Course Metacommentary
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At Alma College where I teach, Rhetoric 101 is required for all freshman and is the only writing class any of them are required to take—even English majors.  Too, critical thinking is one of Alma College’s main liberal arts objectives and—fortunately or unfortunately, I can’t decide which—they have thrown the beginnings of this squarely in the lap of my course; if their writing is weak or their critical thinking skills are poor, we as English 101 teachers are often blamed.  A lot of responsibility is on our shoulders.  Yet despite the pressure and the heavy responsibility, I love to teach this course and my students seem to enjoy it.  Part of this enjoyment, I believe, comes from my attitude: I see my students as writers, I’m very enthusiastic, and I try to act as guide rather than teacher.  I also practice “discovery learning” whenever possible, which means my students experience a lot of failure before they find success.  Admittedly, I keep my students very busy: they have four major papers to write and eight small papers (1-3 pages), as well as five presentations to give over the course of the semester.  Yet I firmly believe that these three reasons are what make my course so fabulous.  My students work like crazy and fail at a lot of small tasks, yet they tend to leave the course as significantly stronger writers—and they still like me at the end.  I believe it is the combination these three pedagogical stances—attitude, practice theory, and discovery learning—that makes my course work.

The Complex Interweaving of My Three Pedagogies
Most of my in-class approach and much of my course design revolves around discovery learning, the idea that the students’ prior knowledge can simultaneously be tapped into and challenged, leading them to extend what they know into a learning experience.  Like Peter Elbow, I believe that “Writers testify all the time to the experience of knowing more than they can say, of knowing things that they haven’t yet been able to get into words” (75).  Discovery learning helps students put this knowledge into words.  Olson says “that the act of writing can be a means of learning and discovery” (7).  Through their writing, students can learn a lot.
           
Also imperative to this approach is that I don’t believe rhetoric is a body of knowledge that can be taught like calculus or astronomy, but is rather a skill, something that must be practiced and fine-tuned like music or gymnastics.  This would be similar, I believe, to the idea “discovered” at the Dartmouth conference back in 1966, the “Copernican shift from a view of English as something you learn about to a sense of it as something you do” (Harris 1).  We can direct students.  We can guide them.  We can point them in the right direction.  We can wince at the sour notes and let them know when they finally get them right.  We can encourage practice.  This is where my attitude comes into play: if I were the all-knowing one and they the empty vessels, the “guide” attitude would not be appropriate.  But this is not my attitude: rather I see myself as simply having had a heck of a lot more practice than they have.  So I’m not there to fill their heads with what I know but rather, as they write, help them discover the same things I have discovered as I have written.  And in order for this to happen, we need to make them write, write, write.  As David Smit says, “The subject of a writing course is writing” (186).  Through practice, they will discover their weaknesses and strengths and will hopefully find their own voice, learn to guide themselves, see themselves as writers as I do, and discover a lot along the way.  Does this sound idealistic?  Perhaps, but I believe that some of the struggles of my students have been alleviated by the combination of these three pedagogical approaches. 
           
My course is highly process-oriented as well.  This process relies, again, on discovery learning and that, as students “invent the university” as Bartholomae would put it, they begin to approximate the language they read and hear, the language of the academy (205).  So as they approximate, they begin to see all the writing they are doing and all the failures they are having as simply part of the process, as means rather than as ends.  Too, I try, as I teach, to talk in their discourse enough to make them feel at ease yet talk in academic discourse enough to familiarize them with it, based on Elbow’s idea that “language acquisition is the absence of teaching.  What people need for acquiring language is not teaching but to be around others who speak, to be listened to, and to be spoken to” (“Interchanges” 90).  This ideal again comes from an attitude of seeing students as fellow writers, people I am there to guide rather than empty slates I am there to write on.  It also is vital that this happens often, thus relies on practice.

One example of my pedagogical ideas being put into practice is easy to see in what I call “group conferencing.”  A group conference, in a nutshell, is a combination of a one-on-one conference and a peer workshop.  The students give one another their papers in groups of three, read them, and fill out the group conferencing sheet.  When the three come for their conference, I have not read the papers.  Instead, I ask all kinds of questions about purpose, what they’ve learned, what works well, etc.  While we talk through a student’s paper, the student who wrote the paper does not talk but only listens and takes notes.  I have done these for years and they are an absolute success, and for a variety of reasons: First of all, it alleviates pressure for me: I don’t have to read all their drafts and comment on them ahead of time.  Secondly, the students are put in a position where they are required to think critically about someone else’s paper, which in turn makes them think critically about their own writing.  Another reason for the success of group conferencing is that I am there—as opposed to workshops in class where I would only be able to float from group to group—to guide the students, making sure that they do more than simply tell the writer that they have a good paper, something I have seen happen more than once. 

