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Jason & The Bottlenecks

Explore the challenges of transitioning to independent research-based essays in ENG 101 and learn how to overcome the bottleneck to learning. Discover effective strategies to treat the writing process as a dynamic conversation and make original arguments based on facts and expert opinions.

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Jason & The Bottlenecks

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  1. Jason & The Bottlenecks Adventures in Reflective Pedagogy

  2. Jason and the Bottlenecks in performance

  3. What is the Bottleneck to learning in this class • ENG 101, Freshman Composition • Difficulty transitioning from papers based on essays that we’ve provided to writing an essay based on their own research. • Treating the writing process AS a process • Treating the “right” answer as “guess what’s in the teacher’s head.” • Treating research as finding smart people to confirm your existing thoughts. • Making an original argument based on facts and expert opinion.

  4. The bottleneck in action • Student begin writing their papers, and type until they reach the required number of pages. The first pages are mostly throat clearing, question asking, and undigested quotations, with a final page or final paragraph that quickly responds to the actual prompts. • Students do not think that there is anything to do with this document except to proofread it.

  5. Metaphors for the Bottleneck • Metaphor for Process based failures • Giving a romantic partner seeds instead of flowers • Serving a guest Uncooked Pasta • Metaphor for Process based reading • Mowing a lawn/vacuuming a carpet • Buying a shirt • Metaphor for an ongoing and dynamic conversation • Relationship Counseling • Should my brother get married?

  6. How do experts approach this? Hoffman, 1992: Make an I-Chart to map out research

  7. How do experts approach this? • Gaipa, 2004: Drawing the student-author’s relationship to the authors of published research (the student finds a dynamic relationship to their own research)

  8. How have I been addressing this bottleneck? • Revision

  9. Can these tasks be explicitly modeled? • In the Writing Center we used an order of operations to approach student work: • 1. Is the student on topic/completing the assignment? • 2. Is there a thesis? • 3. Is the the thesis supported? • 4. Is the paper well organized? • 5. Is the paper grammatically correct? • So having seen many assignments fail, I’m hesitant to schedule to the point where I feel that I lose the ability to meet students. Rather, I’ve been using something entirely responsive, but it is not succeeding in making the process iterative. • So rather than focusing on discussion, which often feels like an attempt to find the “right” answer, creating assignments to stage and scaffold the paper.

  10. How will students practice these skills and get feedback? • Quizzes– were proxies for attendance and a reward for punctuality and reading. • Restructured quizzes from this semester: • Annotated bibliographies (new bottleneck: the students use annotated bibliographies as works cited pages) • Asking to see a basica outline of the paper (just thesis and three topic sentences)

  11. What will motivate the students? • In the best papers, the students are surprised by the controversy and end up having strong– but complex—feelings about the subject. • In the worst papers, students take a “morally abstract” position, without considering larger questions. They often complete quizzes after the paper has already been turned in. • Further research/bottleneck: how to motivate students who remain passive?

  12. Scaffolded Assignment • Andrew Yang’s plan for UBI (will/will not) ameliorate income inequality. • Kosoko Jackson was (right/wrong) to prevent the publication of his novel. • Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till (should/should not) be destroyed. • The Brooklyn Museum of Art was (right/wrong) to hire a lead curator of African art who is white. • The transmission of HIV (should/should not) be criminalized. • Walking while texting (should/should not) be illegal. • Leggings (are/are not) pants and (can/cannot) be worn to school, work, and church.

  13. Planned Scaffolds for Next Semester • Planned scaffolds for next semester: • Annotated bibliographies on popular sources (new bottleneck: the students use annotated bibliographies as works cited pages) • Working thesis based on initial research, and larger “abstract” question to be considered with academic research. • Revised annotated bibliography with scholarly/peer-reviewed source. • Basic outline of the paper (just thesis and three topic sentences)

  14. Plans for the future • Recreate the Gaipa experiment. • Use quizzes to get manageable staged reports, with manageable amounts of feedback required from me.

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