professors to explore their passions.

The non-writing seminar was popular, but ultimately not sustainable so when the curriculum was updated a few years ago, we dropped the non-writing FYS and added an upper-level writing and research course requirement to better support teaching writing at the college level.

I have been teaching writing formally for 39 years, 18 years as a high school ELA teacher and currently 21 years and counting at the college level. Therefore, I have a great deal of experience and knowledge about teaching writing as part of a transition from high school to college (see recommended posts below).

As a high school ELA teacher, I focused on teaching writing, and for my advanced students, I worked diligently to prepare them for college. I am proud that many students returned during college and confirmed that they were better prepared as writers than many of their peers.

Embedded in that, of course, is that many students then—and now— enter college not well prepared to write at the college level. In fact, much of my work in my first-year writing seminar is helping students unlearn beliefs and practices about writing that helped them be very successful in high school—but that were guaranteed to be far less effective in college.

A significant part of that needed transition is the misguided “research paper” approach to writing cited essay and an overemphasis of the singular importance of MLA as a style and citation guide.

Elements of the inauthentic “research paper” model of writing cited essays include the following:

  • Students following templates and prescribed steps to gathering sources and producing a paper in MLA format.
  • Students writing with a stilted style that focuses on their “research” and “sources” instead of incorporating sources as authoritative evidence in an original essay and purpose.
  • Students using a “one source at a time” organization and discussion pattern that focuses on covering the sources instead of writing an original essay.

I address these issues directly in my FYW, scaffolding the course from a first essay that is personal narrative, to an essay citing entirely with hyperlinks, and then to a formally cited scholarly essay in which they use APA style and citation.

That FYW experience in my course is transitional and foundational, and I would say moderately effective. But I also recognize that teaching composition at the college level is not a mere inoculation; one course over 3-4 months cannot a scholarly writer make.

So I am always eager to work with my upper-level writing/research course—where every class I am confronted with how powerful the “research paper” model of writing remains in students two or three years into college.

Just yesterday, my students in the upper-level writing/research course turned in their major cited essay grounded in their course project—analyzing and evaluating how media covers a key education topic.

The course is heavily structured and scaffolded to help students write a very advanced and difficult cited essay. Part of that structure is that I almost daily remind them that the focus of their work is media analysis, which I punctuate with “You are not writing a research paper on your education topic.”

As has become expected in this course, however, students mostly submitted research papers on their education topics and tended to write using the strategies I identified above that they learned in high school—mostly writing about their sources (even calling them “sources) and simply covering all their sources one at a time.

Many students almost entirely failed to even mention media, and they all continue to struggle with the complex expectations for writing an original analysis and evaluating media coverage—especially the stylistic differences they need to practice in different sections of the essay.

Here is the full assignment and guiding support for the assignment (which I revised and refine every time I teach the course):

Assignment

Students will conduct a research project in which they critically analyze how the above chosen issue is presented in the mainstream media, and write in a workshop format (multiple drafts, conferencing) an 8-10 page essay using APA format (see link above and student resources provided) detailing how well or not the media has presented the research. See Sample APA 7e with comments. NOTE: This cited essays is primarily a critical analysis of media coverage, and not simply an essay on your chosen education topic. The essay should include the following major sections: opening, literature review, media coverage, relationship between research and media, and closing/conclusion.

For 8-10 pages, a proposed structure:

Opening – about 1 page (2-4 paragraphs); be sure to include essay focus on media

literature review – 2 pages; focus on *patterns* in the sources (write about your topics, not the sources); must be fully cited (prefer synthesis and avoid presenting one source at a time) and address all scholarly sources included in references

media analysis – 2 pages; focus on *patterns* in the media and include several examples; directly identify media outlets and journalists

media evaluation (relationship between research and media) – 2 pages; this is the most important goal of the essay so evaluate the media coverage by implementing your knowledge of the scholarship (do not refer to “research” or “sources”); must be fully cited

closing/conclusion – about 1 page (2-4 paragraphs); must emphasize essay focus, media analysis

You MUST follow APA guidelines; please refer to this SAMPLE.