And this is where these theories come into play.  I’m aware of the fact that my presence can change the nature of peer workshopping—but frankly that’s the whole idea.  Harvey Weiner feels that “the teacher’s presence as a group member challenges one of the basic tenets of collaboration in the classroom…to help students gain authority over their knowledge and gain independence in using it” (57).  While I can appreciate this problem, it isn’t my main concern in these workshops.  My main concerns are to make sure the workshop goes well, to make sure they are giving one another good advice, to make sure they are thinking critically.  I don’t honestly think that throwing students into peer workshops right away is productive: it’s tantamount to asking them to grade a paper, an activity at the top of Bloom’s taxonomy (see below).  They don’t know what they’re doing.  Group conferencing is a sort of discovery learning, a scaffolding if you will.  And they do peer workshops without me, but not right away.  Most of all, though, the students seem to really get a lot from this.  They feel at ease critiquing one another’s papers without feeling attacked, they get input from more than just me (they don’t think they get any input from me, which I think is great), and they get to know one another and enjoy reading each other’s papers.  In student comments at the end of the semester, these group conferences get more positive comments than anything else I do.
Assignments and Sequencing: Units One through Five
My assignment sequence also follows these three pedagogical stances.  They write short papers and do presentations that are graded much easier, and mostly these are done in groups or in online forums.  These small projects give them lots of practice while allowing them to flounder and fail a bit before they have to write their bigger paper that I grade harder.  So this is my way of guiding them, giving them practice, and letting them discover as they go—all while they are preparing and working on the process of their major paper for the unit.  At the core, however, the sequence is based on Bloom’s taxonomy, something I learned about back when I was getting my teaching certification.  Bloom’s taxonomy, in a nutshell, is based on the idea that students (all people, actually, in all circumstances) must achieve certain levels of learning before they can achieve others: first knowledge, then comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, then evaluation.  So, for example, students need to apply something they know and comprehend before they are adequately prepared to analyze, synthesize, or evaluate.  Bloom’s taxonomy follows the same assumptions that discovery learning does: it’s a sort of scaffolding, a sense of needing a certain thing to build on at various levels.  My course is set up in units.  Each unit builds on the previous one.  They begin with their opinions, then move on to applying their ideas through an argument strategy, then they analyze rhetoric, then they write a research paper. 

Unit One
They start with a subject they know and understand—school.  They start, too, with something else quite familiar: their opinions.  Most of their work in the first unit is done in groups and in online forums, a way to be sure everyone—including the quieter students—is heard.  This is also a way to “situate what they write into the conversation of other members of the classroom community to whom they are writing and whom they are reading” (Elbow 79).  In the first unit, students read articles about education, respond to the articles in an online forum, and form groups to do a bit of analysis on one of the articles, which they present to the class.  Then they go online and find blogs on topics dealing with education and they follow the same pattern: read, respond, analyze.  This time, however, they work alone rather than in groups.  The purpose of having students read and write about education is to allow them to work with a subject they know very well, one in which they have years of experience.  As Elbow would put it, “unless we can set things up so that our first year students are often telling us about things that they know better than we do, we are sabotaging the essential dynamic of writers.  We are transforming the process of “writing” into the process of “being tested” (81). 

While all this lovely theoretical stuff is happening, what the students are most aware of are the basic parts of rhetoric that I begin the course with: the five criteria for strong writing, showing rather than telling, and the three appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos.  The five criteria are what my rubrics are based on, but I have them actually make the rubrics, yet they always end up with the same things, and dividing them up into these five areas just makes it more clear to students.  Showing not telling is simply to get the students out of the habit of making claims without backing them up; I play a song about love and how words mean nothing if you don’t act like you love someone—the idea is pretty clear after we discuss this and connect it to writing.  And we analyze magazine ads to help them understand the basics of logos, pathos, and ethos—although I avoid using these terms for awhile (a terministic screen thing).  And, while I think it’s true that these ideas are not new at all to any users of language, the awareness of them and the study of them is, indeed, new to most college freshmen.  Again, it’s a discovery thing, a practice thing, and a guide thing. 

