"Student-Centeredness: Teaching Students to Write...

Описание: ...Instead of Just Teaching Writing."
Presented by Lizbeth Bryant

Lizbeth Bryant directs the writing program for Purdue University-Calumet. She discusses the way that most teachers have been instructed to teach and grade student writing. She talks about the way she, as a graduate teaching assistant, would grade student writing as if she were talking to the paper rather than to the student. She quickly came to the realization that she would have to be more student-centered if she hoped to have those students find success in their writing. Thus, she formulated a basic response to the question "what do you teach" to serve as her purpose. She suggests that teachers focus on an answer of "I teach students to write" rather than "I teach writing." This is the starting point to student-centeredness.

One technique that she uses is student conferencing. Rather than rely on the marks and comments made on a paper, she suggests face to face conversations with the students. In those conversations, she argues that discussing the students' process of writing is perhaps more important of a topic that the products produced. She wants students to understand how they were generating their ideas, how they were organizing, and how they were revising and editing. Then, in subsequent conferences throughout the semester, the students can have a better understanding of what goes into the writing process, what works and does not work, and what leads to better critical thinking and communication skills.

An additional area of student-centeredness that she discusses is how it informs her approach to her administrative duties as the director of her college's writing program. When students complain about grades, she speaks with those students' instructors to understand how the instructors work with the students. Unfortunately, she found that often instructors could only provide lists of grades instead of actual evidence of how they worked directly with those students. This, she says, is a sign that an instructor is focused on teaching the writing rather than teaching the student to write. To remedy this in the future, she always advises the graduate students in her program to keep interaction notes about their students so the instructors are constantly reminded to focus their attention on teaching the students.

Another area where student-centeredness impacts faculty is in professional development. One challenge she sees in most professional development sessions is the fact that participants often focus on what they are doing rather than focusing on what their students are doing. New teaching orientations and standards come into the field, and she suggests that these often become focal points rather than the students.

She asks listeners to think about how to be better focuses on students as they plan their next courses and assignments.