And please review this CHECKLIST.

Assignment Submission Guidelines

Research project essay: Submit research project cited essay in both the initial and final submissions (all drafts should be complete and in proper format, even when submitting “rough” or initial drafts) as Word files and attach to email with “research project essay” in the subject line. See APA 7e guidelines here and Sample APA 7e with comments. Submit essay as a Word file, and format in Times New Roman font, 12 pt., double space, with 1″ margins. Each file should be named “lastname essay.docx” (as you revise and resubmit, add RW, RW2, RW3, etc., to the file name to designate multiple drafts).

Peer conferencing cited essay in class; have a copy of your cited essay (hard copy or on your device) to peer review with classmates.

Checklist for peer-review:

[ ] Formatted with 2 page breaks (after title page and after last page, before references)

[ ] Opening: narrative and focus/thesis identifying media coverage of educational topic

[ ] Four level two subheads: lit review, media analysis, relationship of media and research (key section of the essay), and closing

[ ] Fully use *all* sources and fully cite throughout the essay

[ ] APA formatting

I am very clear and address directly that the assignment is challenging, in many ways preparing students for graduate school. But I also believe this is an important entry point to writing well as an undergradute.

Students spend the first half of the course exploring writing (we examine scholarly personal narrative) and study educational research; they also carefully research both scholarly evidence on their education topic while gathering recent examples of media coverage.

Their first major assignment is to produce an annotated bibliography of those sources, and I stress that this is a process scholars use to support writing their essays (noting that creating an annotated bibliography is for them as writer and scholars, not just an assignment to follow).

The sections—literature review, media analysis, media evaluation—force them to write with different styles within one essay.

Some students struggle with focusing rhetorically on the patterns found in their scholarly sources for the literature review; they tend still to write about the sources and walk through them one at a time.

The media analysis requires that they do close textual analysis (a much different style than the literature review). We ground that in critical discourse analysis [Theory and Practice in Critical Discourse Analysis (PowerPoint)], but they also tend here simply to summarize the media examples one at a time, not focusing on patterns or how media covers the topic.

Along with not being adept with analysis, they do not understand that using sources is a way to lend authority to their own evaluation. Some of this is rhetorical since they want to say “research shows” instead of allowing the parenthetical citation to support their wording.

As I have noted before, students would be much better served if high school set aside the reductive research paper method and instead established some concepts for students about how and why academic and scholarly writing incorporates sources into writing:

  • Explain to students that citation formats are a subset of style guidelines that are discipline specific. MLA, for example, is often required in high school English classes because it is the style guide favored in some of the humanities. I forefront for students the stylistic expectations of style guides in the context of disciplinary expectations (APA uses dates in parenthetical citations because when a study is conducted is important in the social sciences, for example) and stress that many of the formatting quirks of a style guide are tedious and thus not to be memorized. In short, students need to learn to use style guides as a reference, not “learn MLA,” etc.
  • Focus on centering academic and scholarly writing around questions that the essay will explore and answer instead of declarative thesis sentences. Students as young scholars benefit from a humble and nuanced pose versus asserting a level of certainty that they simply do not yet have.
  • Foster an understanding of a wide range of ways to offer evidence and support in academic writing. Since many students write cited essays as literary/textual analysis in their English classes, they “learn” that the only or most important evidence is quoting—yet quoting from social science sources is not recommended in APA or even relevant. In fact, writing expectations in many disciplines prefer students synthesizing multiple sources into they own words to show a body of evidence. Paraphrasing and citing multiple sources shows sophistication and understanding that simply summarizing one source at a time cannot.
  • Stress that citation in original writing is a tool, not the goal of writing. As writers they need to start with clear content purposes that then lead to searching for sources that help them gain the knowledge and authority to write a compelling essay. They should move away from “my sources say” to “I know this” and include citations to stand on the shoulder of giants.

My university’s shift from English Department-based composition to first-year seminars has had many stumbles and falls, but the core principle of moving writing instruction across all the disciplines is essentially far more authentic.

As my assignment above demonstrates, academic and scholarly writing often is a blend of modes and purposes that demand a great deal from a purposeful and effective writer.