Unit Two
Once these basics are out of the way, the semester progresses into a series of papers that require a higher level of critical thinking.  The second unit, strategies of argumentation, asks students to argue for a definition of a word.  They still are working from what they already know and what they observe, yet this time their knowledge is not likely something they have ever thought about before: the power of words.  During this unit, students are learning rhetorical strategies by using them (Bloom’s “application”), they are learning to support their claims first by their own experiences then by a text, they are creating knowledge through class discussion and interaction, and they are creating an understanding of language and its complexities.  This all leads up, again, to their next major paper, one where they choose a word, define it, and then argue for that definition using text and their own experience.  This is a combination of the application and synthesis portion of Bloom’s taxonomy.  It scaffolds from the knowledge and comprehension of the first unit as well.  And, of course, still relies on practice, discovery, and guidance.
           
Unit Three
Unit three—rhetorical analysis—builds yet again on what they have done so far.  This unit is by far the most difficult, filled with “terministic screens,” academic discourse, and concepts foreign to most students.  I have yet to teach this unit without major whining and struggle.  Yet students are, inevitably, much better writers and critical thinkers for the experience.  They struggle with the critical thought involved when having to discover not only what writers say but also how they say it, what affect it has on readers, and why.  My belief is that this is often too much at once.  It’s like setting the table with a complete Thanksgiving dinner for a one-year-old who can barely digest Cheerios and expecting her to tackle the turkey leg, the cornbread stuffing, and the pumpkin pie.  Before doing rhetorical analysis, then, students write a paper concentrating on what they are saying and how they are affecting the reader, then a paper focused on how they create rhetoric.  At this point, hopefully, they are ready to analyze another’s rhetoric.
           
I have changed my approach to this assignment almost every semester.  Then last semester I hit on a gem: chatting their way through it.  So we take two days in the computer lab where the students are put in groups.  They have read and annotated the same article as the others in their group, and then they get online in Moodle (Alma’s version of Angel) and log into the chatrooms I set up for them, where I can jump in or watch.  I have a set of questions for them to work through as they chat.  This worked so well last year that I am going to do it again: I was amazed at how they managed to understand rhetoric and analyze it so well in this type of forum.  All this, again, leads into their major paper: analyzing and evaluating two articles on the same topic.  Their job is to read them, summarize them, then argue for which one is the most persuasive.  This paper, as before, combines the elements of the previous two—persuasion through personal knowledge and experience and persuasion using textual evidence—yet adds on the additional work of rhetorical analysis.  Too, they look carefully at words and their ambiguities; at logos, pathos, and ethos; and at argumentation strategies.  By this point they are at the top of Bloom’s taxonomy: this paper requires synthesis, analysis, and evaluation. 
           

Unit Four
Then, of course, the course culminates with “the big kahuna” as I put it: the research paper. Everything we have done so far leads up to this paper: they understand what goes into opinions, how to use different strategies to persuade, how language is ambiguous and tentative, how to read their research critically, and ultimately how to persuade.  They do very academic things like research proposals, annotated bibliographies, research reports, etc. I’m not as fond of this assignment as the others for various reasons, but I hope to create a semester that progresses to a place where students feel comfortable and prepared to write a long paper like this.  It usually is the case.
           
Unit Five
We do one more unit after the research paper, but it is a mini-unit and involves no formal writing.  We discuss visual rhetoric by studying editorial cartoons and the students do presentations.  This actually does build well on what they have learned over the semester, and the students do learn from this unit, but to be honest I do this unit mostly because I need the extra week to grade all the research papers.  If this weren’t the case, I would introduce visual rhetoric in a different way.   
           
