Teaching Students to Write: Dealing with the Perennial Problem of the Pile of Crap
www.productiveflourishing.com
I'm currently designing my next course and I am faced with a problem that gets me every semester: what's the best way to teach students how to write well while balancing that objective with many others? Many people in my department subscribe to the "look-Ma-no-hands" pedagogical principle, which asserts that the best way to learn to write papers is to learn from something you've already written, rather than going off of somebody else's templates. So, we assign papers, have the students write them, and grade fairly charitably the first time around; the idea is that the light hand should alleviate the discomfort that some students feel from having to write papers blind. Having myself done this, I've got a few problems with this approach:
Teaching Students to Write: Dealing with the Perennial Problem of the Pile of Crap
Teaching Students to Write: Dealing with the…
Teaching Students to Write: Dealing with the Perennial Problem of the Pile of Crap
I'm currently designing my next course and I am faced with a problem that gets me every semester: what's the best way to teach students how to write well while balancing that objective with many others? Many people in my department subscribe to the "look-Ma-no-hands" pedagogical principle, which asserts that the best way to learn to write papers is to learn from something you've already written, rather than going off of somebody else's templates. So, we assign papers, have the students write them, and grade fairly charitably the first time around; the idea is that the light hand should alleviate the discomfort that some students feel from having to write papers blind. Having myself done this, I've got a few problems with this approach: