Joan Vinall-Cox's personal annotations on this page
Joanvinallcox bookmarked
on 2009-02-03
Essential reading for all writing teachers. A fascinating experiment - the article is from 2006 and my quick shallow search didn't find more up-to-date info. I am ambivalent as I believe strongly that writers should write for specific audiences (i.e. their teacher) and, contradictorily, that writing teachers should be coaches not judges &/or markers. I also see this quote from the article as an accurate description of many freshman comp. courses:
"Before ICON, says Mr. Kemp, the system for teaching freshman composition was rife with inconsistency. Or rather there was no system. Instructors drawn from creative writing, technical communication, rhetoric, and literature could not agree on either the content or criteria of good writing. Some instructors had students writing haiku and short stories, while others assigned lengthy research papers. At the beginning of each semester, says Mr. Kemp, the department dealt with wholesale movement between sections, while his office turned into a "complaint desk" for students carping about the program's inequities." via Stephen Downes
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Most alarming to the critics is that the system's separation of instruction from grading threatens the traditional, and to some, sacrosanct, relationship between teacher and student.
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Before ICON, says Mr. Kemp, the system for teaching freshman composition was rife with inconsistency. Or rather there was no system. Instructors drawn from creative writing, technical communication, rhetoric, and literature could not agree on either the content or criteria of good writing. Some instructors had students writing haiku and short stories, while others assigned lengthy research papers. At the beginning of each semester, says Mr. Kemp, the department dealt with wholesale movement between sections, while his office turned into a "complaint desk" for students carping about the program's inequities.
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Students meet once a week in a classroom with their classroom instructor to go over the finer points of grammar, style, and argumentation, and to discuss their weekly assignments, which are standardized across all 70-odd sections of the two required first-year composition courses. Each assignment cycle includes three drafts of an essay, reflective "writing reviews" commenting on students' own work, and two peer reviews of other students' work, all of which are submitted and stored online.
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Students now turn in an average of 35 pieces of writing a semester, nearly three times as many as before.
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blind grading eliminates bias, says Mr. Kemp. His maxim: "We are not grading the writer, we are grading the writing."
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Grading online documents goes more quickly than if he were marking hard copies, he says. He can use search functions to find frequently made errors. And instead of writing out repetitive commentary by hand, he can insert links to helpful Web sites explaining grammar and style rules. "It reduces the amount of menial labor," he says.
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Why is it pedagogically necessary for the classroom instructor to be the one grading?"
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the coach, not the policeman
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Technical-communications majors "get" ICON, it is said; literature majors and creative writers do not. And the tension between the two factions is palpable.
This link has been bookmarked by 4 people . It was first bookmarked on 28 Jan 2009, by dean groom.
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Joan Vinall-Cox
Essential reading for all writing teachers. A fascinating experiment - the article is from 2006 and my quick shallow search didn't find more up-to-date info. I am ambivalent as I believe strongly that writers should write for specific audiences (i.e. their teacher) and, contradictorily, that writing teachers should be coaches not judges &/or markers. I also see this quote from the article as an accurate description of many freshman comp. courses:
"Before ICON, says Mr. Kemp, the system for teaching freshman composition was rife with inconsistency. Or rather there was no system. Instructors drawn from creative writing, technical communication, rhetoric, and literature could not agree on either the content or criteria of good writing. Some instructors had students writing haiku and short stories, while others assigned lengthy research papers. At the beginning of each semester, says Mr. Kemp, the department dealt with wholesale movement between sections, while his office turned into a "complaint desk" for students carping about the program's inequities." via Stephen Downes-
Most alarming to the critics is that the system's separation of instruction from grading threatens the traditional, and to some, sacrosanct, relationship between teacher and student.
-
Before ICON, says Mr. Kemp, the system for teaching freshman composition was rife with inconsistency. Or rather there was no system. Instructors drawn from creative writing, technical communication, rhetoric, and literature could not agree on either the content or criteria of good writing. Some instructors had students writing haiku and short stories, while others assigned lengthy research papers. At the beginning of each semester, says Mr. Kemp, the department dealt with wholesale movement between sections, while his office turned into a "complaint desk" for students carping about the program's inequities.
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dean groomLast semester Lindsay Hutton "taught" 1,940 students. She met only 70 of them in person. Those were the ones enrolled in the two weekly sections of English composition that she taught in an actual classroom. The hundreds and hundreds of others she knew only as anonymous numbered documents she read on her computer screen and then, with a click of a button, sent back out into the ether.
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