I’ve been asked before who I lean toward more: Elbow or Bartholomae—but I don’t really know.  But like Elbow, “I insist I can have it both ways” (“Interchanges” 88).  Although I don’t consider the writer and academy to be as separate as Elbow does, I do believe that certain assignments can be considered more academic, like a research paper (one of the reasons I tend to like it less).  The audience is academia.  The subject is grounded in academia.  It’s an academic paper—like this one.  But I’m hoping students won’t see things this way.  I’m hoping they’ll see all of their writing as being both for them (the writer) and for me (the academy).  If they really think everything they do is just for school and in no way for them, that defeats the purpose of education, which is ultimately for the student.  This is why all my units also have an element of publication, one where the students’ ideas ultimately end up out in cyberspace for everyone to read.  I’m hoping, since this is the first time I’ve required this, that the additional element of writing for real audiences will matter—even if the audience remains mysterious and a bit ephemeral; at least someone outside of the classroom will be reading what they have to say.  It makes these assignments a bit more genuine.  I also encourage—and have a few times required—my students to submit their writing to the “My Turn” column in Newsweek and/or to submit it for the writing contest. 
           
I am not thinking that all my students will leave the semester loving writing like I do.  That would be highly unrealistic.  But I would like them to leave the semester feeling confident that they can write, and write well.  Many are unsure what freshman writing curricular goals should be, “whether they should focus on personal expressive writing, introduce students to the essential of academic discourse, promote the writing of essays as a way to reflect critically on significant cultural issues, or a number of other goals” (Smit 200).  I may be naïve, but I don’t know why we can’t include a small element of all these things.  I would never encourage an amateur musician to learn only one type of music or to play only one composer any more than I would encourage a writer to learn only one type of writing or one purpose for it—especially when they only have one semester to do it all.  Why can’t they practice a little bit of everything, so long as they are practicing? 
Assessment: Rubrics and Grading Scale
My course has several different means of assessment.  Half of their grade is based on their major papers and the other half (almost) is “process”: smaller papers, presentations, and ancillary writing.  I also give them two “tests” and they turn in a portfolio.  While I do understand and, in part, proscribe to the cognitive writing process theory, I feel more strongly drawn to the ecological model, the socially constructed model “of an infinitely extended group of people who interact through writing, who are connected by the various systems that constitute the activity of writing” (Cooper 372).  So assessment in my course is based on more than just final product. 

For example, their ancillary writing—journaling, freewriting, homework assignments, etc—has intrinsic value that cannot be achieved any other way.  As Elbow says, “Writing in class helps me not just sanction, dignify, and celebrate writing; it helps me frankly coach students in various concrete practices and techniques and approaches toward getting words on paper” (“Writer” 74).  When students are forced (or allowed, depending on how you look at it) to write what they are thinking without hesitating or editing their words, they are often surprised at what they come up with.  Because I would like them to then share or talk about what they have written, it takes the freewriting to another level: dialogic discourse.  This is where “students [can] situate what they write into the conversation of other members of the classroom community to whom they are writing and whom they are reading” (“Writer” 79).  This is where I can do that “coaching,” which in turn leads to wonderful discussion and hopefully wonderful ideas.  I wouldn’t necessarily define my entire philosophy of teaching around this, but as does David Sumner, I want students “to participate in in-class discussions about issues, to discover points of stasis, to generate questions at issue, and then to respond to those questions in argumentative essays” (Good and Warshauer 58).  The ancillary writings are to germinate all of this.

Rubrics
I grade all major papers using a rubric and those rubrics are based on the five criteria for grading essays (see this on the wiki).  My reasons are simple: First, I prefer to make grading as objective as possible and a rubric accomplishes this.  Second, I want grading to be as fast and simple for me as possible and a rubric accomplishes this as well.  Third, I feel students have a right to know why specifically they received the grade they did and, again, a rubric accomplishes this.  Fourth, I like having something concrete to refer to when working with revisions or talking to a student about a grade (although I haven’t had one student question a grade yet—perhaps because of the rubrics).  I design my rubrics, though, a bit differently than many others I have seen.  They are broken up into the five criteria and then, within each criteria, I specify what that would look like for each paper.  This comes from realizing that I was repeatedly writing the same comments over and over on student papers.  When I realized this, I decided instead to put them into the criteria, give them the rubric ahead of time so they know what they will be graded on, and then just go down the list and make check marks.  I still leave an end comment—using the “positive sandwich” (I don’t remember who I’m quoting here)—but this has reduced my grading time from over 30 minutes per paper to around 12. 
           
