[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to a special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]
I know you might expect me to say AI for the significant challenge facing my two sections of First-Year Writing I this Fall. But while there were a few instances, as there have always been a few moments of plagiarism in every Writing class I’ve ever taught, they weren’t a consistent issue in these courses. What was, however, was somewhat more surprising: a higher than usual percentage of students with life and schedule issues that made it very challenging for them to get papers in on time. In a class that is all about building skills across assignments, with the help of my feedback as well as our continued class conversations, this widespread challenge (which some percentage of students in every class and semester experience, but which was again much higher than usual this semester) made our work together a good bit more complicated than my general FYW experience (outside of Covid and its immediate aftermaths, at least) has been.
I won’t pretend I have some silver bullet solution to this challenge (no more than any of them I’ll highlight in this week’s series), but I did lean into enhanced versions of a couple of my class policies and practices in ways that helped us move forward:
First, I doubled down on my willingness to make some assignments/papers ungraded, or rather standards-graded (if the students get me a paper and have included work on a couple of key levels, they get full A credit). I’ve long made the first graded paper in each case ungraded in that way, to help introduce them to me as a grader with a bit lower stakes. But this semester I circled back to that grading method with a key later assignment, and found that many more students got that assignment in and genuinely practiced its major skills. Does that throw off the class grades in a way that might be frowned-upon by admins? Probably, but it meant students got papers in and did the work in thoughtful ways that I could give feedback on, and I was good with that.
And second, I really leaned into the role of my most consistent pedagogical practice: weekly emails, short, informal, participatory emails where students share reading responses as well as work in progress on papers. I’ve long found countless benefits of using such emails in almost every class I teach, but this time I decided to make one such email required as part of the work on their concluding paper—if they didn’t get me that email at some point, that is, I couldn’t grade their final paper. I hadn’t ever taken that step, and am not sure I’m willing to do it consistently—I want these to feel productive, not punitive—but in this case it did make sure I heard from every student about their paper at some point, and I think the percentage of submissions went way up for that assignment as a result.
Next reflections tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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