This sort of writing is very challenging, and students would benefit from being introduced early to these concepts so that so much of college instruction need no longer be spent helping them unlearn the “research paper” method.

Recommended

What Do College Professors Want from Incoming High School Graduates?

Transitioning from High School to College: (Re)considering Citation Edition

Making the Transition from Writing in High School to Writing in College

Fostering the Transition from Student to Writer

poetry, The National, Writing

Fostering Purposefulness (and Not Correctness) in Students as Writers: The National Edition

A confluence of language has washed over me lately, completely an accident of living. I have been reading and finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger just as The National has begun releasing singles from their upcoming album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein.

Currently my favorite band, The National’s music is characterized by their lead singer’s (Matt Berninger) literary elements, augmented by co-writing with his wife, Carin Besser. The new album leans heavily into the literary with the odd title, grounded in Berninger’s struggles with writer’s block when starting to compose this album.

The first three releases—“Tropic Morning News,” “New Order T-Shirt,” and “Eucalyptus”—sound like they have 1960s and 1980s pop influences and offer what appears to be an evolution in Berninger as a lyricist.

These three songs seem grounded in “Not in Kansas” from I am Easy to Find, a rambling sort of song that achieves its lyrical/poetic elements in many rhetorical and syntactical ways while also depending on specific details (such as references to other musical groups).

Having been a serious writer since my first year of college, I am often drawn to words and language in my hobbies, and lyrics fascinate me in the same way that poetry does.

I spent almost two decades teaching poetry to high school students through the songs of R.E.M. And among the many things I miss about teaching high school English is that I don’t have the space as I did then to engage students with lyrics as models for writing with purpose (a much more foundational writing skill than correctness).

As a poet and a teacher, I am not arguing that all students should love poetry (although I suspect that student resistance to poetry is mostly instilled in them by formal schooling ruining poetry), but I do maintain that studying how poetry/lyrics are written is an excellent context for fostering purposeful students as writers.

Lyrics are poetry adjacent; lyrics absent the music are not necessarily poetry, but a form of composing that embraces an essential quality of poetry—economy of language.

Poetry as a form relies on a purposeful structure—lines and stanzas—and a heightened form of expression through language. Poems tends to be brief and most pop songs hover around 3 minutes so these forms of text share that urgency to make the most out of the fewest words possible.

Yes, there are prose poems and book-length poems, but even then, these poetic forms are formed in tension with expectations of lines/stanzas and brevity.

What has struck me with the first 3 songs off The National’s upcoming album is Berninger’s (and when co-writing with Besser) use of specific details as well as rhetorical and syntactical patterns that raise the lyrics to poetry beyond the expected use of rhyme.

I want to focus here on two of the songs, “New Order T-Shirt” and “Eucalyptus,” as models for fostering purposefulness in students as writers.

A writing challenge in poetry and lyrics is achieving a coherent text within a very short space while also attending to more than creating meaning; to that last point, poetry and lyrics often depend heavily on exact word choice and rhetorical/syntactical elements in a compressed and layered way that isn’t necessarily in prose (although my recent McCarthy reading drifts far closer to poetry than standard prose).

So how do the lyrics of these two songs demonstrate qualities students as writers should aspire to?

First, I want to highlight how rhetorical and syntactical elements of raise the language of two songs to “poetic” (in the same way we associate rhyme and meter with “poetic”).

Consider the following:

When you rescued me from the customs cops in Hawaii
When I shut down the place with my Japanese novelty bomb
And your dad came along
How you had me lay down for a temperature check
With the cool of your hand on the back of my neck
When I said, “I think I’m finally going crazy for real”

“New Order T-Shirt”

What about the glass dandelions?
What about the TV screen?
What about the undeveloped cameras?
Maybe we should bury these
What about the last of the good ones?
What about the ceiling fans?
What if we moved back to New York?
What about the moondrop light?

“Eucalyptus”

Both songs’ opening stanzas are compelling and coherent structurally, relying on rhetorical patterns—the “when” and “how” clauses drive “New Order T-Shirt” and the “what” questions anchor “Eucalyptus.”