Grading Scale
As far as determining grades for the semester goes, I use a 1000-point scale.  I believe it is easier for students to know where they stand with their grade according to points rather than percentages or straight letter grades.  I gave ancillary writing 100 points (10%).  Students will be doing a considerable amount of writing in class, between journaling and writing prompts and drafts, and, while these are never really graded, they are important for them to do.  Thus I will be checking to see that they do these things regularly and give them credit for them.  The minor assignments and presentations all together are worth 250 points (25%).  The students will be writing and presenting a lot, so this simply makes sense to weight it this heavily.  I do grade these, on a 4.0 scale (which I then average and convert to points), yet I will readily admit that I am pretty easy on these.  I don’t use rubrics, I don’t pay much attention to mechanics, and what I’m looking for is critical thinking.  I make this clear to them and give them very specific ideas of what I’m looking for in each assignment (it varies).  In-class essays are each worth 50 points (5%), not enough to hurt their grade much if they don’t do well, but enough to make them matter.  They can mean the difference between an A and an A/B, for example, so students make sure to show up and write these.  Because I don’t really believe in testing in writing class, however, these serve other purposes and I don’t like to weight them too heavily.  Major papers are weighted each 100 points, except for the research paper which is certainly more difficult, more time-consuming, and longer and is therefore weighted 200 points, which altogether is the equivalent of half their grade.  I decided 100 points for the first three was sufficient to make them important yet not the be-all and end-all of their grades.  Technically they can, however, do poorly on every paper and still pass if they do everything else 100% (not that this would ever happen, but it’s possible).  The portfolio is required by my department and is not used as a major assessment tool.  I do, however, have them write a reflective statement to go with the portfolio and that is essentially what I grade.  I want them to put effort into this, so I give it 50 points (5%). 
           
I wanted to weight each portion of the class in ways that will help students understand that process and product are both important, that writing a lot is essential, and that success or failure in every area affects the success or failure of every other area.  Too much weight in any particular category deemphasizes those elements of composition that I believe are important.  I sometimes worry that my grading is too product-heavy, that I don’t put enough weight on process; it’s about 50/50.  I have leaned in the other direction before, but I have discovered that grading something as subjective as process is difficult (like grading something fuzzy like “participation”—who really is going to give a student a bad participation grade in college?).  Too, I have found that those students who do all the process stuff end up with good product and those who don’t participate in all the process work don’t have the best product—so inevitably the grade ends up the same.  

In the Bitter End…
I have been told many a time that I have a very demanding course, that my students are worked pretty darn hard.  I’ll admit it’s true.  But I’ll also back up my reasons for doing this every time, and much of it comes right back to the fact that my class is probably the only writing class they will every take at Alma (only one other is even offered!).  On top of this daunting pressure is the fact that Alma’s commitment to writing across the curriculum is pretty heavy: all students are required to take several “quill courses,” ones with a heavy writing emphasis.  When I was a student there, I had to write at least one paper in every single class I took—even my math class.  So I feel it’s imperative to offer these students the practice, guidance, and discovery that I believe they need in order to prepare them for this.  But there is more.  In my research paper unit, I tell students that “all these things matter in more ways than just writing research papers.  If you get good enough at this, if you learn the skills we have worked on in this class, they can help you be a successful parent, friend, worker, and citizen.  This stuff matters.”  And I firmly believe this.  My students know I believe this, too, since I’m not very good at hiding my feelings about writing and teaching writing.  I’ve got fourteen weeks to make a difference.  I don’t plan on wasting a minute.

Works Cited

Cooper, Marilyn M. “The Ecology of Writing.” College English. 48.4. Apr. 1986. 364-75.
Elbow, Peter.  “Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals.” College Composition and Communication. 46.1. Feb. 1995.  72-83.
Good, Tina and Warshauer, Leanne, eds. In Our Own Voice: Graduate Students Teach Writing. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000.
Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1997.
“Interchanges: Responses to Bartholomae and Elbow.” College Composition and Communication. 46.1: Feb. 1995. 84-107.
Olson, Gary. “Toward a Post-Process Composition: Abandoning the Rhetoric of Assertion.” Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing Process Paradigm. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: SIUP, 1999.
Smit, David. “Curriculum Design for First-Year Writing Programs.”  The Allyn and Bacon Sourcebook for Writing Program Administrators. Eds. Ward, Irene and William J. Carpenter. New York: Longman, 2002.
Weiner, Harvey S. “Collaborative Learning in the Classroom: A Guide to Evaluation.” College English. 48.1. Jan 1986. 52-61.