In typical Berninger fashion, these two examples also highlight how the specific details give writing weight and richness; both songs are heavily concrete, including a dependence on proper nouns and details.

Focusing on how the songs open also contributes to helping students interrogate how meaning is built by the writer and for the reader. The writer must have a coherent plan and purpose, but also present a text in a way that allows the reader to construct meaning.

Although cliche and a bit simplistic, poetry and lyrics when done well capture the truism “show, don’t tell” since the meaning comes from the whole text as a result of its parts.

Like poetry, as well, lyrics depend heavily on sound and patterns.

We expect rhyme in lyrics and poetry, so the near rhyme of “screen” and “these” in “Eucalyptus” both draws in and disorients the listener, reinforcing the complex topic of the song dealing with what appears to be a break up.

In those lyrics also, Berninger plays with meaning in the chorus:

You should take it ’cause I’m not gonna take it
You should take it, I’m only gonna break it
You should take it ’cause I’m not gonna take it
You should take it, you should take it

“Eucalyptus”

The listener must navigate the tension in the layers of the chorus: “take it” as in physically possessing an object and then “take it” as in putting up with a situation.

Rhetoric, syntax, and diction are the tools of the poet/lyricist who has chosen to work within the limiting constraints of poetry or a pop song; that’s where the economy of language and the need to express merge, creating poetic language.

There are many more things students could be asked to do with these lyrics, but I wanted here to start and continue a consideration of how lyrics and poetry can serve as powerful models for being an effective writer through acknowledging purposefulness and control by the writer.

There are no temples, and simplistic rules for writing often fall flat (like “show, don’t tell”), but there are enduring concepts emerging writers need to examine and adopt.

Concrete and specific details, rhetorical patterns applied with purpose, and paying attention to the sounds and emotional impact of words and syntax—this is the stuff of writing well, and these are the elements found throughout the songs I have identified here.

Some aspects of becoming a writer are ignored or simply bulldozed over, yet are as essential as the things we have traditionally taught (five-paragraph essays, rubrics, correctness, etc.)—such as engaging the reader and balancing the content of writing with the aesthetics of language.

Lyrics and poetry are ideal for highlighting those ignored elements because they are brief, rich, and engaging.

For a while now, this has been playing over and over in my head:

How you had me lay down for a temperature check
With the cool of your hand on the back of my neck
When I said, “I think I’m finally going crazy for real”

“New Order T-Shirt”

As a fan, this clearly resonates with me, but as a writer/teacher I want students to investigate how these lines are compelling—the rhetorical patterns (“how,” “when”) throughout the song creating meaning and the details shaping a very brief but compelling narrative.

Unlike (for me) McCarthy’s The Passenger, the three new songs from The National are satisfying and fulfilling, even when I find some of them fragmentary, possibly incomplete.

They also warrant re-listening because that element of fulfilling grows over time with the text and complete song.

Our students are unlikely to be poets, lyricists, or even writers beyond formal schooling, but there is a great deal to be gained from exploring purposeful things in order to foster purposefulness in what we do and why.

The speaker in “New Order T-Shirt” admits a few times, “I carry them with me like drugs in a pocket,” and for me, this is the thing about poems and songs I love. That line reminding me:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in], e.e. cummings

Finally, I think, we often get lost trying to teach writing, mired in the technical, the rules and such. But language is more often about how we feel and about our need to communicate through language.

Poetry and lyrics are an ideal medium for not getting lost in the technical when inviting students to explore becoming writers.

Recent Poem

closer (turn inside out before washing)

ChatGPT, Education, Writing

ChatGPT and a New Battle in the Citation Gauntlet for Students and Teachers

The responses to AI writing in the form of ChatGPT have run the gamut from thoughtful to frantic (see both in my own consideration), but the International Baccalaureate response has added a new battle in the citation gauntlet for students and teachers:

Schoolchildren are allowed to quote from content created by ChatGPT in their essays, the International Baccalaureate has said.

The IB, which offers an alternative qualification to A-levels and Highers, said students could use the chatbot but must be clear when they were quoting its responses.

ChatGPT has become a sensation since its public release in November, with its ability to produce plausible responses to text prompts, including requests to write essays.

While the prospect of ChatGPT-based cheating has alarmed teachers and the academic profession, Matt Glanville, the IB’s head of assessment principles and practice, said the chatbot should be embraced as “an extraordinary opportunity”.

ChatGPT allowed in International Baccalaureate essays

This hamfisted move by IB has prompted another layer to the debate:

IB’s “exactly wrong” response to ChatGPT and McCormick’s criticism come on the heels of my first-year writing students submitting their second essay of the semester, an assignment that introduces them to academic citation at the college level through using hyperlinks to support their claims and discussions.

This assignment is grounded in two concerns.

First, students often come to college having learned “to do MLA” and “to write research papers,” which inculcates in them writing like students instead of writing in authentic ways or as scholars/academics.

Second, first-year students are often buried under the weight of formatting citation and less engaged with why and how citation works in authentic texts.

Therefore, hyperlinking as citation and incorporating online sources into original writing allow students to navigate that why and how of citation and using sources while primarily focusing on original ideas and claims in the context of finding and using credible sources to establish their authority as writers.

The next essay assignment requires students to do scholarly citation using APA; therefore, essay 2 is a type of scaffolding to address student misconceptions learned before college.

My teaching style is grounded in workshop structures—students doing holistic behaviors and producing authentic artifacts of learning—as well as providing less upfront direct instruction, models of products being created by students, and then individualized instruction grounded in the artifacts students submit. Of course, much of the learning comes from, in writing-intensive courses, conferencing and revising.

One student, for example, who seems sincerely engaged in the course submitted their essay 2 with the first hyperlink being to Wikipedia.

I had given the class the standard Wikipedia talk I offer: Academia frowns on Wikipedia so you should never cite it, but Wikipedia may be a good place to start thinking and brainstorming, although it certainly isn’t a solid source to end your research.

I reminded them of that in my comment, and once again, reminded the class of this aspect of finding and using credible sources in academic writing.

Essay 2 is once again proving to be a valuable instructional tool about seeking out sources to understand topics and claims better, incorporating citation into writing to support claims and give writing (and the writer) authority, and the seemingly arbitrary standards for citation that vary among different fields (journalism has a much different standards for citation than academia, for example).

Now that IB has christened ChatGPT as citable, students and teachers have yet another layer of problems in the tensions between plagiarism and citation.

Despite IB’s stance, as McCormick rightfully notes, ChatGPT is not citable, not a credible source.

Part of the reason reminds me of the SAT writing debacle that also included computers—machine grading of the writing portion of the test.

As Thomas Newkirk mused in 2005, machine graded writing on the SAT allowed students to “invent evidence” because the computer rubric rewarded the appearance of evidence, not the credibility or even accuracy of evidence; simply putting words in quote marks and ascribing that to someone could fulfill the rubric for proof.

This, as some have noted, is what ChatGPT will do, along with other forms of fabrication.

Citation and incorporating sources in original writing are about the conversation of deep and critical thinking as well as about the ethics of attribution of ideas; in academia, we often call that standing on the shoulders of giants.

It doesn’t have to be that grand, but scholarship and thoughtful thinking and writing should acknowledge that knowing and knowledge are communal, not the product of the solitary mind.

I have come to recognize citation as an unnecessary gauntlet for students, something like academic hazing.

As I tell students, I hope someday we all simply hyperlink as citation to eradicate the mindless formatting nonsense from an otherwise noble behavior: Simply acknowledging that I am not alone in this thinking and many smart and careful people have wrestled with this also in diverse and engaging ways.

Until then, sigh, we teachers and our students are now confronted with another battle tossed in the heap of traps for the emerging students-as-writers.

Added to our lessons on choosing sources, warnings about Wikipedia, and fervent fist-waving about plagiarism, the Brave New World of ChatGPT—and the likelihood that students will arrive in higher ed not only trapped in “doing MLA” and “writing research papers,” but citing AI because their IB program told them it is ok.

See my many posts on citation.